Record of decision

And also, uh, first week in November, keep that in mind.

It's, uh, it looks like the first full week in November, the ROD, Record of Decision's gonna be made by the federal government, and, uh, that'll open up for funding and, and engineering and design service for the new bridge, four-lane bridge.

Four-lane bridge.

Right.

We were accepted as a covered project under Fast 41 in January this year, and that means full concierge service, where we have a, we have dedicated sort of project managers under Fast 41 that are providing oversight to the whole federal pro- processing system, uh, permitting system.

Um, we issued an updated timetable for the, um, permit, uh, process, the NEPA process in March of this year, and that timetable gives us a firm date of January the 5th, 2028 to receive the final record of decision.

Prior to that, there are a whole series of milestones, um, to get to that point.

The, the one that's coming up next would be the release of the draft EIS, that's the environmental impact statement.

What happens? What are the mitigating strategies, and what's the net result? And that then is what ultimately gets approved, and that becomes your operating manual, if you want to think of it in that sense.

So that comes out in, in February next year.

There's a public review period directly after that, and then six months later, we issue the final EIS, the final environmental impact statement, and at that time you receive your draft- Notice of decision, record of decision, and then 90 days later you see the final.

So that's sort of sequence from, from here to January the, the 9th.

The 2026 amendment is not Butte's first revision.

It modifies the selected remedy from the original 2006 Record of Decision, which was already changed once by a 2011 Explanation of Significant Differences and again by a 2020 Amendment.

Three revisions in 20 years is not evidence that Butte's cleanup has failed.

It is evidence that a Superfund remedy is a living document reopened as science, funding, and agency priorities shift.

Overwhelmingly positive support from the community surrounding Delamar itself, which is always good to have your neighbors in your backyard pounding the table saying we want this mine to be built and permitted and built.

So that then shuttles us into the EIS process, if you will, which is taking some of these comments, tweaking the study, making modifications where we can, ones that make sense, building them into the EIS process, and that's the final stretch towards getting the record of decision.

Has it genuinely been beneficial? Is fast the right word to have in there?

Yeah, the response times from the federal regulators are far faster than they were ever.

Yeah, and I think we speak to in that context the state-level permits, right, which are equally as important, which you do need, like the water permit, water usage permit, sanitation permits, air quality permits, those things that happen at the state level.

Those are... gaining steam now.

The record of decision will answer a lot of those questions.

And then we're into the final stages of state permitting over the course of the winter of 2028.