July 19, 2018 - In a victory for local environmentalists, an Ohio coal company has decided to suspend its plans for a strip mine in northern Athens County while it reassesses the project.

Westmoreland Resource Partners, owner of Oxford Mining Company of Coshocton, confirmed its change of plans regarding the Johnson Run coal mine in a July 13 letter to Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials.

In the letter, Nathan Leggett, regional environmental manager for Westmoreland, cited continued difficulty in getting final water-quality certification from the state EPA as the main reason the company is putting the strip-mine project on hold.

“Oxford has reviewed OEPA’s request for re-evaluation of field data… at location U-3 and D-3 at Johnson Run,” Leggett states in the letter. “In light of the recent requirements and the additional biological sampling, the costs to permit this project have been steadily increasing. Given all of the problems/uncertainties obtaining a 402 permit from OEPA, plus the scheduled expiration of our sales contract to Conesville (power plant in Coschocton County, Ohio), we are going to reevaluate the project before we proceed any further.”

The proposed mine in Trimble Township has generated substantial local opposition from people concerned about its adverse environmental effects, including on local streams such as Sunday Creek. Opposition has been led by the Athens County Fracking Action Network’s “Save Our Rural Environment” (SORE).

Oxford Mining Company had proposed surface mining 36 acres of the 300-acre site. Advocates for the project cited job creation as its main local benefit, and downplayed potential environmental issues.

In his letter to the EPA, Westmoreland/Oxford’s Leggett wrote that as a result of the aforementioned obstacles facing the company, “Oxford has been forced to make the decision to suspend permitting in order to give us time to reevaluate moving this project forward. CEC (Civil and Environmental Consultants, Inc. of Pittsburgh) has stopped work on the project and has cancelled the biological sampling scheduled for Aug. 2 and 3.”

Leggett did leave open the possibility that Oxford could resume its efforts to obtain a water-quality permit from the EPA (and then a mining permit from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources). “Once we have a chance to discuss this project internally, we’ll let you know how we plan to proceed,” Leggett wrote to the state EPA.

Roxanne Groff, who helped lead the environmental effort against the Johnson Run strip mine, posted the news on her Facebook page Wednesday evening, and almost immediately began receiving congratulatory comments from supporters of the anti-mining effort, most of them from Athens County.

Groff on Friday morning showed The NEWS a copy of an email that she had received from Lanny E. Erdos, chief of the ODNR’s Division of Mineral Resources, the agency from which Oxford Mining Company would have needed to obtain a final mining permit for its Johnson Run coal mine.

In the email, Erdos confirmed that he had gotten a phone call from Oxford Mining Co. Wednesday evening, informing him “that indeed, they have chosen to suspend advancement of the Johnson Run permit. I informed Oxford that DNR would not advance any approvals/denials until such time that the company decides to move forward.”

Groff Thursday morning expressed satisfaction at the company’s decision to suspend its permit application efforts.

"This what the citizens resisting the strip mine on Johnson Run were hoping for,” she said in an email. “The persistence of protesting voices of the citizens to local elected officials and the regulatory agencies resulted in the mandated attention that should have been given to the Oxford's strip-mine applications in the first place.”

She praised public efforts to criticize the Johnson Run mining proposal.

“The people who showed up for all of the meetings, wrote letters, met with public officials, were serious about our concerns that we were not going to accept or allow any further degradation of our water, our lands, our wildlife or our health…

“This is a huge step toward breaking away from fossil fuels and bringing attention to why clean energy is the path to a resilient economy." 

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