Developer wants to turn Three Kids Mine residential

By Jeremy Twitchell

Monday, Jan. 19, 2009 | midnight

As a developer, Bob Unger has turned a string of gas stations on the Strip into the Showcase Mall and an abandoned gravel pit into the Tuscany development in Henderson.

For his next challenge, the one-time Henderson planning commissioner is eyeing a project that will make those cleanup jobs look like sweeping the floor.

On land that Henderson recently annexed on its eastern edge, near the border of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, lies the former site of the Three Kids Mine, which Unger wants to clean up and turn into a 1,260-acre residential development that he has tentatively named Lakemoor Canyon.

Between Unger and his vision lie acres of contaminated soil, cavernous mining pits, mountains of displaced dirt and rock, piles of illegally dumped trash that has accumulated over the years and 1.8 million cubic yards of slimy black sludge left over from manganese mining that ended in 1961.

Before he can get started, he’ll need an act of Congress, a transfer of 950 acres of land from the federal government and a state-approved remediation plan.

Once he has all that, there’s the little matter of an estimated $250 million in financing to clean it all up.

After guiding a tour of the site, Unger admits that he occasionally wonders what he’s gotten himself into.

“I’ll be wondering that every time I go out there for quite a while, probably,” he said.

But based on his past experience with cleaning up contaminated sites, Unger said he has developed enough confidence to believe that Lakemoor will happen.

“I became more and more confident with environmental projects that most developers would walk away from,” he said. “If I hadn’t done Tuscany, I’d probably be very scared of this, like everybody else. But that worked.”

Unger’s plan is turning heads from Washington to Carson City to Water Street. He and his investors plan to buy about 300 privately owned acres in the 1,260-acre site, and are working on a deal with the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Reclamation, which together own the remaining 960 acres.

The deal would allow Unger’s group to purchase the federal land at its appraised value minus the cost of cleaning it. Unger thinks he will end up getting the land for free once he’s done.

Joe Liebhauser, director of resource management for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Region, said that given what the economy has done to land values, Unger could be right.

“A couple of years ago, there’d be no question, no problem” that the land would be worth more than the cost of cleaning it, he said. “In today’s economy, who knows?”

Henderson, meanwhile, has agreed to declare Lakemoor a redevelopment area, meaning that part of the taxes from any future developments on the site could go to reimburse the group for a portion of the remediation costs. The city has used the same approach in its Eastside, Cornerstone and Tuscany redevelopment areas, which all required varying degrees of industrial cleanup.

“It’s still being negotiated, but it’s something that would make sense for the area,” Henderson Redevelopment Manager Michelle Romero said.

Romero said the former mine has been a concern of the city’s for some time, and to see a private developer shoulder the responsibility is “huge.”

Unger calls the situation a “win all around,” saying it will save the federal government up to $1 billion in cleanup costs, allow the city to reclaim a potentially valuable piece of land for development without risking a penny, and provide a strong return for him and his investors if it all works.

That’s a 12 million-cubic-ton-sized “if.” Unger will have to move that amount of dirt and rock on the site — enough to fill more than six NFL stadiums.

Most of the dirt will just be placed back in the holes it was taken from, after possibly being treated to remedy higher-than-normal concentrations of arsenic that were left behind as other minerals were removed from the earth.

The 1.8 million cubic tons of sludge will pose the greatest problem. They are tailings left from more than 30 years of on-site milling operations, in which workers dumped the excavated rock into large vats of diesel oil and soapy water. When stirred, the mixture would cause the manganese ore to float to the top and the remaining silt to sink to the bottom.

As the silt built up in the vats, miners would dump it into a man-made reservoir to the west of the mill, Unger said.

Now, 48 years after the mine closed, the sludge still lies there untouched — spread out over a football field-sized area at depths of 30 to 70 feet. It looks like solid dirt on top, but is 80 percent liquid just three feet beneath the surface, Unger said.

The good news — and the reason the site has never been a priority for cleanup — is that it lies on a thick bed of rock-like soil known as caliche, which has formed a natural liner that locks in the contaminants. In the 48 years since the mine closed, the tailings have leaked only one foot into the ground, Unger said.

In addition, tests on the site have gone 600 feet beneath the surface and found no groundwater that could carry contamination off the site, Unger said.

Those same factors make the site an ideal location to store the contaminated materials, Unger said. Though the final cleanup plan will have to be approved by the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection, his tentative plan is to put the tailings into a 350-foot pit nearby and then cover them with clean soil taken from elsewhere in the project area.

The remaining soil that needs to be replaced will be used to fill in the other three mining pits.

“To be honest, I’m getting more and more confident every day,” Unger said. “The more science we do, the better I feel.”

There’s still much to be done, and Unger doesn’t expect to begin remediation for at least three years. Once started, he anticipates it will take two years to complete.

“I’ve structured everything so that we can keep moving forward,” he said. “Everybody has been very cooperative so far, because it’s in everybody’s best interest to get this site clean.”

Jeremy Twitchell can be reached at 990-8928 or [email protected].