Celebration of Community Environmental Monitoring Program of Eagle Mine agreement praised Thursday

On Thursday, the Superior Watershed Partnership (SWP), the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC), the Community Foundation of Marquette County and Eagle Mine celebrated an important victory for Marquette County.

"I feel like it's a great moment today to have this document that we've been working on for the past year. Our departments have been very active in meeting with Eagle Mine, the Superior Watershed Partnership and the Community Foundation of Marquette County,” said Keweenaw Bay Indian Community Natural Resources Director, Evelyn Ravindran.

The agreement, signed Thursday, was established to recreate the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP) of Eagle Mine.

This program was started in 2012 to have a third party monitor the air, water and noise at Eagle Mine.

"As a collaborative, we've been able to meet monthly for a year and we've finally came up with a good solution for two agreements,” said Community Foundation for Marquette County CEO, Gail Anthony.

These agreements will last through the life of the mine which ends in 2025.

"It really is a success in many, many different ways. The main one being that the environment is being monitored by a third party organization, and it's being funded by the mine,” explained Anthony.

Eagle Mine will provide $300,000 yearly to support this effort.

"For us, there's been lot of challenges and a lot of learning along the way, so it's nice to be able to capture those to modify the agreements into something that we're pretty excited to move forward with,” said Eagle Mine Managing Director, Kristen Mariuzza.

The group understands once the celebration ends Thursday, the real work will begin, which they say they're ready to begin.