The Nov. 21 Redhawk community ‘meeting’ was exactly what we’ve come to expect: an open house designed to prevent true community dialogue and interaction. The parking lot – jammed with logo-filled, vendor pickups 40 minutes before the open house started – also proved the event would be another mining-industry-stacked charade designed more for investors than community members.
Despite residents asking the company, after the last set of open-house-formatted meetings in 2023, to hold a proper town hall with chairs and a microphone, those requests were denied. Instead, residents were forced to move from one themed table to another, straining to hear Redhawk employee responses.
The San Manuel Community Center space was, in fact, so filled with Redhawk employees and industry-mining professionals (about 30) that conversation was simply impossible.
I, and group of about a dozen others from Mammoth – the area closest to the proposed 28-square-miles of pit mines – expected answers to pressing questions about future impacts to our community. We expected Redhawk employees to be forthcoming, but found their responses to be evasive.
When asked about water or environmental impacts, the key messaging was, “We’re just an exploratory company. We have little impact.” Questions about job statistics, economic impact, water use, and potential impacts on wells were met with the same response: “We don’t know. We won’t be doing that work.” Indeed, the company plans to ‘de-risk’ and sell to a senior mining company. They won’t be doing the work. And yet Redhawk’s website makes a lot of promises to the community for a group that “doesn’t know” much and can’t make predictions. It cites an economic impact study suggesting impressive job numbers, promises staggering economic growth, and touts water monitoring protocols – none of which were openly shared with the community.
While the Redhawk team surely celebrated this open house as a rousing success to their stakeholders, it left much to be desired by this portion of the community. The one clear takeaway to which we all agree is that Redhawk, a US subsidiary of Canadian parent company Faraday, will get things started then walk away. Sounds familiar—short-term profits for a foreign investor group that structured this meeting to evade tough questions from the affected community.
/s/ Melissa Crytzer Fry
Mammoth resident and board officer with the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance: lowersanpedro.org