The permits call for what amounts to hydrologic tweaking to "contain" the tailings and the polluted groundwater that is seeping into the Verde River.
They essentially write off the uppermost, polluted aquifer, sealing it into the bathtub, the Verde Formation, right along with the tailings.
The theory is that a deeper aquifer, which supplies residents with drinking water, is "hydrologically isolated" from the upper polluted aquifer and the tailings above it.
To keep the shallow, dirty aquifer from seeping into the Verde River, DEQ will require Phelps Dodge to "de-water" or pump the shallow aquifer near the river.
It will also demand that an impermeable slurry wall be built between Peck's Lake, which has also been polluted by the tailings, and the river.
The tailings pile itself will be capped by giant plastic sheets. Drains will be constructed atop the plastic. Three feet of soil will cover the drains. The golf course and natural vegetation will be planted on the soil.
The greens for the golf course, according to the permits, will be watered by Clarkdale's sewage effluent.
Any water that reaches the bottom of the soil is to be collected by the drains and transported to a plastic-lined pond on Verde Valley Ranch. That pond also will contain Clarkdale's effluent and the water that's been pumped from the uppermost aquifer.
All of this will go back on the golf course.
Water from the river and the deeper drinking-water aquifer are to be carefully monitored to see if further pollution occurs.
It's a technically creative solution.
But environmentalists raised important questions about that solution at the hearing.
They contend that five years of study still have not sufficiently defined the "bathtub" that is supposed to separate the tailings and the polluted aquifer from the rest of the environment.
For instance, a monitoring well drilled by Phelps Dodge two years ago into the lower, drinking-water aquifer was recently found tocontain the same contaminants as the tailings.
This means one of two things, environmentalists say.
Either the lower drinking-water aquifer has become polluted, or DEQ and Phelps Dodge for two years misunderstood the geology of the "bathtub" in this particular area.
There is another possibility. The well's casings could have been poorly constructed, permitting dirty water to leak through the well into the lower groundwater reserve.
Pond, however, is convinced the golf-course plan is sound. He testified that the Verde Valley Ranch permits were based on solid technical data.
That was what he concentrated on, he said. Technology.
But Pond admitted that he made one mistake.
A big mistake.
He issued the permit that would make Verde Valley Ranch possible to the wrong company.
He granted the permit to Phelps Dodge Corporation, instead of to the original applicant, Phelps Dodge Development Corporation. He said he did this because "it's preferable to have the parent company on the hook" should compliance or financial issues arise.
But by having its subsidiary as the original applicant, Phelps Dodge avoided disclosing a complete five-year history of environmental-enforcement actions taken against the company. The law is unclear as to whether the actions would pertain to sites across the country or across the world.
Because Phelps Dodge never applied for a permit, it skirted these potentially embarrassing disclosures.
"Is there anywhere in either of those applications where Phelps Dodge's history of state-federal enforcement actions on environmental laws is set forth?" attorney Jeff Bouma asked Pond at the hearing.
"No," Pond answered.
Is that required in the rules? Bouma asked.
"Yes," Pond replied.
"Did you get all of the information required by statute out of these people?" Bouma asked again.
"Apparently, I did not," Pond answered.
Later, Bouma asked Pond if the rules allowed him to "issue a permit to a corporation that has not filed [for] one."
"I am not aware of any rule," Pond answered.
"So you admit that you don't have any jurisdiction to [grant a permit] to a company that hasn't filed for one?"
"I don't know," Pond answered.
Bouma, who is not charging the environmentalists for his time, could barely conceal his pleasure at the answers.
"The undisputed evidence," he told the hearing officer, is that Phelps Dodge never filed for the permit it received.
Bouma says he figures the environmentalists have only "about a 5percent chance" of winning their case at the Water Quality Appeals Board hearing.
The real test, Bouma says, will come when he takes the case to Superior Court.
If he loses that battle, he says, the environmentalists will fight in federal court over federal environmental issues.
None of this, he insists, is simple obstructionism. Or a move to force the site onto the state or federal Superfund list, which may well happen if Verde Valley Ranch isn't built.
"In the short term, yeah, this might work," says Bouma. "For the first ten, or 15, or 20 years it might work really well. But our concern is that by the time it starts to fail, it is going to have a subdivision around it.
