Drilling for metals on federal land in northern Wisconsin got a boost after President Donald Trump’s administration added it to a list of infrastructure projects being fast-tracked through a permitting process, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
The Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council announced Friday that the Bend project in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest is a new project added to the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act permitting program.
Canadian mining company GreenLight Metals, operating as GreenLight Wisconsin, has been conducting exploratory drilling of the Bend deposit near Medford in Taylor County. The deposit contains around 4.2 million tons of ore like copper-bearing sulfides with significant gold and some silver.
“The addition of Bend to the federal permitting dashboard is an important milestone for GreenLight and provides a transparent, public framework for tracking the federal review process as Bend advances,” GreenLight President and CEO Matt Filgate said in a statement.
Environmental advocates have pushed back on the mining, saying it presents a hazard to the local water and will destroy natural resources.
