An owner of a northern Wisconsin property proposed as the site of an iron ore mine said Monday he thinks it will take several years before a new mining company moves in with plans for a large open pit mine in Ashland and Iron counties.

Inevitably, said David Adams, president of LaPointe Iron Co., someone will mine the rich source of iron ore in Wisconsin's Penokee range, where developers of a contentious iron mining project pulled up stakes in late February.

But Adams also said that a new operator may approach the project differently than the former developer, Gogebic Taconite, a unit of a Florida-based coal mining company.

Having seen the acrimony that pervaded the former project, Adams suggested a new company would likely spend more time on building relationships with neighboring communities and environmentalists.

"I don't know when any of these people are actually going to come in and start talking seriously about it, given the current state of the industry," said Adams, referring to falling iron ore prices.

"Probably any serious talks are years away, I would imagine. That gives us a couple of years to try to re-establish ties with the local communities."

Communities felt they were left out of the process, and Adams said the state's new iron mining law exacerbated the problem by slashing funding to them to offset costs such as for road repair.

Such fence-mending "is very important to establishing credibility," said George Meyer, a former secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and executive director of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation.

Adams also suggested Gogebic's plan to build a large-scale processing plant next to the mine — and just upstream from an Indian reservation — might not be the optimum location for a factory with a huge need for water and a potential to pollute.

Gogebic Taconite announced on Feb. 27 that it was backing out of the project, citing concerns about the difficulty in avoiding harm to wetlands and worries about federal intervention at some point in the process.

Although Gogebic pushed Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP controlled Legislature to write new iron mining laws, including easing limits on development of wetlands, the company said field crews werefinding far more wetlands that would be hard for the company to avoid.

Gogebic's option on the mineral rights on about 22,000 acres expires next month.

When that happens, LaPointe and RGGS Land & Minerals Ltd., which owns a majority interest, will start looking for a suitors, according to Adams.

Significant iron ore reserve

In 1978, economic geologist Ralph W. Marsden estimated 2.2 billion metric tons of iron ore available on the land. There have been subsequent studies by U.S. Steel, a former owner, and Gogebic. All the data are in the hands of LaPointe and RGGS.

"It's a huge resource," Adams said.

"It's 25% of the U.S. reserves, and that is just going to increase. It's going to be mined at some point. As long as we keep using iron — and I don't see any of us stopping — especially if the federal government decides to do something about our aging infrastructure. That's going to take a lot of steel."

Adams and others met with representatives of Ashland and Iron counties on July 29 as a first step in taking back the mineral rights of the land and smoothing frayed relations. He said he would also be meeting with tribes, environmental groups and others.

It was a good first step, said Dale A. Kupczyk, executive director of the Ashland Area Development Corp, who was one of those who met with Adams.

"Every time you take a ton of iron ore out of northern Minnesota, it makes this land here that much more valuable," Kupczyk said.

Despite a potential boon from the $1.5 billion mine, his group remained neutral on the Gogebic project.

"It's a hot subject up here," Kupczyk said, "We told them this wasn't Florida. This wasn't West Virginia. This is northern Wisconsin. You're on the shore of Lake Superior. We do things different up here. You see what happened."

Kupczyk said he was intrigued with Adams' talk of using trains to ship ore out of the Penokees and the Lake Superior basin for processing.

Building the plant elsewhere would eliminate the need for tailings ponds, a potential source of water pollution, Adams said. It would also conserve groundwater that would have been needed for processing the ore. The groundwater feeds the Bad River watershed. The river flows through the reservation of the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Keeping the manufacturing plant away from the mine would be preferable, Meyer said.

"It would remove a major pollution source from the headwaters of one of the finest remaining pristine watersheds in the state," Meyer said.

Environmentalists were highly critical of the iron mining law, especially aspects of the law affecting wetlands. But Adams said he thought the changes worked because federal protections remained in tact.

"To my mind the wetlands protections are pretty much in place," Adams said. "Wetlands were one of the things that turned out to be a stumbling block."