00:00recognizes the gentleman from Idaho, Mr. Fulcher, for five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman,
00:04for holding this hearing today to the panel, for your participation, and just, if nobody has said
00:09this to you yet, forgive some of us for having dueling committees. So if you hear some reruns
00:14here, you'll understand why, I hope, but, and I think I'm going to make sure and give you one at
00:19least rerun, but, for Mr. Hergott anyway, but you haven't heard it from me, so I'd like to get some
00:27feedback on this, but I'm talking about NEPA here, and the NEPA process, and on average, it's my
00:33understanding that a U.S. mine project takes somewhere between seven and ten years, on average,
00:38to permit application through final process, and I would just augment that by saying we just, we did
00:47just get one permitted, the Stibnite project in Idaho, and I believe that was 18, and so that's,
00:54that's a real troublesome number to me, but in Idaho Canyon, or Caldwell Canyon's mine,
01:04that NEPA process began in March of 17, it was forced to restart in June of 23, and it's still
01:10ongoing after eight years. Mr. Hergott, sometimes I wonder if we should just start over with this
01:20process, but you know how cumbersome that might be. From your vantage point, can you talk some specifics
01:26in terms of statutory regulatory reform that you'd recommend to give us a fighting chance to have a
01:33reasonable time frame for the NEPA review? I think the first thing we all need to do is just admit the
01:38mistakes of the past. We've had some, much of the debate that has happened today, and often happens,
01:42and this is, you know, six or seventh hearing where I'm a nerd, Mr. Peters is a nerd, Mr. Western is a nerd,
01:48when they sit around, they talk about permitting, it's not the contextual way, it's more contextual,
01:52and it actually gives you hope in the world that we can cut a deal, but at the end of the day, the
01:55problem is, is that these fights are not about NEPA, right? They are, they're about other things,
02:00they're about tax credits, they're about other things. NEPA is a convenient statute to bring all relevant
02:04information to the table, and make an informed decision about whether it's go or no go on the project,
02:08and the reality is, is that agencies are dispatching their duties, are supposed to, if the project does
02:15not meet certain goals, it kills it, and if not, you have to mitigate against it. So is that due to
02:20legal challenges? Well, and that's, those are the laws, the problem is, most of these laws, the most
02:25recent law that was written was 40 years before the internet, we have 13 laws that were not written
02:31to coordinate with each other, that are no longer operational for today, yet we still rely on them,
02:35and then we have another 65 piece of regulations that come out of them, another 180 pieces of
02:40regulation and precedent, but it's the informal agency practice. Mr. Hurgott, if I'm a mining
02:44operator, I have no idea how to capitalize this. No idea. If I'm Laurel and I'm at Perpetua doing
02:48Midas Stibnit or Bogart, I don't know why they got involved in this in the first place, and to tell you
02:52what. So what do we do? I'm listening to you, you're just telling me there's, you're validating my comments,
02:58but how do we fix it? Midas Stibnit suffered in silence because there was no transparency,
03:02they had to hire consultants and do things to get people's ears, and so what. Maybe I'm not being
03:06clear. What do we do to fix it? How do we shorten this thing up? Complete redesign of the, complete
03:13redesign in a transparent way in which you can't see ghosts and call it out as an override of of
03:19individual rights or on consultation. The process is broken, and we are not going to be able to make
03:24incremental change in this Congress when it's spread across six committees of jurisdiction on the
03:28House and five in the Senate, and then at the end of the day, the people that are going to suffer
03:33are going to be these projects in particular at antimony, which we absolutely need, and we don't
03:37have the ability, we don't have the room to wait another five years to fight the same battle again.
03:42We got to tear it down and build it back up. You're talking about starting over basically.
03:48In a rational way together, recognizing that the projects that are impacted the most right at this
03:53moment are projects that are backed by a party. Mr. Campbell, I've got a question for you too,
03:58and I think that my colleague, Congressman Bentz, asked a similar question. So I'm not going to
04:04restate the entire preface that goes along with that. But are you familiar with the Idaho Power Project,
04:11the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line? I'm sorry, I'm not. Okay, so there is a
04:19project that Idaho Power, a public utility in my state, has been working on. It's a project that's
04:25been underway for about 20 years. It's called the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line project.
04:30And that has faced multiple federal reviews, state reviews, legal challenges, and not only that,
04:36but there's been a, it's delayed energy benefits to customers. And the growth in our state and in the
04:43region is astronomical. And so this has been underway for about 20 years. It's the transmission line
04:50project. And so I'm going to, we're about out of time. So just very quickly, changes we need to be
04:57making to allow those types of things to get permitted. Well, I've said this before, I think we
05:03need to put bounds on it, that you can only litigate it so long, you need to be involved in the process from
05:08the very beginning. And you can't just delay with litigation. And our industry now is at a time
05:18that we have to have generation transmission. Because it used to be gas and oil were, that's
05:24what the energy was, now it's electricity. Can we provide enough electricity? We don't have time
05:29to wait 10 years anymore. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I'm out of time. I do have
05:32more questions. I'm going to submit those in writing. Thank you.
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