The town of Patagonia collected 41 community concerns and 75 community suggestions over the course of four public hearings focused on identifying what protections should be included in the Community Protections and Benefits Agreement being negotiated with South32, which is building a mine outside town.
The concerns and suggestions were compiled in a pamphlet that was made available at a community workshop at Thurber Hall on May 20. Mayor Andrea Wood said the workshop was an opportunity for community members to help town officials establish protection priorities for five main topics of concern: water, air quality, soil, biodiversity and nature-based economy.
“The impact of their mining is going to impact all of those areas,” Wood said. “It’s up to us to say this is what we expect, this is what we insist on.”
Wood was joined at the workshop by council members Francesca Claverie and Steve Finch.
Claverie said she was grateful for the wide range of community members who have provided input.
“We got dozens and dozens of suggestions, which is the whole idea behind this,” she said, “so that while this process is engaging professionally with experts, that you don’t leave out the people that are living here. This is a very smart community, very well-informed and caring people – people that care not just about how pretty the place is but the general health of the local environment and for humans.”
The CPBA is a formal agreement among four signatories – the town of Patagonia, the city of Nogales, Santa Cruz County and South32 – relating to protections and benefits that will be agreed to by the mining company in connection to the Hermosa mining project in the Patagonia Mountains.
Negotiations on the agreement have been ongoing since 2024, but the signatories agreed to delay hammering out the protections component until the release of the federal government’s Final Environmental Impact Statement, which is likely to be released this summer.
“I think the best thing that’s happened with the agreement is that it’s not done,” said resident Chuck Klingenstein, who attended the workshop. “Something of this magnitude, the amount of impact, the length of time, whether it’s 23 years, 55 years, whatever, you want to make sure you have an agreement that anticipates the protections needed but has the flexibility to address change.”
Claverie agreed: “This type of agreement will have to be ongoing because the stuff that they’re going to do will be ongoing and things will change. When they start there will be different impacts than there will be in five or 10 years.”
While the notion of prioritizing more than 100 concerns and suggestions might seem a bit daunting – “It’s all important,” resident Bob Proctor said – one of the purposes of the workshop was to gather specific, evidence-based input to help shape potential protections, monitoring commitments and accountability measures.
Santa Cruz County Deputy Manager Chris Young and Community Development Director Colin Bishop attended the workshop in support of Patagonia and will be involved in collating the input.
“When we look at a lot of comments like these, you want to have supplemental information,” Bishop said. “If you look at what a person’s concern might be, we want to roadmap that logic to what is altering the community, the protection that is needed, and the benefit.”
Young said the community’s best protections will be the result of the data behind their concerns.
“It’s really important that we have the data, and not just opinion: This (protection) really should be included based on this data, and I think really that’s the leverage more than anything,” he said.
Young said he anticipates the final CPBA document will be ready by the end of the year or early 2027, and it will be presented to the public for review prior to finalization. “There’s no hurry,” he said. “If we’re behind, it’s because we want to make sure we get the protections right.”
Anna Darian, executive director of the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, said the community workshop was a step in the right direction but yearns for more open communication.
“What I would like to see in tandem with gathering input from people is an opportunity for the signatories themselves to actually present to the community a larger picture of where the process is at, what are the timelines we’re looking at and how the big picture is coming together,” she said. “Because people can only give input on what they understand.”