Pictured above: Superior Mayor Mila Besich Lira gives the town’s perspective on the disposition of the stack. Photo by Susanne Jerome.

Innovative ideas to deal with the fall of the Superior Stack

The Superior Community Working Group and Rebuild Superior held a meeting to allow residents to contribute ideas on how to retain the town’s cultural heritage now that the smelter buildings and the smoke stack are coming down.

The meeting was convened by Jim Schenck, who invited local musician Steve Holmquist to sing a song he had composed about the stack and the miners who worked there. Meanwhile, those attending enjoyed healthy refreshments from Porters, who catered the event.

Schenck made it clear that in addition to being historical, the stack and buildings are history. The very bricks the stack is made of are contaminated, and the stack itself is unstable.

According to Schenck, who was until recently with Resolution Copper, the cost to “save” the stack using an internal steel framework would be at least $12 million. Bringing it down would cost only $2 million and the rubble from it and the smelter buildings could be used to stabilize some of the tailings piles that Resolution had inherited with the property. Otherwise they would have to haul in materials from elsewhere.

No one directly from Resolution was at the meeting because they didn’t want to stifle discussion, according to Schenck, when faced with suspicions on the part of some participants as to why. One wanted the committee and town to insist on line items in the lifetime budget of the project to be sure promises were not simply abandoned by future mine administrators.

The Superior Community Working Group itself came into existence, according to Schenck, when it became known that Resolution could not dispose of tailings from the Apache Leap project in the Pinto Valley pit as they said they would. What was promised was not delivered. Since then Resolution has been eager to demonstrate by current behavior that the town can trust the corporation and their promises about the future.

The committee that the mine set up with the Town of Superior and the Superior Unified School District was then invited to choose the least-worst alternative site and to monitor the project giving an ongoing sounding board to all opinions.

Many at the meeting felt that Resolution owed them something in return for what was being taken away. Schenck expressed it this way: “You come down from Gonzales Pass, you see Picketpost and you see the stack and you kind of know that you’re home.” A symbol of the city will be going away, he said.

Hank Gutierrez recalled working in the smelter himself before it closed in 1971.

“I can tell you right now that was the best place I could work as a young man,” he said. “Because I had an opportunity to work with my dad’s friends. I’ll tell you what, that was a riot. They not only knew how to work hard, but they knew how to play. That’s where I kinda got my teeth cut. And it was not a very nice place to work. It was nasty. But the memories are very fine.”

Schenck invited ideas and received some very innovative ones. Mayor Mila Besich Lira spoke of her goal of blending other parks and amenities in Superior with any stack and smelter projects.

Schenck spoke for using the old Magma railway to bring in tourist trains if the company renovates it for mine traffic. He thinks tourist trains can fit in with that traffic and bring tourists into the Superior area to a train stop that would function as a multi-use center, even sporting an auditorium.

Someone suggested it would be a good venue for virtual reality displays that might enable visitors to “walk through” smelter buildings and inspect the stack. The company has already hired an architectural archeologist who reassessed the buildings and stack inside and out using laser mapping and drones.

Another idea looking to the future that caught the attention of Superior Town Manager Todd Pryor and others would feature the construction of a high cell tower similar to many high towers being built all over the county. The tower could be in the area of the Stack and could provide revenue to Resolution, as well as providing a strong and safe structure to hold the new 5G network dishes. Like the fake pine and palm trees, the tower could be camouflaged with a cowling that would look very much like the smoke tower that used to be there.

David Guzman drew on his experience in building and renovating all sorts of towers to produce concrete details and solid arguments in favor of moving forward to study the project. He said that the users of towers are not owners they normally just rent space so that the tower could host several carriers of phone and data for a growing town.

Some commenters wanted a scale model of the smelter and stack, and one wanted a light coming up from it or anything else that is built.

Everyone wanted to commemorate those who worked there of all ethnic groups. As Lindquist quoted from social media. “What’s the most important thing to come from the mines? The miners.