‘More time needed to study Azmar proposal’

The Marianas Public Lands Authority is studying another proposal to grant Azmar International a conditional permit to extract pozzolan from Pagan.

In an interview yesterday, MPLA chair Ana Demapan-Castro said the agency’s staff presented during Friday’s board meeting on Tinian a draft conditional approval that would be proposed to Azmar for further negotiation.

The board, however, has yet to give its go-signal for the MPLA staff to start discussing the proposal with Azmar.

Demapan-Castro said the board members have agreed to defer action on the staff’s recommendation, as they wanted some more time to study the new proposal. The MPLA board is scheduled to re-convene on Saipan at 2pm tomorrow, Nov. 16.

“We will be on recess until Tuesday, when the board members will make a decision. If approved, the proposal will be presented to Azmar for discussion and further negotiation, to see if the plan is workable. Whatever they agree upon, the staff will bring back to the board for final approval,” Demapan-Castro said.

She refused to provide specific details on the draft proposal.

On Aug. 17, the board authorized the issuance of a conditional approval to Azmar and gave the firm 60 days to prove its financial capability to mine Pagan pozzolan.

But a written list of conditions was not sent to Azmar for compliance until about a month later. Azmar subsequently demanded its “conditional permit,” while MPLA maintained it had not made a decision to grant any permit to the company.

Azmar’s application has not been placed on the MPLA board’s agenda since the Aug. 17 meeting.

But in late October, Azmar public information officer Don Farrell urged MPLA to honor what he claimed had been agreed upon by Azmar and CNMI government officials—including the governor and Demapan-Castro—during the Los Angeles business conference in September.

Farrell maintained that at that meeting, Demapan-Castro agreed that MPLA would immediately issue Azmar a mining permit, as well as a separate document stating requirements that Azmar must satisfy within 90 days upon issuance of the permit.

Sen. Paul Manglona, who was present during the meeting, corroborated Farrell’s statement, saying he got the same impression from the discussion.

An Associated Press reporter covering the L.A. conference also quoted Gov. Juan N. Babauta as saying that he “struck a multimillion-dollar deal with an Arizona investor who wants to buy the islands’ volcanic ash for use in mixing cement and other construction purposes.”

Azmar president Kenneth Moore is based in Arizona.

In an interview shortly after she arrived from Los Angeles, Demapan-Castro denied that Azmar’s application was a done deal. She maintained that the 90-day conditional permit purported to be given to Azmar was a proposal that MPLA was still studying.