The owner of the Montana Tunnels mine will keep the mine property after a new company he formed paid $5.1 million in overdue property taxes just days before a Dec. 2 deadline, preventing Jefferson County from seizing the mine through a tax deed.
County Treasurer Terri Kunz wrote in an email on Dec. 3 that Goldfield Funding Partners LLC paid the county $5.175 million “for the assignment of the tax lien certificate from the county to them.” In a phone call that day, she explained that the payment meant that Goldfield Funding Partners paid Montana Tunnels’ delinquent property taxes for much of the mine, and that Goldfield now holds a lien on the property. Montana Tunnels still owns the property, she said, but Goldfield Funding Partners could choose to seize the parcels.
“They have a lien,” she said. “They could choose to go through the tax deed process and get the deed that way.”
Records from the Colorado Secretary of State show that Denver-based Goldfield Funding Partners was formed on Sept. 28 this year and lists Patrick Imeson, the owner of Montana Tunnels, as its registered agent and the person who formed the company. It was not immediately clear if Imeson partnered with other people to form the company or finance the tax payment.
Imeson responded to a request for comment but The Monitor was unable to schedule an interview before press time. In a Dec. 2 email to The Monitor, Imeson wrote that “we are pleased we were able to pay the taxes. We think this is a significant step in moving forward our overall plan to implement the expansion plan at Montana Tunnels and bring the mine back into production.”
Before the payment, Jefferson County was poised to seize much of the mine property because of the unpaid taxes.
The County Commission on Nov. 2 unanimously approved a resolution authorizing Kunz to sign a tax deed for multiple parcels of Montana Tunnels property near Corbin, west of Jefferson City, that constitute much of the mine, which produced gold, silver, zinc and lead, but hasn’t operated since 2008 and owed the county about $9 million in a variety of unpaid taxes, including about $4.9 million in delinquent property taxes on the parcels in question. Although the commission authorized Kunz on Nov. 2 to sign the tax deed, commissioners directed her to wait until Dec. 2 to see if Imeson would pay the millions he owed the county. If he didn’t pay the delinquent property taxes by Dec. 2, Kunz said, she would sign the tax deed, which would transfer ownership of the parcels to the county.
Imeson paid Jefferson County $1 million via wire transfer on the morning of Nov. 2, and with last week’s much larger payment, “for all concerns, it’s paid for the moment,” Kunz said.
But Imeson also recently owed the state of Montana far more money for the mine.
According to a July 8 press release from the Department of Environmental Quality, the department issued a violation letter to Imeson for failing to post an adequate reclamation bond with the state, and the agency notified him that it could revoke the mine’s permit. The mine has already posted $19.7 million in reclamation bond—but that’s $16.8 million short of the $36.5 million total that the department needs to hold for the mine to be allowed to operate, the release stated. The department had already suspended the mine’s permit in 2018.
A DEQ representative said on Tuesday that the mine still had yet to post the full bond.
At a Boulder Transition Advisory Committee meeting on Dec. 2, County Commission Chairman Leonard Wortman called the payment to the county “a big coup”—county leaders were skeptical that Imeson would rally funding to keep the property—and he added that “I guess it gave me a pretty good feeling … that kind of indicates that he might be a little bit closer to the overall financing package than he was before.”
In a phone call on Dec. 6, Wortman called the payment “a pretty positive thing.”
“I think that if they have investors that were willing to come up with the $5.1 million, that kind of tells me that they’re probably pretty close to having some financial backing put together,” he said. “I guess I have more confidence right now than I have in a long, long time that the mine may get back up and operating.”
And if Montana Tunnels does indeed reopen, he said, “it would be huge. I don’t know how big they would get. They had 250 employees or more—I don’t know if they would get back up to that this time,” but the impact from high-paying jobs and direct tax revenue to the county would be significant. “Right now with Jefferson High doing the expansion, having the mine operating and paying taxes would be a big benefit for all the taxpayers in the district.”
Of the millions already paid to the county, Kunz said that “the schools get a good percentage of that money, and all the other agencies are affected—all the things that are in the Montana Tunnels district. Those will get a portion, the schools especially. It’s a good win. I’m satisfied with the outcome at this moment. Hopefully it won’t go that delinquent again.”
She added, “Maybe ‘win’ is the wrong word—it’s a boost.”
But Imeson still owes property taxes on other parcels around the mine—those taxes just aren’t as long overdue as the taxes for the parcels the county moved to seize.
“In the tax year that those will become delinquent, which would be 2023, the county could start the tax deed process on those,” Kunz said.
