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COLORADO MILLING COMPANY, LLC <br /> P.O. Box 1523 <br /> Longmont, Colorado 80502 <br /> Gold Hill Town Meeting December 29, 2018 <br /> Tony Vrba, Chairwoman <br /> <tonyvrba@gmail.com> <br /> Tony Vrba: <br /> The Colorado Milling Company, LLC is herewith responding to the Gold Hill Town Meeting's <br /> letter regarding the Application for an Amendment to the Gold Hill Mill Limited Impact 110 (2) <br /> Permit No. M-1994-117, filed to add the previously permitted Left Hand Creek Pump Station, <br /> Gold Hill Mill Pipeline, and the Times Mine adit portal to the affected land boundary of the Gold <br /> Hill Mill Permit. <br /> In your email addressed to the Review Board, you posed several questions by writing: "As per <br /> your website and report there are many violations listed. Has there been any effort by the operators <br /> to make corrections? Is there a trend of fixing violations in a timely manner? The owner's prior <br /> actions and reliability to make the area safe needs to be a consideration when further decisions are <br /> made." <br /> Since some of your members were not residents of Gold Hill when the Gold Hill Mill was <br /> permitted on September 26, 1985,the following history may be useful to those of your membership <br /> who want to know what has actually transpired at the property during the last thirty-three years. <br /> The Gold Hill Mill has only been owned and actually operated by four companies since it was <br /> constructed in 1986 and 1987. The first was the original permitted operator,the Gold Hill Ventures <br /> Limited Partnership;the second was a company called Colina Oro Molina;the third company was <br /> ITEC Environmental; and the fourth was Mount Royale Ventures. Of the four companies that <br /> owned and operated the milling facility, only one, Colina Oro Molina, was responsible for all of <br /> the operational violations at the Gold Hill Mill. <br /> Colina Oro Molina was owned and controlled by Gwen Fraser of Seattle, Washington. She placed <br /> her brother, J. Wayne Tatman, in control of the Gold Hill Mill on October 23, 1990. The fact that <br /> Colina Oro Molina's on-site Mill Superintendent was totally incapable of managing the Gold Hill <br /> Mill quickly became apparent to anyone in contact with J. Wayne Tatman. He had convinced his <br /> naive and very gullible sister that he could make her tens of millions of dollars by processing just <br /> a few thousand tons of platinum, palladium and gold ore from a secret placer deposit he owned if <br /> he only had access to the Gold Hill Mill's processing equipment. When this ridiculous geologic <br /> impossibility came to naught, the owners of the Cash Mine refused to ship any ore to the mill as <br /> long as J. Wayne Tatman was in control of the facility. <br /> Shortly after this,Colina Oro Molina began importing ore from all over the place in clear violation <br /> of the original State and County Permits. Every serious violation at the Gold Hill Mill dates from <br /> Mr. Tatman's appointment to a position that he proved entirely unsuited for to every observer <br /> 1 <br />