Haines, Skagway assemblies not keen on developer proposal

(Continued from page 6) dinance, yet to be voted on by the Skagway assembly, that would require ore to be loaded onto ships in closed containers, rather than by a conveyor belt.

That method isn’t a viable option for Minto Mine, which currently ships out of Skagway, Minto’s chief executive, Chris Stewart, said in an email to the CVN.

Both Jahn and Stewart said Skagway’s equipment can operate without polluting. “The ore loader works well in its current state, as we have seen from our air sampling during the loading process – no contamination during ship loading – but for whatever reason (I believe just legacy feelings about it) the Town of Skagway wants it gone from their dock,” Stewart said.

Haines is the next closest port for Minto, and if it’s not in play, the company would have to truck to Stewart, British Columbia, hundreds of miles to the south.

“Minto is actively looking for other loading options beyond Skagway and something closer than Stewart, B.C., would be preferable,” Stewart said. “If Haines had an ore loading port available, we would definitely consider that for our concentrate.”

Stewart said he has spoken with Jahn but is “not at liberty to discuss it at this time.”

Jahn said he has been in “daily” discussions with Minto over the past month.

There could be demand from other mines in the region, Jahn said, but he didn’t specify if any had directly expressed interest.

“There’s a list if you Google Yukon mining companies or Alaska mining companies,” Jahn said. “A lot of these companies—they have been in their processes for up to 10 years. We’re creating an Excel spreadsheet right now. There are about six Alaska mines and about eight Canadian mines. Those could all be potential users over the next seven-year period.” (There are six actively producing mines across Alaska, including three near Fairbanks and one in the Arctic.)

Jahn said he reached out to operators of the Palmer Project, the major exploratory mine northwest of Haines and Klukwan. They are “definitely not an immediate client for us” but “could potentially be” later on, he said.

Former Haines Borough planner Dave Long spoke twice with Jahn in recent months, according to borough manager Annette Kreitzer, who said she didn’t know details about their conversations. Long couldn’t be reached for comment by press time.

Haines Borough Mayor Douglas Olerud told the CVN he hadn’t heard of Prosperity Investments or Jahn prior to hearing from Cremata about the developer last week.

“We heard that gentleman had talked to Mr. Long about permitting,” Olerud said at a Haines Borough Assembly meeting Tuesday. If Jahn’s ore terminal proposal were to move forward, it would come before the borough’s planning commission, Olerud added.

News reports and court filings from the past decade suggest Jahn—who has owned or directed numerous companies with different names—has a history of proposing projects that don’t always pan out.

In 2018, a U.S. District Court judge ordered a default judgment against Prosperity Investments for likely breaching its contract with a California tech company called Provision Holding. That company alleged that Prosperity entered into agreements with “a then existing state of mind and intention not to perform,” according to court filings. Prosperity didn’t file a response or appear in court, and the judge ordered Jahn’s firm to pay $450,000.

In 2012, environmental regulators in Alberta said a different company owned by Jahn, Heartland Industrial Park, hadn’t been complying with a groundwater monitoring program at a former chemical plant near Edmonton, where there was known contamination. About two years after Jahn’s company bought the site, government officials said they “made multiple attempts to resolve the matter but the contamination issue remains unresolved.”

Jahn said this week that his company successfully remediated and redeveloped the property. “We had to spend a great deal of time with Alberta Environment to determine a plan to clean up the site, I believe we spent around $400,000 over a 24-month period (to) clean it up to be reoccupied and subdivided,” Jahn said in an email. (The CVN contacted local officials and the Alber- ta Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas but was unable to verify Jahn’s statement by press time.)

That same year, in 2012, a different company owned by Jahn, Pacifica Deep Sea Terminals, agreed to buy a former pulp mill on Vancouver Island for $8.6 million, but that deal went south after being extended three times, according to reports in the Campbell River Mirror.

Jahn told the CVN that a last-minute disclosure of contamination at the site— by the company selling it— had gotten in the way of access to funds from his mortgage company.

In 2019, Jahn told officials in Fernley, Nevada, that he had partnered with other entities with plans to develop a K-12 school, 2,000 low-rise apartment units, a technical college and a main street area with shops and restaurants on land north of town, according to a 2019 Reno Gazette-Journal report.

A source familiar with the development told the CVN that Jahn is no longer involved in that project.