Idaho-Maryland Mine Corporation’s CEO David Watkinson submitted a new letter (dated April 1st, received by the City on March 31, 2011) to Joe Heckel, City of Grass Valley’s Community Development Director.

Mr. Watkinson says in his letter that IMM Corp. plans to submit by April 8th (among other things) the “working draft” of a Revised Project Description.

He continues:

“Subsequent to your review and comment on these draft documents, we will submit the final project application package, inclusive of the Revised Project Description, with the target date of April 29th.”

Did the City (in private conversations?) indicate to Mr. Watkinson that it would accept drafts in satisfaction of the April 8th deadline? Has the definition of the word, “deadline,” changed? According to this latest letter, meetings between IMMC and the City have been taking place “over the past several weeks,” so possibly something was said to that effect? Do transcripts of these meetings exist? If the public has the right to see written communications related to the project, shouldn’t it also have the right to see transcripts of verbal communications on the same subject?

Or, possibly these conversations were nothing more than routine chats with Planning Department staff?

Later in the letter, Mr. Watkinson implies that the City has not already decided whether to require a Revised Draft EIR:

The City has indicated that it would make a formal decision on the requirement for a Revised Draft EIR for the Project upon submittal of the 2011 Revised Project Description.”

But the City has already made that decision. Here’s what Joe Heckel said on that subject in an interview with Paul Emery on KVMR last November:

JOE: “Yes, what would occur is — let’s just walk through he steps — is the applicant would be filing those new changes with the city — and those changes could deal with a number of points of their operations — then we would commission a draft EIR to be prepared. We would utilize a lot of the information already collected and compiled in the previous EIR but we would focus a lot of our critique and analysis on the new changes. But we would have a new draft EIR — called a “new” — but an updated draft EIR prepared and released for a public review period in which the public would be provided an opportunity to fully look at the document and walk through what the issues and concerns would be with the project.”

We may hear more from Mr. Watkinson in a few days, if he lives up to his promise to meet the April 8th “deadline.”