by Larry Campbell, Darby
The Sheep Creek mining company, US Critical Materials, new office in Darby is an empty shell. About a month ago USCM released a widely spread high priced public relations initiative and new website saying: “U.S. Critical Materials is establishing a local office and community space in Darby, Montana, to help strengthen communication and accessibility within the Bitterroot Valley community,” and, “The office reflects the company’s commitment to maintaining a local presence, supporting open communication, building long-term relationships, increasing accessibility to project information, and participating in the local community.”
The porch light at the office is on, but nobody is home. Packaged office furniture is lying around still unopened. This does, in deed, “reflect the company’s commitment.” USCM’s words often do not match their deeds and are just empty shells meant to fool rubes, which is, apparently, how they view us.
As a private company, USCM does not have to identify investors, allowing them to play a corporate shell game designed to leave a mess behind with no accountability. Privatizing profits from public resources but socializing losses for taxpayers to pay, aka ‘they take the gold and we get the shaft’, is a time-honored mining tradition. Today, no doubt, there are new, improved, more modern mining scams.
Shell games usually involve quickly shuffling empty shells hiding a pea. FAST 41 turns out to be a fast one. Last week the FAST 41 “Transparency” Dashboard, that was supposed to keep the public clued in, abruptly “canceled” the EA permitting process that had been identified since May 2025. No new ‘p’ermitting ‘p’rocess has been identified. Those ‘p’s are now completely hidden and the expected date of public release is unrevealed.
So much for “transparency” and “increasing accessibility to project information”.
Send your public comments as soon as possible to sheep.creek.comments@usda.gov.
Helen Sabin says
Larry – another piece of the puzzle explained – thank you! Philip Ramsey at a Pachyderm meeting spoke about this company and its people and they are a front group for the Chinese. The DEQ director said it quite well in her letter – NO – to Sheep Creek and your proposals.
We must keep watching this scuzzy group and stay vigilant – I will get remarks out tomorrow on this issue. Thanks for posting your findings.