Judge rules that feds erred in greenlighting controversial mine project near Nome

US Army Corps of Engineers improperly approved a gold-dredging project that the agency’s Alaska officials concluded would be environmentally destructive, according to a federal court decision 

Seabirds rest on a sandbar in Safety Sound east of Nome on Sept. 30, 2020. A Nevada-based company called IPOP LLC is seeking to conduct a dredging operation to mine for gold in an area of Safety Sound called Bonanza Channel, but there is widespread opposition in the Nome area to the project. (Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

By Yereth Rosen

Alaska Beacon

Federal regulators acted improperly when they granted a permit in 2024 for a controversial gold mining project near Nome, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason, in a Nov. 2 ruling, said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act when it granted a permit to a company proposing to extract gold by dredging a wildlife-rich channel east of Nome.

Gleason’s ruling stopped short of overturning the Clean Water Act permit granted to IPOP LLC, the company behind the project. She gave the parties 21 days to submit new information that will be used to decide the fate of the permit.

The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed in 2025 by five tribal governments whose members hold an interest in the region for traditional harvests and activities. The lawsuit faulted the Corps for reversing its 2022 decision that denied the IPOP permit on environmental grounds.

IPOP LLC, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, has proposed mining for gold by dredging a nearly 3-mile section of Bonanza Channel, an ecologically important part of Safety Sound, a sheltered body of water that flows into Norton Sound.

The project was originally pitched as the basis for a new Alaska-themed reality show that was to be called Rivers of Gold. IPOP has since said the TV show aspect of the project has been dropped.

The plan has been widely opposed by residents in Nome and the Bering Strait region. Organizations weighing in against, in addition to the plaintiff tribal governments, include Kawerak Inc., a regional tribal consortium; the regional Native-owned Bering Straits Native Corp.; the local Native-owned the Norton Sound Economic Development Corp.

In her ruling, Gleason said the Corps’ Hawaii-based Pacific Division, which approved the permit in 2024, failed to properly explain why it came to a different conclusion than the Alaska district office, which denied the permit application in 2022.

Gleason listed several areas of divergence, including analysis of impacts to migratory birds, Bonanza Channel’s floor and turbidity in the water column. She also noted that the regional Pacific division office used a study that had been discredited by the Alaska district.

The Pacific division office “failed to explain its rationale for reaching a different conclusion from the District; indeed, it did not even acknowledge the District’s different conclusions. Not only are the Pacific Division’s findings ‘in apparent conflict’ with the Alaska District’s findings; the Division’s findings are also unsupported by ‘a rationale to explain the disparate findings,’” Gleason said in her ruling.

In its defense against the case, the Corps argued that the tribal plaintiffs’ allegations were “vague and ambiguous” in the way they defined key terms. 

Those terms included such phrases as “pristine, ecological valuable estuary,” “haven for subsistence users” and “first such suction dredge mine project,” the Corps said in its July 16, 2025 answer to the complaint.

Tribal plaintiffs in the case welcomed the federal court’s ruling as protecting an area critically important to their food security and cultures.

Among the five plaintiffs, the Village of Solomon has the closest geographic ties to the Bonanza Channel area that IPOP proposes to dredge.

Solomon is no longer a year-round village, but it serves as a “seasonal village” for tribal members and used for annual youth and elder camps, said Deilah Johnson, treasurer and tribal resources director for the Village of Solomon.

Tribal members return regularly to fish, pick berries and connect with their heritage, Johnson said.

The area is especially important to tribal members because year-round Solomon residents were displaced from the site decades ago, forced to move away in the 1950s when the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the school, she said.

“When we’re there, we feel whole,” she said. “We always say, you know, ‘Our heart is in Solomon.’”

The other plaintiffs are the King Island Native Community, the Village of Council, the Chinik Eskimo Community and the Native Village of White Mountain.

Separately from Gleason’s ruling, IPOP has been unable to perform development work at the proposed mining site. The project lacks another important permit: a land-use permit from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

DNR’s Division of Mining, Land and Water rejected the permit application twice – initially last year and again in March, when it rejected IPOP’s appeal.

In its 34-page decision signed by DNR Commissioner John Crowther, the department described IPOP’s proposal as riddled with flaws and omitting required information that would justify the proposed land disturbance.

IPOP has failed to demonstrate that surface use of the land is necessary to dredge what it says would be up to 900,000 cubic yards of material a year, the rejection decision said. And that failure clashes with requirements in Alaska’s constitution, laws and regulations that require proof that surface use of state land is necessary and development will be done in ways to minimize adverse effects and environmental resources.

“While DNR seeks to encourage the development of state resources by making them available for maximum use, that use must be consistent with the public interest,” the appeal rejection said. A large-scale dredging project not supported by exploration data “would result in unnecessary and undue degradation,” as defined in state law, the rejection said.

Johnson, of the Village of Solomon, said she expects IPOP to keep trying to get permits. And the groups that have been fighting against the project for years will keep doing so into the future, she said.

“I feel like we’ve really bonded over some of this, because it’s kind of like trauma bonding,” she said.

• Yereth Rosen came to Alaska in 1987 to work for the Anchorage Times. She has been reporting on Alaska news ever since, covering stories ranging from oil spills to sled-dog races. She has reported for Reuters, for the Alaska Dispatch News, for Arctic Today and for other organizations. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.