Update on Black Rock cleanup: ‘At this point, there isn’t going to be any movement’

By Reader Staff

For the better part of 15 years, the communities of Ponderay, Kootenai and Sandpoint have collaborated to create, sustain and expand the Pend d’Oreille Bay Trail — a 1.5-mile stretch of shoreline that is unique not only for the partnership that made it possible, but that it is publicly owned and among the most popular amenities in the area.

During that time, among the goals of the partners — which include the Idaho Conservation League and Friends of the Pend d’Oreille Bay Trail — remained to clean up the northernmost section of the property, referred to as “Black Rock” and the site of industrial pollution left as a legacy of smelting operations more than a century ago.

Ponderay Mayor Steve Geiger and Idaho Department of Environmental Quality Brownfields Analyst Steve Gill went before the Sandpoint City Council on June 20 to provide an update on the project, sketching its history and indicating when work might begin on remediating the Black Rock site.

“The city’s view on all of this property is to keep it more in its natural space and trails and very minimal amenities. No development of condos, restaurants or marinas or anything like that,” Geiger said.

Cleaning up Black Rock is a critical step toward a longer-term — and long-planned — extension of the much-used Pend d’Oreille Bay Trail, including establishment of a park area at Black Rock and ultimately connecting the shoreline to the city of Ponderay via an underpass beneath the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe railroad line — what Ponderay city officials call the Front Yard Project.

The plan has proceeded steadily through property acquisitions by participating communities, including a $500,000 grant secured by Ponderay five years ago and the passage of a 1% local option tax that brought the Black Rock cleanup effort within reach. IDEQ’s plan to clean up the site went out for public comment in the fall of 2023 and was later approved, which started the agency down the path to beginning the work.

Officials had hoped to get moving on the project this year, and Gill told Sandpoint councilors that “this really comes down to, ‘When are we going to do this?’”

However, “we’ve run into a slight glitch,” he added.

In May this year, the agency got word that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had a different timeline centered on gaining approval under a section of the National Historic Preservation Act. That came as a response to concerns from the Kalispel Tribe and the Idaho Historic Preservation Office, which means the Corps will have to complete its work before the Black Rock project can commence. Gill said the Corps’ timeline shows a starting date of June 2025.

“Because this is a lot larger cleanup than we normally do, because it’s on Lake Pend Oreille, which is the Kalispel Tribe’s birthplace … [the statutes] turned everything over to the Corps of Engineers; they’ll work on all this,” Gill said, referring to the work of issuing notifications and interacting with various agencies and the tribe. 

However, he added, the hope is that the NHPA process can be completed before next June, which would push the first stabilization work at Black Rock out to January or February 2026 — at the earliest.

“At this point there isn’t going to be any movement,” he said, later adding, “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise, this delay; maybe it gives us this time to really get our logistics done. It is what it is, that’s all I can say.”

For more information about the Front Yard Project, visit cityofponderay.org/the-front-yard-project.