Black Hills Pioneer

LEAD — Though Vicki Franzen lives in Rapid City, her dentist and optometrist are both in Lead. She spends a significant amount of time and money in the old mining town as she works to advance a proposal to build a deep underground science and engineering laboratory.

Franzen, who works for RESPEC in Rapid City, is one of the many local employees who are working on the DUSEL project and spending money in the area. Franzen’s company is working to do geotechnical characterization in the mine so DUSEL project managers can submit a set of detailed plans for the National Science Foundation to consider when the agency decides whether to build a multi-million dollar underground lab in Lead.

Franzen joined a group of her RESPEC colleagues as the contractors prepared to break for lunch after spending a long morning in the mine. “We’re off to go spend some more money in Lead right now,” they said.

Another DUSEL employee, David Vardiman, who serves as the project’s geotechnical engineer, is a former Homestake employee. He left the area and Homestake in 1997 and took a job in Colorado, but when he heard of the project to resurrect the former gold mine as a world-class science facility, he jumped at the chance to come back to Lead.

As plans for the DUSEL project come closer to fruition the scenario of outside contractors and employees spending money in Lead is becoming the norm. Bill Roggenthen, co-principal investigator for the project said about $12 to $15 million in federal dollars will flow through the S.D. School of Mines and Technology for the design and engineering of the DUSEL.

That money, Roggenthen said, is being spent on DUSEL employees for both operation and design of the project, and on major contracts. So far the DUSEL team has about 12 employees. Of those, about 60 percent are locals, having been mostly hired from the S.D. Science and Technology Authority, which is working to build a state-run, interim laboratory 4,850 feet below the surface of the mine, as part of the strategy to secure federal approval for the bigger, deeper lab. The hiring does not stop there, as Roggenthen said the DUSEL team plans to hire an additional four employees, and by the next year the team hopes to have at least 20 employees working on the engineering and design of the DUSEL project.

But Roggenthen stressed that those 20 people will be specifically for the DUSEL design, and will not include those who are necessary for normal operations. Additionally, those people do not include any locals who are familiar with the mine that contractors will likely hire for their knowledge and expertise.

“We’re starting to get there,” he said about hiring a staff. “We’re getting the folks in. I think we’d be pretty happy if we could march into 2011 with 20 people specifically on the DUSEL project in terms of the engineering and design. We’ve got a lot of people of course on the operations side that we want to incorporate, so I don’t want to leave the impression that we’ll only have those 20 people by 2011. We need the people here to run this place.”

Additionally, Roggenthen said there are about four major contractors, and several small contractors, actively working in the mine using federal dollars for DUSEL design and engineering. Those contractors include RESPEC, which is doing geotechnical investigations to determine the strength of the rock in Homestake; Golder, an international company with offices around the world, which is handling the excavation design; HDR, based in Rapid City, which is designing the surface facilities at the lab; and ARUP, another international company, which is the prime contractor for the underground infrastructure and laboratory design.

Roggenthen gave a snapshot of what those contractors mean in Lead by describing the manpower they bring to town. RESPEC, he said, started doing its core sample drilling in August, bringing crews of about 10 people a day into the mine. Those people worked full time in Lead through November, and now the crews continue to come in periodically to run other tests.

Other contractors, Roggenthen said, may not stay as long. But regardless, he said, while they are in town they spend money for meals, accommodations, and other necessities.

“It’s really hard to quantify how many people, but it’s obviously substantial,” Roggenthen said of the crews that come to work on the DUSEL project.

The jobs for the DUSEL project are only one part of the project, though, as Ron Wheeler, executive director of the Sanford Lab said the S.D. Science and Technology Authority currently has more than 100 full and part-time employees. Of those, more than 80 are full time workers who live in the Northern Hills area. Further, the Sanford Lab has several contracts out, totaling millions of dollars, to rehabilitate the mine for science. In order to do that most of the contractors are required to have expertise of working in mines, and thus have hired a lot of former Homestake miners who are locals.

While working in Lead on the DUSEL project or the Sanford Lab project, employees are spending money and though DUSEL officials say the economic impact is difficult to quantify, Wheeler, said the project represents some of the best kind of economic growth.

On the Sanford Lab side, Wheeler said the budget for 2009 and for 2010 was about $26 million, with about 65 to 70 percent of that staying in South Dakota in the form of contracts, payroll and utilities.

“So obviously the Authority is having a significant impact,” Wheeler said. He also added that so far the state has allocated about $35 million to the Sanford Lab project. But with other outside sources — including an early $10 million federal grant secured by Sen. Tim Johnson, and a $50 million donation by T. Denny Sanford to rehabilitate the mine and get it ready for science — the state has already reaped more benefits than it has put into the lab investment.

And with the deadline for DUSEL plans looming in 2010, Wheeler said the Sanford Lab project is merging more and more with DUSEL, adding federal dollars for planning to the state and private dollars that have been allocated for development and operations. So far, the National Science Foundation has allocated a total of $47 million for the DUSEL design and about $21 million for experiment design. The Department of Energy has also provided about $10 million for experiments that will be specific to DUSEL. Overall, Wheeler said federal dollars that have been pumped into the state for this project just for the design have nearly exceeded the state and Sanford contributions.

“Today we’re having a significant impact and it is growing on the part of DUSEL,” Wheeler said. “It’s federal dollars that are coming more and more into South Dakota.”

The ultimate impact, Wheeler said, will be when the National Science Board approves the project and construction of the deep underground science and engineering laboratory begins in approximately 2013. That will mean an estimated $500 million that will flow into the state for construction of the lab, which could take approximately five years.

“That’s outside money coming in,” Wheeler said. “That’s primary economic development because it’s not inside dollars turning, it’s outside dollars coming into the community and then turning. So, it’s going to be a huge impact, there’s not question.”

Using a standard economic development model, Wheeler said all of those dollars — state, federal and private — will turn over in the area at least five or six times before leaving the Northern Hills community.