A lot of stuff has happened since my last entry in June. We spent most of June in China, all my grandkids and great grand kids were for for July during which we had the Fireman’s Ball where my band Hammerstone performed! Very busy!
During that time we had two town meetings and three or four Comstock Mining Inc./town workshops that I missed.
The big news is that CMI has applied to the Lyon County Planning Commission for two actions that would allow them to open a mine at the Dayton Consolidated Mill in Silver City. One application is for a Reversion to Acreage (RTA) that would merge the lots they hold in and adjacent to the Dayton Consolidated Mill, and the other is to change land use and zoning of this property to Residential Rural (RR-3) which would allow mining with a special use permit (SUP). The RTA application was on the Lyon County Planning Commission agenda today (September 10) but CMI asked for a continuance because while they assumed the lots were all zoned the same, they discovered that they were actually not; CMI had a similar lapse regarding use of BLM land ( see Due Diligence).
In my last blog entry, I estimated that CMI was three to five years from opening a mine in Silver City. That was a guess based on the assumption that CMI wouldn’t expand operations until the Lucerne/Billy the Kid pit was actually profitable and they had banked some income from it. But gee whiz folks, CMI’s going for it now; I guess hoping the price of gold won’t keep falling and stocks will keep selling to keep the whole thing afloat.
CMI CEO Mr. De Gasperis’ remarks at the SC Town meeting in defense of the TRA application sounded to me like an admission that the real interest of people running CMI is in real estate. That raises the possibility that the mining and sales of mining stocks involves a real estate scheme of some kind, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad, I guess. But if you are a stock holder in the CMI the mining company, I’d ask if the real estate is an asset that benefits or will benefit you, especially if CMI goes belly up some day.
