Mollie Maffei, Former Deputy County Attorney

Photo Credit: Montana Standard - Mollie Maffei at left

Oral History Transcript of Mollie Maffei
Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: October 2nd, 2020
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: September 2022 by Adrian Kien

[Interview audio is somewhat sub-par for the first 13 minutes, at which point an equipment issue was resolved and the recording quality improves.]

Clark Grant: You do mind saying and spelling your name?
Mollie Maffei: M-O-L-L-I-E, M-A-F-F-E-I.
Grant: Ok, ready to roll.
Aubrey Jaap: Alright, ready Mollie?
Maffei: Yeah.
Jaap: Alright, it is October 2nd, 2020. We’re here with Mollie Maffei. Mollie, I would just like you to start out and tell me about your family background – your grandparents, great grandparents – kind of the first people that were settled here.

Maffei: Ok. Well I was born in Anaconda to Margaret Mitchell and Maurice Maffei. My mother is Irish; my father is Italian. Both of their parents are immigrant families. My mother was an Anaconda girl. My dad was born and raised in Meaderville. His Italian family came to Butte prior to the turn of the century. His grandfather worked at the Leonard mine and lived in Meaderville, not very far from the mine. His father worked at the Leonard. His – actually his name was Angelo Maffei – his grandfather’s name was Antonio Maffei, and Angelo received his 50-year pin form the Anaconda Company so he literally worked for them, probably from the age of 14, maybe earlier, till his retirement.

My father went to law school and became a lawyer, and he served as a captain in the Air Force – it wasn’t the Air Force at the time; it was the Air Corps – during World War 2. He had three sisters. Two of his sisters went to school, which was common for young women from Butte, at St. Lawrence in Kansas, and graduated in chemistry and biology. His older sister worked for the Anaconda Company and retired from the Anaconda Company.

[00:02:10]

On my mother’s side of the family, her Irish family, her father was an Irish immigrant that was born in Ireland and came over to New York, and ended up coming to Butte working for the railroad. And they settled in Anaconda. Her mother, Marguerite Mitchell, was Marguerite Dwyer. Her father, Daniel Dwyer, built the Montana Hotel in Anaconda. It was a very famous structure. My grandmother’s brother, Robert E. Dwyer, was the President of the Anaconda Company and lived in New York. He was the President in the 50s – he worked for Anaconda his whole life. I believe he was an engineer and graduated at Notre Dame. My mother’s uncles on the Dwyer side were engineers. They were all educated. He father Daniel Dwyer came to Butte from Ireland and actually walked from Salt Lake up to Butte, and knew Marcus Daly – worked for Company and was a contractor. So he was a pretty well-known Anaconda citizen and lived a long life. He was in his 90s when he died, and lived with my mother’s family. On my dad’s side, his grandmother lived next door. So it was those kind of relationships and we have a very close family to this day.

I think on my mother’s side, I’m one of 24 first cousins, so there was a lot of them. So that’s basically my background. So it’s kind of interesting to me – I went to the University of Montana for a few years and then I transferred to the University of Houston and lived in Houston for 10 years, and was married there at the Rothko Chapel. My husband is Steve Wellman; he’s an artist. We’ve been here in ’92. We came back to Butte in ’92. I went to law school at the University of Montana and that’s how we ended up back in Montana.

[00:04:36]

But you know, I guess what goes around – then I end up working on Superfund and it’s all tied with the Anaconda Company, essentially, so it’s kind of interesting when you reflect upon that. So that’s my background. And I have two boys that were born here. And my son Max worked for the Archives and my son Antonio is a musician and works for Summit Valley Title, which is a family business. And so that’s what gets us here today, I guess.

Jaap: Ok, so is it your father’s oldest sister that worked for Anaconda, did you say?

Maffei: Yes.

Jaap: What did she do for the Company? You just don’t hear about a lot of women –

Maffei: Her name was Camille Maffei. She never married. She worked in that office that’s just right over here, so she worked in the business office. So she had a long career – she retired from Anaconda; it was ARCO at the time. There was an organization called the ARCO ladies – and after, they would have lunch together and picnics and, you know, because there were so many employees of the Anaconda Company that – that generation worked for the Company their entire life and got together afterward to keep in touch and whatnot. SO she did work in the business office.

My father’s family, all miners – my dad, his two sisters had college degrees. They were all high school graduates. My grandmother Lucy Maffei – her maiden name was Magretti – she was the oldest living graduate of Girls Central when she died in 1989. So I have her diploma from Girls Central, and it’s really funny because it’s huge, like [gestures].

Jaap: That’s great. So Mollie, we’re gonna kind of go up to you now. Where were you born and where was your family home?

[00:06:45]

Maffei: I was born in Anaconda in 1958, at the hospital in Anaconda. My parents – my father and his father actually built our house in Anaconda. It’s still there at 1901 Tammany. And it was known – it was in the new division, so it wasn’t – my dad worked downtown. My dad built a little dollhouse in the back, which you could go in and you know, play. It was a playhouse and it was painted the same color as the house, so it was really cool. Anaconda was fairly idyllic really. My mother would open the door and we’d run all over town and go to Washoe Park. At the time, my mother’s family – pretty much all the aunts and uncles lived there. So we would run and go to our aunt’s and uncle’s house and just have the run of the neighborhood.

So we decided to move to Butte. My father moved his practice to Butte to the building that is not there anymore, where the Northwestern parking lot is here on Granite. Can’t believe I can’t say the name of the building, but it burned down in 1979.

Jaap: The Silver Bow Block?

Maffei: I don’t think it was the Silver Bow Block. It was literally just right down there. But there was a major fire. It was 1979 in February, I think. So he then had to go up and throw stuff out the windows to save paper because he had a title company and a law office. He had bought furniture from an older attorney named Frank McGann, who also had an office. And so he had beautiful – the leaded glass bookshelves and a conference table. It was old furniture, but really nice. The table got saved and his desk got saved, which was the old fashioned twin desk where lawyers would sit across from each other. But the bookshelves got quite destroyed with smoke damage and water.

[00:09:06]

So anyway, that building houses – he was on the second floor and it had an elevator and bannisters, but the Corrette Firm was on the floor above him I believe. So they ended up moving – the Poore office ended up moving down on Harrison Avenue in front of Albertson’s, at that time. And my dad temporarily had an office on Broadway and then he bought the gas station across from the Mother Lode and remodeled that to move his office. So at any rate, I worked for him when I was a freshman in high school until - my sophomore year I went to work for Taco John’s. It was a new business that was coming to town and I went over when they were putting up – in those days it was just this little red and yellow structure. And I went in and asked for a job and I got a job with the first crew. So I worked for Taco Johns. And I was a member of the union. The union came to us – and it was all young high school students that worked there – and they came to us and handed us our union card, and we made pretty good money. And we paid union dues.

The guy that owned it at the time – Joe Longmeyer was his name – his wife made all our uniforms and it was quite a good job. And actually, I left high school with over $7000 in my savings account, because of the union wages. And still in those days - like I said the union rep came to the shop and handed us the card and we signed it.

Jaap: Great. So, you told us a little bit about college. You can either talk a little bit more about college or talk a little bit about what you did after college.

Maffei: Well, I started at the University of Montana and then transferred to the University of Houston. I graduated from U of H in 1982. At the time, my parents were huge sports fans – which, I am not sporty at all. And the Houston Cougars had a really good basketball team. In fact, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler were on campus with me. I remember seeing them because they’re basketball players and they’re seven feet tall.

[00:11:32]

So my parents were just really really excited that I was going to this school that had this incredible football team and basketball team. And I was like, I don’t know much about that because I was a philosophy major and got my philosophy degree. Anyway, so when I graduated from the University of Houston, I got a job at the Houston Public Library, so I was a librarian for a couple of years. And then Houston was having – the city – was having some difficulties. They had a hiring freeze – the job was secure but we had a need for more – I worked at the downtown library, a beautiful building. I actually loved being a librarian and would have stayed, but they didn’t have a master’s at the time, in Houston, there was no master’s program for Library Science.

So my husband and I took a trip across the country and drove all over in the summer of 1987. And that’s when I kind of decided that I was going to go ahead and go to law school. Because after I left the library, I got a job at Fulbright-Jaworski. And Leon Jaworski was the Watergate prosecutor. It was quite a large law firm in downtown Houston. And so I was working there as a legal assistant, and I actually got that job because a neighbor of mine in Houston was a legal assistant there. And she said, we need legal assistance. You should come down and apply for a job there. And since the library was kind of, um, needing more employees. And so I thought, well, I'll try that out.

So I went and the lawyer that hired me said, "Oh, you have a philosophy degree. You can read, you can write, you can think, when can you start?" And I was told that I was never going to get a job with my philosophy degree. And I was like, huh, that worked out pretty well. So anyway, I worked for Fulbright and Jaworski in their downtown office for five years. And then we took this trip and decided to go to law school. So we moved back to Montana and went to the University of Montana. Graduated there in 91 and clerked for the Supreme Court of Montana for a year, and then came here and went to work with my dad.

[00:14:07]

And so, I worked for my dad in private practice and he was getting ready to slow his practice down. And so I worked in private practice for about 10 years and a job opened up with the county. And for reason of the health insurance and those sort of things,  I went to work for Bob McCarthy in January of 2002. So that's when I started working for Butte Silver Bow. And shortly thereafter, we were just starting to negotiate with Atlantic Richfield for our allocation agreement. So that they would fund Butte Silver Bow to do the work once remediation was taken care of. That we would do the work on the hill. And so Bob had slated me to, along with Eileen Joyce, who's the county attorney now, to work with the Butte Silver Bow team on those negotiations. So we negotiated that agreement since when I started in January, 2002, and we signed that allocation agreement in December of 2006, which provided funding for Butte Silver Bow crews to do all the work on the hill.

So it was a long negotiation and the Atlantic Richfield company, their employees, as I understood it, we're sent to negotiating school. They were tough negotiators. And we hired an attorney to help us named Gordon Hart out of San Francisco, a nationwide expert. And he helped us with that. The negotiations with Atlantic Richfield, which was quite helpful because they had three outside council from Denver negotiating for them in addition to inside council for Atlantic Richfield.

So they had upwards to four attorneys working on this allocation agreement, four to five attorneys. And we had three, Bob and Eileen and I, and then we had hired Gordon. So it worked out fairly well over the years. And that agreement is still in place today.

[00:16:45]

Jaap: Did you know anything about Superfund when you began with Butte Silver Bow?

Maffei: I did not. I knew that there was CERCLA and the EPA was out there administering this law for cleanup, but I really didn't know anything about it. I was actually a real estate attorney. So in as much as I was familiar with the land of the area and my dad was a real estate attorney. So he knew quite a bit, being born in Meaderville and living in Butte most of his life, he knew a lot about the area and in Anaconda. And he actually was hired by the county to help negotiate the Silver Lake agreement, because I'm kind of diverting, but Butte Silver Bow ended up owning Silver Lake, which is a major lake and water source for Butte and Anaconda. The Anaconda company owned Silver Lake. So they had all the water rights to that, and they used all this water in their mining operations and piped it back into Butte from Silver Lake near Georgetown. And my father had a great deal of knowledge of the area. So he had actually written legal opinions about the ownership of Silver Lake and the surrounding area and the different, because that drainage, there's also water rights to Storm Lake and other water in the areas.

And there's a huge dam, Myers dam, and it was all important. All those facilities were important for the mining operation. And there was a lawsuit with Montana Resources and Butte Silver Bow, as ended up with Silver Lake, which is an extremely important asset to Butte because there's so much water. So just as a side, my father was quite knowledgeable and had worked for Bob McCarthy as a private attorney in those negotiations.

Jaap: So was he helpful to you?

Maffei: Yes. But he died in 2003. So he has not seen the reclamation on the hill or anything like that, but he would be pretty excited about the work that has been done on the hill, because it looks entirely different than it did when I was a kid.

[00:19:18]

My grandmother still lived in Meaderville when the company bought their house and she moved into the area called the drives by Kennedy park. But I, as a child had gone to Meaderville and remember when their house was moved and Meaderville was very . . . you could smell creosote. My dad's house, my grandmother's house was right across from the railroad track. And so all that orange and mine waste was just, that's what Butte looked like. And I really didn't think that much of it throughout when I was a child and this hill. It was completely looked like mine waste and it was orange and it had a certain smell to it. So now it's amazing with the reclamation that's been done because it looks entirely different.

Jaap: It is amazing. Yeah. We have people say, this looked like the moon or this area. Yes. And you look at the trail system we have now. And oh, it's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, your father was the real estate attorney. Did he help then with anyone being bought out by the Anaconda Company? Did he get involved in any of that?

Maffei: Not to my knowledge. I mean, I wouldn't say that he didn't prepare deeds or represent people, but when the company was buying those houses, I just think they made an offer and people accepted it and then they moved into town. Some people might have held out. I really don't know the history of that part. But once the company took over the Columbia Gardens area and Meaderville was certainly slated to be gone, I don't know. I've never talked to anybody about resistance or somebody not wanting to move. Maybe they probably didn't, but it's incredibly sad to me. You're probably familiar with the Butte, America film. I was sobbing at the end because we've lost so much because of the mine. And so I'm sure there's people in New York that can say my parents used to live on this block. You can't even go to Meaderville. I mean, it's gone. And McQueen, you can kind of see some foundations. And on the hill, you can see foundations that have two lilac bushes on either side, but there's entire neighborhoods that don't exist anymore in East Butte and it's pretty incredible.

But at the same time, you have to look to the future. And Butte is a very unique place and there's so much good happening. And people, we were at the folk festival a couple years ago on a Sunday and we were watching a band and this woman said to me, "Are you guys from here?" And we said, "Yeah, we, we live here." And she and her husband come every year from Bozeman and they pull their trailer to the Mountain Con area that is open for camping during the folk festival. And she said, "It's just so tremendous. The views are incredible. And it's the same people that pull their trailers every year for the folk festival." And she said, "It's just incredible and Butte is just so amazing." And so you do have the naysayers that have bad mouthed Butte and thought it was ugly. But a lot of people just are amazed when they come here because of its uniqueness and it's on a hill and it doesn't look like Missoula or Bozeman, which when you're out on those new 93 or 19th street, they look the same. You wouldn't know which town you're in because there's Home Depot and Target and a Costco and it's the same. Butte has some really unique qualities. And so I find it fascinating. So I'm happy about what's happened. And I think for instance, the Original as a stage and a venue . . . there's just nothing like it.

And the old boss's neighborhood at the Mountain Con, the views are incredible. It's so much fun to walk up there. It's so much fun to do a picnic. And every person that we've taken up there is always just like, wow, this is so interesting and unique. And I think it is.

[00:24:10]

Jaap: It really is. So I wanna just go back to your grandmother. Did she talk about having a hard time leaving Meaderville? How'd she cope with having to leave Meaderville?

Maffei: Well, as I recall they were kind of excited about getting their little house on Center Street, but she was born in Meaderville and like I say, her mother lived next door.  My grandfather died in I think it was 1962. So she had been a widow, but she loved her neighbors in Meaderville. They all knew each other. They took care of each other.  As I understand it, and I remember that from being a child, but I was in grade school probably in second grade when my grandmother moved to the Drives. So I think she was sad. But at the same time, she was very tied, both of my parents were raised Catholic. My grandmother was a member of the St. Helena church in the old days before they was running water. She actually would bring the water to the church in the morning. And so incredible ties to the neighborhood. So she probably was sad, but it wasn't a conversation I was having with her when I was in second grade. She was the youngest, her siblings had both died.  They were grown up, but they had died young, so she and her husband had died. So really she had us. My parents had six daughters and so she had her daughters and her son and her grandchildren. But in terms of her immediate family, nobody was really left.

Jaap: So Mollie, would you talk a little bit more about negotiating with Arco. Are you fine talking a little bit about that? We're always so curious of how that plays out. What does that look like?

Maffei: So when we knew we were going to start this process to negotiate the funding for the . . . Butte Silver Bow was named as a party because of our storm water system was carrying mine waste from the hill down to the creek. And of course, as you can imagine, there were a lot of mines on the hill. Everybody was mining on the hill before the turn of the century and after the turn of this century. So, and then of course, the Anaconda Company consolidated all these mines. And there was I don't know how many. You probably do, but a lot of mines on the hill. And so there was a lot of mine waste and mineralized soil coming down to the creek. So we were named because we were the owner of that storm water system. So there was several components to the negotiation. The storm water system was one of them. The groundwater collection system was another that we have not taken over.

It was potentially something we were going to do when it was allowed for in the allocation agreement if Butte Silver Bow had decided to take it over. And there was also the reclamation on the hill and the taking care of all the caps on the hill.  So at any rate when we started the public works department. Actually, in their budget, funded for Eileen Joyce and John Sesso and I to go to Washington DC to a Brownfields conference, which was an intensive, weeklong conference to learn about Superfund sites and the cleaning up of Superfund sites. And that conference was in 2003, maybe.

[00:28:19]

But at any rate, we did go to that conference and we got the name of this Gordon Hart to help us with this negotiation, because it was going to be a big deal. I mean millions of dollars. And so we came back and contacted Gordon Hart on the phone and he was delighted to represent Butte Silver Bow. He did a conflicts check and he came to Butte on numerous occasions for those negotiations. We held the negotiations in the jury room of the courthouse. Sometimes they were at Arco's building over on Anaconda road.  And people at the table included public work staff, health department staff, people from the county attorney's office, all the attorneys and then Atlantic Richfield engineers and all their attorneys and their principles that came from Chicago and from Houston. So it was a lot of people in the room. John Davis, who's an attorney here was charged with the drafting, but all the parties would go over the different paragraphs. And there were numerous iterations of that allocation agreement.

And so another aside is Gordon Hart, San Francisco attorney. He's an expert in the country. He's an incredible negotiator. He has represented a lot of entities and city and county governments, but he loved to come to Butte and he thought it was amazing. And he always stayed at the Finlen hotel.  And he would tell his partners a night at Finlen hotel is less than breakfast at a restaurant in downtown San Francisco. So that was kind of funny, but he really grew to love Butte and helped us negotiate that agreement.

So those negotiations were often intense. We often didn't agree.  There was one point that a couple people on the staff of Butte Silver Bow were very distrustful of Atlantic Richfield and wanted to just say, "Let's not do this. They can do the cleanup. Let's walk out." And I, in particular, and John Sesso just said this is our destiny. If we are not involved, if it's not our crew and it's not our people, Atlantic Richfield can get crews that will come from Salt Lake, from Boise, from anywhere. And they're not going to care. We should really have a department. We should be in charge of this cleanup. Please, let's not walk out of these negotiations. It's worth it to go toe to toe with them and continue these negotiations. And we did. And to this day, I think it's really important that it's our city, it's our town. And we need to be in control of our destiny and have the ability to implement this cleanup with our crews or people that we hire. If we don't have the staff to do whatever it is. And it's worked out very well, I think.

[00:32:00]

Eric Hassler who worked for the health department is now the Superfund manager.  John Sesso is semi-retired and will be done pretty soon, but he was Superfund coordinator, of course, and involved in Superfund since the nineties.  Eileen Joyce, before I came on and even after I came on, knows quite a bit about it because there was major projects that were done. The Copper Mountain ball fields, for instance, was a major project. And a lot of things happened in terms of John Sesso had a pretty incredible vision of how this might look as the planning director and doing telemore one and two over reclaimed site and building those neighborhoods on the hill that both are housed with families and new construction at the time in the nineties. And those views from those neighborhoods are incredible. And so many working parts in terms of what's happened. And of course the last piece is the no man's land between Harrison Avenue, or Texas Avenue, and the Butte reduction works.

That George Street area in particular is the last part. And that's going to be next on the cleanup. So that'll be really nice because it's in the middle of the town and the views from that area, which we call the north side tailings and the east side diggings has views of the 360 of the entire hill. You can see the East Ridge, you can see out to the Highlands, it's just really a nice area and it's going to be beautiful. So that'll be really, I think, fantastic for the heart of our city to have that cleanup, that last cleanup in the area where the confluence of Silver Bow Creek and Blacktail come together. And today, if you go down there, you can see, because they started cleaning up the pit and they're discharging clean water at that confluence area. And it's really cool to see all that water coming out when they're discharging. It really makes me happy because the pit obviously is the big elephant in the room and it is either beautiful or absolutely an eyesore depending on your view of the day. But it's a miracle that clean water is coming out of that. And so it's just really, to me, not negative, but positive that we have that water coming there and entering the stream at that juncture. And I've seen kids playing in that area, older kids. So it's kind of funny.

Jaap: Yeah. Nice to see kids playing there. And we interviewed John Sesso and he echoed a very similar thing that Butte Silver Bow being named a PRP was terrifying, but that it turned out to actually be a really kind of unique, beneficial position to kind of be able to determine, to be in the room and have a little bit more control over the cleanup and what it would look like.

Maffei: And having our destiny in our own hands. And prior to the negotiations even starting, Atlantic Richfield was funding what was known as the lead program in Butte Silver Bow for many years through a memorandum of understanding. And that to me was pretty important. And when I was a young mother in the early nineties, the lead program was completely a go. You had your lead tested as a mother, your children had their blood tested for lead. And that was just the norm and every pediatrician and doctor in town did that. And so, in fact, my husband and I lived on Galena on the hill. We happened to live across the street from John Sesso actually. And the lead program had an industrial vacuum that we checked out from the lead program and vacuumed our entire house after we remodeled it. And that program, I don't know if you've interviewed Eric Hassler yet. But he worked as a young tech graduate for the health department, and he is extremely knowledgeable about the history of the lead program and still is today. But it was a great success.

And so when we hired Gordon Hart and he was getting the background of what the relationship was and the funding. Because Atlantic Richfield was funding cleanup prior to the allocation agreement. And he had never heard of anything like a company funding a program based on pretty much lead paint. When they, the Atlantic Richfield Company didn't make paint, they had nothing to do with paint. Yet, this was a good will kind of thing for them to fund that. And he couldn't believe it, but it is pretty remarkable. But I think today, and I'm not good with the numbers, but our children don't have high blood lead levels. That program has really worked.

Jaap: Clark, do you have a few questions?

Grant: I'll kind of start at where we're at right now. I was curious about the formation of SARTA. Is that part of the allocation agreement?

[00:37:46]

Maffei: Yes. So. that notion came because we negotiated a redevelopment trust fund and the figure, I think, was 15 million, but that was to grow in a fund. So that redevelopment on the hill of properties that could be developed. Because there's two designations of properties. There's the non-developable that you can't put a house on it or a business on it, but then there's properties that are developable. And so we wanted to put this money in a fund and then have a board that could oversee projects and take grant applications. And so that's how SARTA came about. And there was in the early days discussion of who would be on that board and how the board would function.  So we had those discussions, but that board was literally, I think, Matt Vincent was the one that had SARTA put together and name the people on the board. So there's staff and then there's board members and they literally take the grant applications and review them and give money out to people that have projects that are related to the different categories of the funding. And so that's how the board came about. And I think it has worked pretty well. And the money was a little complicated because we're a city county government, and we can't invest because of state law and rules like a private company could. So I think the money is overseen by the state of Montana board of investments and it follows budgetary constraints of state law.

And a lot of people have come forward and good projects have come out of it. And the board is pretty dedicated. Some people have come and gone, but there are a lot of original board members on SARTA that are still there. So it's a pretty neat thing.

Grant: In the process of negotiating the development of this trust fund, was there an opinion among people at Arco that the uptown needed to be revitalized?

Maffei: I think so. The people at the table were people that lived in Butte and worked in Butte. Robin Bullock being one of them. She ended up getting transferred to Alaska and is no longer here, but the people that worked at that office are Butte people. And I must say even the people that worked out of the Houston office and people that were outside council for the Denver office got involved with Butte, because they were here so many times for not only the allocation agreement negotiations, but then the subsequent consent decree negotiations. And so these people came to Butte a lot and they really wanted to see it through and they grew to really love Butte and wanted to see a success in their part of the negotiation. So I think oddly it really did end up being that there was some emotional investment in the success and the outcome of this cleanup.

Grant: Why is that odd?

Maffei: Well, most people wouldn't see corporate executives and attorneys that live in another state caring, but they did. And so it's kind of great. Maybe it isn't odd, but I think the perception would be 'yeah, like, right.' And I think there's some people in Butte that think that we have been had. We've been taken to the cleaners and we should never have done it. That is not my view from being in the room for as long as I have. But some people do feel that way.

Grant: I've heard that. Well, we don't have to get into Fritz, but he talked about the allocation agreement as hush money. I always thought that was an interesting take on it. One that I don't think is accurate obviously.

Maffei: Well, one of my pet peeves regarding the language is that we've been accused of being in secret negotiations. Well, they're not secret. They're confidential. And that is true in the law. You don't have mediations that are open to the public in most instances. You can't get anything done. You have to be able to, I mean, it's a representative government. And I work for an elected official. Other people on the negotiating teamwork for elected officials and we're charged with representing citizens of Butte Silver Bow. And so while people might say it's hush money, and I think people have even said somehow we were being paid or benefited. It's absolutely not true. And I know every member of our team is very proud that we worked for the people of Butte Silver Bow, and negotiated this agreement. And negotiations are give and take. Not everybody gets exactly what they want, but we fought pretty hard and got angry and were not shouting, but voices were raised over the amounts of money that we were going to accept for the storm water piece. And the amounts we were going to accept for the lead program. Now, it's not the lead program anymore because they do attics and yards. We argued over what the funding would be. And we're quite lucky that at the time of that argument British Petroleum which owns Atlantic Richfield, had the ability to invest money and gain 7% interest. And so a lot of these trust funds have grown and because of the partnership and the good sense of John Sesso and understanding budgets. I mean, you could ask him a question today about how much money is in a certain account. He would tell you almost to the penny.

It's really remarkable but we were really careful with Atlantic Richfield after the agreement, because they review the budgets and you submit the budget to this trust company that's in Chicago or New York somewhere, and all of it's reviewed. And we're careful about how the money's spent. And so there's been a trust that's been established between Atlantic Richfield and Butte Silver Bow because we're not misusing the funds. We're careful. And when we've asked for more money or needed to spend more money, we're prepared. We go in there very prepared and reasonable about what we need, because we've had three amendments to the allocation agreement. And they've never said, no, all three of those, we were never told no about the extra needs that we may or may not have. And so it's worked out quite well. But the negotiations, when we got that allocation agreement signed by council in December of 2006, it was a pretty happy day because it was a long process. And there was a lot of people at the table and the negotiations were difficult. It was never, "Oh yeah. We'll just do it." It was very careful with the language and when we've been criticized that's why we bring up Gordon heart. Like we had an independent expert representing us and he represented us very well. And he understood from staff input and the legal staff input, the importance of certain things and how things needed to work. And because it was our crews, we just really understood what needed to be done and what the funding source should be and how it should work. So I think there is that out there, but I don't agree with those that think that way, because I think it's turned out pretty well.

Grant: I'm curious, just in general, does the language of legal documents appeal to you?

[00:46:53]

Maffei: Contracts? Yes. Sure.

Grant: What is it you like about it?

Maffei: Well, just being precise and making sure it's written in such a way that somebody 20 years from now will understand what it means and that the language is plain enough and that everybody's on the same page. So it's kinda like a puzzle. It's problem solving.

Grant: I think when most people read a legal document, they just kind of glaze over.

Maffei: And I do too. I'll have something sent to me that is not of interest and I'll go, yeah. I think that's pretty common.

Grant: I wanted to ask too.  How unique and how challenging is it for a small town, like Butte to have a Superfund division in their local government? Is that very common?

Maffei: I don't think it's very common and I'm assuming that it's fairly unique here. I think it's really critical and important though. And I think we're so fortunate to have funding, to have a department because this doesn't go away. You have caps on the hill. You have to take care of them. For instance, when you walk up the trail to the Mountain Con, you see all those incredible storm water structures that are lined with rocks. They take those rocks out and clean them and recycle them. So that now there's a pile of rocks that's keeping you from going up a little road towards the pit. Those were in the adjacent storm water ditch. They took them out, replaced them with new clean rocks and they'll move those and clean them and put 'em somewhere else. So there's things you would never think of, but when you do walk that trail, especially, I think if you start looking, you can see the amazing storm water features that are controlling the storm water coming off the hill. And it's kind of a marvel to me when you look at it. And so there's all the grasses, all the caps that need maintenance, they need to be replaced. You have our GIS department and the land records department has to keep track of properties that are adjacent to, or have some caps on them so that they're not disturbed. And it's kind of a complex little situation because Butte at the turn of the century, everything was above front street. So you've got a major city that was on a hill and there's all these mine shafts and mining operations. And it's just fairly complex. So I think it's perfect actually that we have a super fun crew. And I think these people are invested and they're proud of the work. And I think it makes a really big difference.

Grant: You don't think it's been a strain on our local government at all? Sometimes I, I see council commissioners meetings where members are struggling to understand the situation.

Maffei: I think they can't quite understand it. And you get a different set of commissioners, new people come in and it's complex to a certain degree and we've tried to go and explain the funding and how the allocation agreement works, but taxpayers aren't paying for anything. And it just really depends. I've been to council meetings where things are explained, and then you might get somebody that doesn't really understand it. It just really depends, but I think it's really good that there's a department. I think part of that is just a vocal minority so unhappy with Atlantic Richfield and unhappy with the Superfund crew. And they just didn't like it. So there's a lot of noise versus the facts on the ground. I mean, you have people at meetings that say nothing's been done in Butte, nothing's been cleaned up and you're just like, "Have you taken a walk? Have you been anywhere?" And I think, especially these times, there's some antigovernment sentiment and distrust and it's just sort of pervasive and you try and you try to explain and some people understand it and I think most of them do, but you just have people that don't either want to understand it, or they just want to be critical. It's kind of hard for me to say, but not for lack of trying. There's been presentations, before and after presentations at Tech and different lectures that have been given by John Sesso and Julia Crane and, and Eric Hassler and the people that have been really involved. And some people just don't pay attention.

Grant: How does it affect you personally, especially if there's contention at a public meeting or something, do you take that home?

[00:52:24]

Maffei: Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I don't take it home because I think when you feel like what you're doing is right, it's a lot easier. It is hard. The intensity of the negativity when we were doing the consent decree was very difficult and the most difficult part though was if we don't get to that, that's not going to be good for Butte. And that's who I represent. And so that was my main concern was I would've felt terrible if we didn't succeed in getting the consent decree signed by the court and get this last piece. It's also frustrating that people don't know the difference between, and it is complicated if you don't pay attention, but people confuse the active mining operation with Butte priority soils, operable unit. And people also think that for instance, Missoula got a much better deal and Butte was taken to the cleaners. There was waste left in place in Missoula,  when they cleaned up the area by the Clark Fork, there was waste left in place. People just wanted to hear what they hear and say what they say. Yes, a lot of money was spent, but they left waste in place there too.

So the other thing is where are you going to put all this dirty dirt? I mean, it's easy to say you should have taken all of it away, but where are you going to put it and what community's going to wanna take it. And so while we have caps and waste was removed and then it was capped, it may not be ideal, but I think that Silver Bow Creek is much, much cleaner at the end of the pipe than it was. And I think it will even be cleaner once we get this middle part of town taken care of it's kind of a work in progress because it's not finished yet, but it's much cleaner. There was a story from a New York writer that came out and talked to a guy here named Glenn Brackett that makes fishing rods. And Glen Brackett is in his eighties and he's fishing, Silver Bow Creek, and it's clean. And so there's still work to be done, but that's kind of a feel good story because when my dad grew up in Meaderville because Silver Bow Creek ran right through Meaderville, he said they called it Copper Creek, because it literally ran copper.

Jaap: It's a big deal. We were out by Fairmont looking at all the cleanup out there and Abby was talking about fish and how fish are coming back. And we saw fish jump right as she was saying it. And it was just really nice to see. It is frustrating when you hear people say nothing's been done, nothing's been done, but then you think, well wildlife is coming back, fish are coming back, there are birds and it's just really lovely and yeah.

Maffei: Yeah. So the landscape architect that designed the Shiloh storm water features in Billings, which was a public works project that city of Billings, those are taxpayer dollars and it's really beautiful. Shiloh's really awesome. And when they were first talking about having this guy design it, I have some friends in Billings, so this was, oh, couple of years ago, probably, I drove over to see Shiloh and stay with friends. And I was so excited. I called Julia Crain on the phone and I said, "You're not going to believe this. Like, it's amazing." And so I was so excited and that the guy that did that design, he's excited about this Butte project, of course. But he's most excited about the piece that's the pond over on the other side of the highway off of Lexington, because they're going to do that as part of this, it's not part of the consent decree, but they're going to clean that up and put boardwalks in and there's pelicans and cranes and it's just really cool. And Butte is pretty marshy. So there's all this water over in that area where Blacktail comes in. And so I think it's just a really big deal and it's so exciting, but there was a guy at a public meeting at the Butte brewery that said, he thought that it was kind of a joke that they just made that film. And that they're really not going to do this cleanup. I mean, somebody at that meeting literally said that. So you're thinking you'd spend a million dollars to hire this firm to design this cleanup, to pull the wool over the eyes of the people in Butte. I mean, some of the logic totally escapes me.

Grant: I don't think you can describe that as logic.

Maffei: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But that was literally said at a public meeting. "You're not really going to do it. Nothing's been done." And they just don't know Butte and haven't been and seen the before and after, or not old enough to remember what it looked like. Because the hill, when you go down to the George Street bike trail and just kind of go in the middle and look up, I mean the hill is green. It didn't look like that when I was a child, at all. It was all that orange moon landscape. And now it's just like, wow. So I'm not the only one that loves Butte. There's many people, but it's pretty, I think it's really exciting. I'm thrilled about this future and what it might mean for economic growth and the future health of the creek and for the kids that live here, and that may be able to come back here.

And those of us that are living here and working here, and these are tough times right now, but I really think this particular piece is really exciting because it's job creation. It's clean up. It's going to be a park in the middle of town and it just has a lot of potential. So I'm extremely excited, enthusiastic about it. And about the future of what Butte might become for future generations. And any given day, I think the statistic is there's a hundred people working, whether they're engineers or Butte Silver Bow people or Atlantic Richfield people working on the Butte priority soils. There's a hundred people a day and that's not a small number for a town our size.

[00:59:45]

Jaap: In regard to economic development, do you think when the cleanup is done, do you think we will see an improvement in economic development?  I guess I'd like to know kind of your personal thoughts on that.

Maffei: I do. I think one of the things that I would sell is that Butte is unique. It's different from the other cities in Montana.  We have I15 and I90, you can go to Canada. You can be in Calgary in eight hours. You can be in Salt Lake in six hours. You can go east or west, you can be in Seattle in 10 hours. You can head to Minneapolis. We have the infrastructure. Really Butte is such a pretty area.  I think Blacktail Creek is a gem. I don't know if you guys notice how many private planes come in and out of Butte on a daily basis. Because of our incredible hiking and fly fishing. And I think people are very attracted to that. I know that people are coming to Butte. There's a lot of people buying property in Butte, because property values in Bozeman and Missoula have really skyrocketed. I don't know that is such a good thing, but I hope that Butte people can continue to prosper and grow here and that we can get some businesses that, and there are things that are happening.

The potential Mitubishi coming here to do an operation.  We have the industrial park and Federal Express and Old Dominion are out there and we have water. We have this incredible Silver Lake water that we can provide to people that need water in their businesses. So I think there's a lot of good and I really can't stress enough that I don't know of any other city that has a water source like that. It's pretty amazing. And we also have the pit is cleaning the water and they're building that new plant that's going to go online. So I just think there's a lot of potential. I hope that it's done smartly because our valley isn't huge and that we have our planning director really understands her job, Lori Casey, and they have growth policy and I just hope all these things come together in the right way. And I've lived in Missoula and I've lived in Helena and I think Missoula is beautiful, but it has too much population for the valley and those things are those are difficult that can probably be said about any city that you go to that our cities are overpopulated and people move out and then you have the problems with the fires and people living in the forest. But that's the issues that we face in this day.

Jaap: I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about water. Butte is kind of ironic because, as you mentioned, we have this great water source, but I think Butte also has this horrible stigma around water in our community. And what do you think it takes to overcome that stigma?

Maffei: I think that we have to get the word out there about our new water treatment plant that's state of the art. I think the technology was purchased from Japan. We have some of the cleanest drinking water in the country and that has to get out there because I know people, "Oh, Butte." I have nieces and nephews in Portland and they have heard that and it's just not true. But I think, Butte has had that stigma for so long that it was ugly, that it was rough and tumble, that people are going to beat you up if you come here and there's that stigma. And a lot of it, I think has gone away because you talk to people and they come here and they just love it. And I think part of it is the recreation that we have here. I've talked to doctors that the reason that they came to Butte is because of the recreation potential. And I've talked to actually a doctor in Bozeman that started coming to Maud S and riding her bike over here because Bozeman was so crowded. And so I think you just have to when the economic development team is talking about Butte and why you're getting here has to really home in on that we really do have clean water. We have clean drinking water and what our resources are. And I think they had a company that came through to talk to Butte about how our city looks in terms of getting businesses that may want to move here. And they were saying that it wasn't the pit so much anymore, 10 years ago that would've been kind of a worry, but it's our corridors and the blight. And I think that is very true. And I think our blight is a problem and we have to have some really innovative thinking and partnering to clean up our corridors. So when people come in, especially Tech is a jewel on the hill and you can go down Park Street and you see some blight and Butte has had blight because we have lost significant population.

When you have a town of 50 to 60,000 people and you lose half of the population and you have empty storefronts and empty houses and absentee landlords, and Detroit, Michigan is quite similar in a weird way. They've lost a ton of population and they had blight. And I've talked to the economic development department about Detroit's website because they wanted people to come back and they were selling houses that they ended up with that Detroit was owning just like we have owned structures that we've sold at a tax sale. And they had a really nice website showing the neighborhood, showing the schools, showing the interior of the house. But no speculators, if you're coming and you're buying here, you're living in Detroit, you're coming to revitalize our neighborhoods and that's been a problem for Butte. We've had a lot of people that own property that don't live here and they don't take care of their properties.

[01:06:39]

And it's a tough issue. We went to the legislature to try to convince them that we should be able to have an absentee landlord list and list all the people that owned properties that weren't living in them. And we got totally shut down. They pretty much ran us out of the capital. 'How dare you." This is what they were saying, "Too bad for Butte. It's your problem. We're not going to allow you. These are private property rights and we're not going to allow you." You can find out who they are from the property tax role. Well, you really can't because some people it'll be an LLC from California with a PO Box. Yeah. And then you can't call 'em and say, "Hey, your building's caving in." So we wanted to get a registry. And the landlord/tenant association had a huge lobby and we didn't even get out of committee.

So you try to do things that make sense, but there's a lot of politics involved in certain things. And we've tried to reduce some ordinances to get registries for abandoned buildings and mothballing so that we can kind of keep. But when I first came here, people were speculating and that O'Rourke building right there. They took fixtures out of there that were just gorgeous and it was owned by a private individual. And people were like, I guess, speculating and thinking Butte was going to have a turnaround and they'd make a lot of money. And so we had a lot of problems like that. It's getting better. We don't own as much property as we did, but these things are real and the county government has to be really proactive about it. And it's not easy because there's just so many factors and people don't like you to tell them what to do with their private properties. So there's a real balance.

Jaap: Clark, do you have more questions? I kind of interrupted you.

Grant: I do. No, that's fine. That's fine. You kind of were touching on these, but I was going to ask maybe other than your previous effort you just described, what can our local government do to try and compel building owners, especially in the commercial business district uptown to not neglect those buildings, what other ideas are out there?

Maffei: It's really hard. Maybe there should be a blight committee that gets people from the community and proactive. But then you have another board because we need to also take care of all of our head frames. I'm a firm believer that we should never divest ourselves of those head frames. Once they're in private hands, you don't have control of them. And I think that they make Butte unique and we have to take care of them. And we need to do that too, but we might, should have a blight committee because it's really hard. You have an ordinance, perhaps it might take care of it, and then you have to send somebody a ticket and you have to bring him into court. Health and safety is easy. If somebody has a building that's collapsing or they have open sewage or they've turned water off and somebody's living in a building that shouldn't be, those are easy to win in court. We had a building in midtown, which is some of the biggest blight that we have between Front Street and Platinum maybe used to be single family, nice homes. That area got hit very hard when the mine closed. 

We had a building that was near collapse, the fire department went in there and said, it's a problem. It was owned by an individual, but there was tenants in there and we wrote all the tenants about the issues and they were like, we're fine with it. It's difficult, but maybe we should have the chief executive form a blight committee so that people from different areas of town that might have ideas about our corridors and getting a fund to paint houses and maybe put hanging baskets, just so when people are coming up Montana Street, Main Street looks so much better. I don't know how long you've been here. If you remember that part of town, but it looks so much better than it did. But we still have a lot of blight and it's difficult. And there's a lot going on though. My husband and I like to ride bikes and we ride around and there's a lot of remodeling going on in Midtown now. And I think young people, if we had some jobs coming in, that's a great place to buy a house because you can walk to town, you can walk up town or you can get downtown really easy. So I think Midtown is like a great area, but you have to have all these things work together, have some jobs and have the ability to maybe do some work on blight and absentee landlords and those sort of things, because it is difficult. I don't really have any magic solutions.

[01:12:21]

Grant: There's lots of interesting efforts that have taken place internationally like in London and things. But blight you commented earlier on the precision of legal language and blight is so subjective when I saw a second dollar store go in, I thought that was blight. So I don't know. But are you talking about boarded up windows and failing roofs.

Maffei: And windows maybe not even boarded up. Yeah. But empty homes and pigeons. I don't disagree with you last year we drove from Mississippi through Arkansas, down into Texas and all these little towns in Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas had a lot of boarded up storefront, but they had a Dollar General and a Family Dollar and they don't look very good. And now we ended up with a shame about the Albertson center, because that's what we ended up with and people are shopping there, but it's not your ideal. It's like pawn shops. When they became our storefront all over Montana. It's not an ideal situation.

Grant: You kind of hinted at it earlier that historic preservation in Butte is somewhat political. Why is that do you think?

Maffei: I think you have people that are very passionate about it and don't want any buildings to be torn down no matter what their condition. But then you also have people that are, "It's my property. I don't wanna be told what to do." And just trying to balance both of those things. And when the mind shut in the eighties a lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of people moved. Things looked pretty bleak. Now things are coming back, but everything takes money and you just have a lot of varying interests. We've lost so many buildings. It's heartbreaking.  And so we really need to work to keep what we've got, but everything's expensive.

Grant: I wanted to touch on how much has been lost. The time I've spent in Butte I guess I've come to realize how little is left, you know? And I'm curious if you see a connection between your work and the county attorney's office and the development of a new identity for Butte because we can't go back to the wide open town, the mining metropolis, that's gone. And so what in your estimation is our new identity going to be?

Maffei: I think one of our new identities, and I think this will happen, is there's a lot of young people living, your age group in town that are enthusiastic. And I really believe that this consent decree and the cleanup is going to be extremely helpful because people wanna live in communities that have amenities and a lot to offer. That have uniqueness, people like that. And I think we're going to be able to start to sell that with the last push of this consent decree. And it's my view, and I know Julia Crain, and I have talked about this, of turning Butte into, because we have Montana Tech, which is science based, turning Butte into this reclamation city where we know how to do it. We can have training. We can have seminars about what to do. How do you negotiate with companies? And I think that would be so incredible. And I think that is part of the future of what happened here and we have had loss. The oldest mind in Butte is the Pilot of Butte, which is back behind the Granite Mountain Memorial. And if you go down there, if you can get a tour down there, it is just incredible. I mean, it will blow your mind and all you can do is, when I went down there for the first time last year, I didn't know whether to cry or to be hopeful because it just showed you the incredible infrastructure of what this hill must have looked like and how noisy it must have been.

[01:17:26]

And all these workers that had incredible skill sets. I mean, these were workers that could do anything. I mean, these operations were major. Absolutely. They had carpenters, they had welders. So you can just picture what this incredible city of working people and the history and the labor and the deaths and the little neighborhoods that lived like my dad's grandparents that lived two blocks from this huge mining operation.

And so it's just amazing. And I think our future is related, but it's about reclamation and it's about cleanup and it's about science and how you can do it. And I think that is really part of Butte's future. And I believe it will happen because there's pollution all over the world. It just is what it is and it needs to be cleaned up.

And I think that's where Butte should go and partner with Montana Tech about reclamation and about how you clean up and how do you negotiate it and how do you get the deal for your community? Because I think it is a story of partnership. I'm amazed to this day, how well that it's worked and that we've worked with one of the biggest companies in the world, and we've gotten something out of it and they're proud of it too.

I mean, it's pretty remarkable to me. And I think Tech is a real important partner in that whole thing. And because we have I 15 and I90 and have the ability to get people here and it can attract people because of the skiing, the fly fishing, the hiking. You know, the Butte 100 is huge now. I mean, that's really remarkable and this year's different because of COVID, but these things are all kind of coming together. I'm very positive about it.

And I'll go back to my father who was born in Meaderville at home at 62 Lincoln Avenue. He loved Butte and he was a firm believer, but he was part of the I-15/I-90 task force. They wanted to bring the highway through Boulder and then it would've come out on the other side of Whitehall. And he fought really hard, went to the legislature and he just was like, we have to have I-15 come through Butte. And it was a fight. Bozeman would've preferred that I-15 come out there and that was a big deal for him. And he always talked about Harrison Avenue where Amherst is, that's always a bottleneck. And he was like, they didn't design that for any growth. It's such a bad little spot there. But at the same time we have I-15 and I-90 and I think it's really important. It's certainly important for Butte that I-15 comes through here at the juncture. So I just think we have a lot of things going for us. And when you hike up to Maud S Canyon to the top in the spring in a wet year and all that water bubbling out of the ground and converging down, and it's just really, to me, really amazing having the Continental Divide right here. And I think Butte just has a lot going for it. And I think there's a lot of people that believe as I do. And I think it's getting less and less.

I know when my son was in college and he's a musician and he would play all these shows. He and my youngest, Max, would say, you go to Missoula and they're like, we're not going to Butte for a show. We hate Butte and they would just get so offended. And I think that's changing. You have a lot of people that just really love to come here and it's not just about St. Patrick's Day anymore. I have nothing against that, but that's when the college kids would come, but I think the Folk Festival's been tremendous and the Irish Fest and Matt Boyle is talking about the resurgence of the Original Festival and the potential of an amphitheater here and being able to get Butte back on the map. And so I think there's just really lot of good things. And so I'm very hopeful, but I think it should be tied to reclamation and to Montana Tech. I think we have some amazing potential there.

Jaap: I think you're correct. Butte has always homed in on its history. And I think reclamation is now becoming a very important part of its future and history. It homes in directly to what we've been doing.

Maffei: My husband's cousin worked for the Homestake mine in South Dakota and in the Black Hills. It's an open pit gold mine. And they came to Butte for a wedding. My husband's family, they're all Black Hills, Minneapolis, and they don't come west. They go to Chicago and Minneapolis when they're going around. So they didn't really know that much about Butte, but they came to Butte for a wedding. And Steve took them on the tour of around, and his cousin worked reclamation after the Homestake closed. And he was really impressed. He was like, this is incredible. So you have somebody that worked in that area that had never been here and was just really impressed. And we have our naysayers here that think it looks terrible and they don't like the native grasses. And why did you do this? And why did you do that? Because it's easier to be negative in a way and to criticize, but I think it looks good.

And I know that he was just enormously impressed. He was amazed. And so I think that's where it's at. And I think that is the future. And you can tie it to the past, but you can still move to the future about young people and about what the future might hold in terms of our city.

Grant: I know it's a 1000 page document, but can you summarize the CD for us? Do you have a one sentence?

Maffei: One sentence.

Jaap: You can use two.

Grant: Okay. Two sentences. [laughter]

[01:24:15]

Maffei: The CD is a working document that outlines the cleanup of the corridor. And also what's still needing to be cleaned up on the hill and the standards for the water and what it's going to look like. And I think it's a document that works with the future that outlines what that's going to mean. It's very technical. It's based in science and it allows for if something isn't working, it allows for more cleanup to be done. And it's the working pattern and cogs and wheels that are going to make this thing tick well into the future.

Grant: Do you think there are blind spots in the consent decree? Like the, during the rollout, the Timber Butte blowback.

Maffei: I don't know so much, it was a horrible night, to say the least, but I think that speaking of a long time ago, and I think Atlantic Richfield did explain this fairly well after the fact, but all that criteria that they had to, where you're going to put waste and how do you do it? How do you take it from point A to point B? They had all that criteria in place, fairly detailed. It wasn't really talked about as part of that rollout. I think they got ahead of themselves in terms of that neighborhood. And so it was how it was done more than should it be done. They backed down. So that neighborhood was happy. All things being equal had it rolled out differently and had it been explained differently, you might have not had such a welling up of anger and I don't blame them because they didn't know, but I think it was not so much, should it be done and can it be done, but how it came about.

And they found out in a terrible way. So I don't think it was because they were just trying to pull the wool over our eyes and that there wasn't criteria for it. I think it was just how it was done. And so it's easy when you're embroiled in these documents and in these negotiations when you're hearing about it, what it sounds like to somebody that really hasn't paid that much attention, you might have had neighbors that weren't involved in Superfund. People don't even get the newspaper. It's just not on somebody's radar, but when it's in your neighborhood, then it becomes on your radar. And when it was rolled out like that, it was a mistake, but I think it was handled and most of the people were happy with the outcome and they were glad that it wasn't going there. Did they even know that they moved in a neighborhood that already had mine waste buried under there? I don't know. It it's just easy. I think. I was living in Butte and I certainly knew of some things, but you don't really pay that much attention and unless you're extremely engaged, a lot of people don't.

And so I think that neighborhood had a wake up call and some of them got more engaged and a lot of them ended up coming to our listening sessions, which is good, which is what we wanted. And you want public input, but people have jobs, they have children, they have things going on. And so if it's not affecting you and it's tough, there's a lot of, not in my backyard sentiment on many issues. It's difficult.

Grant: I guess I was curious if that event made the team consider what other aspects of this deal once it was finalized might cause a similar reaction.

Maffei: We certainly had a lot of discussions, but nothing comes to mind that I think that was just kind of a one off that, oh God, that just was handled so badly, unintentional, but nonetheless, but I can't think of anything in that consent decree that is similar.

I mean, where to put mine waste is really difficult. It's a lot of it. There's a lot of dirt. You have to move it. You have to be safe and we had lots of discussions about which roads you're going to go over, how's it going to work? And it's not easy and it's easy to be an armchair quarterback about those things, but it just, I guess it is what it is, but I can't, nothing comes to mind. I can't think of anything. I'm not saying there couldn't be, but I just can't think of any aspect of . . . we have to get property in that area so that dirt can be removed between Cobban and Casey Street. We actually negotiated with the railroad to purchase property over there and we did, and Casey street as part of that cleanup is going to get realigned because it's so funky. And so that's kind of a good thing, but I can't think of anything over there and maybe there's something with Butte Reduction Works that, but I think it's all been very outlined and there's certainly been a lot of public meetings and process about how it's going to work.  So I can't think of anything, but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be.

Grant: You keep touching on questions that I already have written down so it's like you're predicting them or something, but you kind of mentioned everyday people living their lives. They may not be engaged with Superfund until it touches them directly. I guess I just wanted to see what sense do you have of how the work you do affects the everyday person in Butte? When you're standing in line at Town Pump, do people know who they're standing next to? You know what I mean?

Maffei: No, I don't think so.  Unless, we call it the window, we have a window when you come into our office and people come in with all kinds of problems and we talk to people about, you know, they have a problem with their neighbor or their neighbor's tree or their neighbor is being mean to them or they're upset with their landlord, or they need a restraining order. So we have people all the time that have nothing but problems. And so we are there, I think most of the people in our office, we're there to help people. It's not often perceived that way. But that's kind of where it is, but most people, unless you know me, you won't even know what I do or who I am. I wouldn't think. I try not to be on the news. It's not my favorite thing. I don't do any criminal prosecution. I do all the civil work for the county. So when you're a prosecutor and you have trials, you can be in the news.

But every now and again, there'll be a civil issue like when we had the fire by Steele's warehouse that was owned by Joe Lynch. That was horrible. It was a really big deal. And he was uncooperative and there was a lawsuit filed and Judge Tucker had to come from the Fifth Judicial District and hear the case. And just getting that building taken care of was like way more difficult than it should have been. But that's how things are. Sometimes things just aren't easy and logical, like there isn't logic to it.  And so unless you have know me for that reason or I've helped you, or you've perceived that I haven't helped you, you might not know who I am. Superfund is just one of those things, unless you're interested.

[01:33:34]

Grant: I just had a couple more questions. I don't know how much time you have today.  I wanted to ask a question about mine yards and then a question about Montana Resources. And then unless you have something, I was hoping to kind of go back to your younger days for a little bit, especially considering we were recording there to begin with. So, but now this is working. Anyway, just a quick anecdote, I was out walking the dog the other night and I went by the Anselmo and I've experienced this too at the Lexington, walking around Walkerville, where I'm enticed by the mine yard. I want to go touch the steel and if you walk up to the fence, there's a sign that says, this is a primary element of the historic fabric of, so stay out. And I always find that message so conflicting. It's a primary element. Why can't I interact with it? And so I was curious if there is any talk or if you've you had said earlier, you really want the mine yards to stay in public hands or by the county, will they ever be developed and will the fences be removed?

Maffei: We just had a meeting last week with Mary McCormick, who's our historic preservation officer and Eric Hassler, who is the Superfund manager and the chief executive. And we are talking about what we need to do because we think we're going to get a board set up comprised of mining engineers and staff and people from the community to talk about what we need to do to allow for some access. It used to be at the Anselmo . . . When I lived up on Galena, we were there all the time and they had the old miners doing tours, which were really interesting, but we've got to get so that we can make sure they're safe and make sure that we can keep them in good shape, but you wanna have the interaction with them and there's been movies.

They had the zombie movie done at the Anselmo and I did the contract for that. And I'm all for access of those, if it's appropriate. They are historic structures. But I would like to see where people . . . you don't want somebody climbing and they can be dangerous, but it's nice to be able to go up to them and look at them. And so I'm not opposed to that. But to try to get a board to talk about how should we do it? What should we do? And which ones perhaps?  There's a push, I think the National Park Service has some interest.  But because of the liability and whatnot, who knows whether that'll happen, but I think we need to start really focusing on how are we going to take care of them and how are they going to be utilized and how can we have people be able to view them and interact with them. So I think that's coming. And it should.

Grant: I agree.  So considering your knowledge of circlet at this point, what can you say about Montana Resources? What will happen when they shut down?

Maffei: Well, they are under an active mine permit through the Department of Environmental Quality. And so it's really not a circlet issue. They have bonds they're supposed to post, and so I'm not real privy to that. But they have bonds and they're supposed to clean up when they're done. And that's a lot of years away, but I'm just not that knowledgeable, but that's my understanding is their active mine permit is very different from, circlet is about the past. And so the DEQ oversees it when they need to do anything, they have to go through the DEQ to do whatever changes they might want to. And so hopefully the bond is sufficient to clean up whatever it is that they're going to need to do, which seems absolutely daunting to me, whatever that, how do you do it and what do you do? Because it's such a huge operation.

Grant: When they shut down, does that trigger the circlet?

Maffei: Not necessarily. Because of the bonding and what they're going to be required to do when they close that mine. It becomes a problem if they don't have any money or there isn't bonding. So mines now that went bankrupt or whatever, that's when you would probably have. And will we have an EPA? What's the future of the EPA and that funding to clean up those things that were abandoned by companies that are no longer in existence and you can't find them or whatever? But that, to my knowledge, isn't that operation because they're bonded. And they have an active permit. And part of that is the bond for reclamation when they close their mine. But I'm not privy to what that looks like and what the amount is or, or how that permit even works.

Grant: Do you miss the pre reclamation Butte hill? Do you miss the moonscape?

[01:39:34]

Maffei: No, I don't. I mean, I have really distinct memories of and even that area where Shields comes around George that right there used to be pretty orange and pretty icky, because they've done some reclamation along the railroad tracks there, but I remember my grandmother's house in Meaderville, like I said, they lived on Lincoln Avenue. It was right across from the railroad tracks and my grandmother had a garden in her backyard and like she'd pull a carrot out of the ground and wipe it on her apron and hand it to us. And nothing tastes better than a carrot that came right out of the ground, you know? So it was such a, you know, you had creosote and the smell and the orange. Then you had pansies and posies and violas and wooden sidewalks and friendly neighbors and wonderful food. And it just didn't, like people my age, I mean, we just didn't think anything of it. I mean, it just wasn't something that . . . that's just how Butte looked. I'm sure in high school, it wouldn't have dawned me to go, "Why don't they do something with that?" I mean, it literally would not have crossed my mind.

Grant: And kind of going back in time, how about at the Montana Supreme Court? You just mentioned very briefly being a clerk there. What is that like? How does a court like that operate?

Maffei: Every justice at the time had two clerks. And so if a case came before them that they would hear, then they would discuss it in a closed room and determine what the decision would be and make a vote. And then the clerks would be given the information and we would write the opinions. And give it back to them for editing and clarification. So it was kind of, for me, I mean, it was good because you want to be precise and you learn about cases because you're going through the entire record, all the depositions or the court testimony or whatever, and writing an opinion and making and trying to put it in plain language. But it was kind of, I wouldn't have wanted to do that for two years. One was plenty.

Grant: Do you have a special way of reading that allows you to read more faster? How do you read that much?

Maffei: Well, in law school to read 40 pages was a lot. I mean, it's rigorous, not because it was hard, but you have to pay attention and understand what you're reading. So I love to read, I probably didn't read a novel the entire time I was in law school because you just get, like reading, because you're reading and you're outlining what you're reading to try to understand it. So I can skim pretty well because you just get to a point, you a certain thing and not, I'm not saying I'm skimming contracts or whatever, but you can kind of ascertain what something is being said, but it's just a different way of reading to see what you're trying to ascertain from a document. What the subject matter is, I guess, it would depend. I don't know if that answered your question.

Grant: I think so. Yeah. I watched that RBG movie recently and was talking about her reading until five in the morning all the time. And I assume that's what takes place in a Supreme Court even at a state level.

Maffei: Yes. And I haven't watched that yet, which I want to, but she obviously was a brilliant legal mind and people that get to that level where they're clerking for the Supreme Court of the United States, I mean, that's high level stuff. And no matter which part of the political spectrum you're on, you have to be pretty bright.

Grant: To say the least. You had talked about studying philosophy. I was curious if you have favorite works of philosophy or philosophers.

Maffei: Well, it's really funny because when you're in it, you kind of can do it. And I loved Wittgenstein's Tractatus, it's just a small book and I got it out recently and every page, almost every sentence is completely marked with notes. And I read the first page and I was like, huh, I apparently understood it in 1982 or 1980. So it was kind of funny, but when I was in law school or at philosophy school, I really loved Plato over Aristotle. And then I kind of changed my mind, but it's been so long, but I just really loved philosophy because it just was to me, just it clicked. And so that was just, once I took a class, that was where I went in terms of getting my degree. But it's just a matter of I like to think, and I like to read and solve problems. And that's what it's about. And it's kind of funny because my husband's a painter and painting's all about solving a problem. It's all about striking a line and how are you going to solve the problem of where you're going with that painting? So it's kind of interesting.

Jaap: I've not heard the similarities between an artist and a lawyer.

Maffei: I think most artists that are sculptors or painters would agree with that, that it's about problem solving.

Jaap: Really interesting.

Grant: Even to some extent I would say carpentry is that.

Maffei: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Carpentry is absolutely problem solving.

[01:46:04]

Grant: So just for my last inquiry because I was fiddling with this other recorder, I heard earlier someone in your family was president of Anaconda. Someone walked from Salt Lake. So I was hoping that we could back over your family history.

Maffei: On my mother's side of the family, they're Irish. And her grandfather, his name was Daniel Jay Dwyer. He came from Ireland and he got to Salt Lake and walked from Salt Lake to Butte. And he was in Butte for a while, but he ended up in Anaconda and he built the Montana Hotel which was a famous, fancy Marcus Daily hotel in the early days of Anaconda. His daughter, my grandmother, Margarite, she had, I think, five brothers and sisters. Anyway, one of her brothers, Robert E. Dwyer, worked for the Anaconda Company all of his life. And he lived in New York and he was the president in the fifties of the Anaconda Company. And his family is still on the east coast, but he lived in New York City.

He was up there obviously in the Anaconda Company in the fifties. His wife was Mollie Burns and her house, her family lived on Granite Street, not very far from here, as a matter of fact, and that's who I'm named after. My mother, her family, there was six of them and Robert Dwyer put them all through college. My mother, her brother, Fred, her brother, Robert, her sister, Patsy, he paid for their tuition. And I remember him and his wife coming out and back in the days when I was really young and we lived in Anaconda, the Echo Lake Lodge was this lodge where you could go have dinner and whatnot. It was on Echo Lake. And I remember him coming out and our whole family and we didn't, there was six of us. We didn't go out to dinner. Wasn't a thing that we did. And I remember getting to get dressed up and go to the Echo Lake Lodge, because my mother's uncle Rob was coming to town. And her other uncles were pattern makers and engineers. Some of them ended up in California.

And on my dad's side, they were Italian immigrants, they were miners. They worked hard. In fact, one of the most heartbreaking stories, which was just revealed to me, not that long ago, I was here with Ellen. We were going over some of the road books because we're trying to get this comprehensive view of the roads to determine if they are county roads or not. Anyway, Ellen called me over to look at some of this stuff and we were just kind of fooling around and the family story for my Italian side, my grandfather, Angelo, like I said, his father was Antonio and he worked for the Leonard Mine. And so did my grandfather and they lived in Meaderville. And at any rate, this family story was always that my grandfather had a brother that was run over by a train in Meaderville. And so that's kind of all that I knew that his brother and that, like I said, that railroad track was right in front of their house.

So anyway, Ellen and I were looking around and I looked at this Andrew Maffei's death certificate. And Ellen looked at it, she goes, "There's a coroner's inquest." And I said, "Really?" And she said, "Do you want to see it?" And I said, "Sure." So to make a long story short, my grandfather and his brother were playing on the railroad tracks and they climbed on a railroad car and the car came loose and it was on a grade. So the car ran down. It was heading towards the Parrot, which is by the civic center now. And as the crow flies, Meaderville wasn't that far. You could take Park Street and you would end up in Meaderville before the pit was there. So anyway, this train car, so a guy, people were on the street and saw two children on the train car. So this man who my grandfather had to have a translator during the coroner's inquest, said he was the Austrian anyway, so this guy hops on the train car, threw my grandfather off, but he couldn't reach his little brother who was standing on the front of the car. He was trying to reach him. And he said that these boys were crying for their mother. They were hysterical. Anyway, he couldn't reach him and he fell off and he was run over by this train car.

So I didn't know any of this. So there's this whole inquest. And so Ellen and I went to the basement and we got these documents out. So they took testimony. So here, my grandfather's five, they take him to the funeral parlor where his little brother's body was and have this coroner's inquest. They get a translator because he doesn't speak English. And so they ask him what happened. And so they have an attorney for the railroad company, two railroad workers. A little girl in the neighborhood, the guy that threw my grandfather off the train and a lady that saw the train going by. So they interview all these people and the long and short of that inquest is they blame my grandfather for the death of his brother. They accused him of loosening the brake on the train. And so I was just heartbroken. Like, I couldn't believe it. I was just absolutely heartsick. And the railroad attorney got to have control over the inquest and he got to control what happened. And basically they were saying that the people were saying, there's no way this little kid could have loosened the brake on the train. And then they had railroad workers saying, "Oh yeah, anybody could have loosened the brake on the train." So here, this is 1897. So here you have people in Meaderville saying that the railroad parked these rail cars that were full of ore so there are tons and tons.

[01:53:21]

And so they were always parking them. And every kid in Meaderville was playing on the train cars and playing on the railroad tracks and jumping from the car to the sidewalk by this warehouse. And so nowadays that would never happen. There would not be children around unless they hopped a fence where they could be in this dangerous situation. So here you had this situation where yeah, you had all these little street urchins playing on the railroad tracks and you have a car full of ore and the brake came loose and they certainly weren't going to be responsible for, some little immigrant kid isn't going to get any money from the rail company, is how I viewed it. But anyway, I just couldn't believe it. And this was just this year that, so we always knew that his brother had been run over by a train.

But when you look at a map of Meaderville, I mean, there's railroad tracks everywhere because ore cars were coming in and out of the mines and they had a precip plant and they had their own operations. And so there was railroad tracks everywhere. And it's kind of fascinating to think that a railcar was going from Meaderville downhill to the Parrot, which was behind the civic center at quite a clip. And this amazing guy hopped on the car and threw my grandfather off, or I wouldn't be here today, but it was just heartbreaking. And his mother, my grandfather's mother, died a month later to the day, the newspaper article said she just never recovered from her son being run over by the train, and she got sick. She had, I don't know if it was the flu or something that was going through the neighborhood. But anyway.

Jaap: And then the stress of having her other son be . . .

Maffei: And that they took this little kid and there was no mention in the inquest that he was with his parents, that he was just being questioned through an interpreter.

Jaap: Those inquests are heartbreaking. I was just reading a mine accident in 1913 at the Leonard. And you can see him try to bait the situation almost. They lay it out and you think, oh, they are totally trying to place blame on this one man. You can just see it and it's heartbreaking.

Maffei: This was 1897 and in 1909, my grandfather was working beside his father, Antonio, at the Leonard and they were unloading huge timbers and the cable broke and my grandfather's father was crushed in front of him and he was 15. So it's interesting that the Italian side of my mother's family worked really hard. They did well. They put their kids in college. My grandfather was a boy scout leader. He was beloved in his community. He was a super nice guy, but they were miners and carpenters. And my mother's, at least, on one side, her father worked for the railroad, but her other uncles were people that were important to the Anaconda Company. The Dwyers were very well known in Anaconda. So it's interesting. But my mom said, "When my dad came home and said, I'm going to get married, I've met a girl. And they didn't say, is she Italian? They said, is she Catholic?" Because that was the most important thing. And they both were quite devout Catholics, my parents.

Grant: Wow. Thanks for sharing that. No further questions at this time.

Jaap: Thank you, Mollie. You bet. That's wonderful. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah.

Grant: Wow. What a story.

[END OF RECORDING]