Dale Lavigne and his family operate three drug stores in Silver Valley. He has been a key player in the valley’s economic development, helping to find buyers for Bunker Hill mine in the 1980’s and later helping to find matching money for the gondola project.

Q: So, you’re a Silver Valley native?

A: Our history goes back a long way in the valley. I was born in Kellogg and have lived here all my life.

My grandfather came here in 1890. Later he and one of his immigrant buddies from Italy homesteaded down in Harrison just above Coeur d’Alene lake. They were some of the first people who belonged to the Federation of Miners and they were on the dock in Kellogg when the Bunker Hill mine was blown up. And they were convicted and ended up in San Quinton for 11 months, until they decided they really didn’t have anything to do with it and let them back.

Q: How important is tourism to this area, now that most mines have stopped producing?

A: With the low prices of silver, lead and zinc, tourism had to become one of the catalysts for the area. Certainly we all hope that the day will come when we can enjoy the fruits of the mining.

As you stand here, the mountains right behind you are the richest silver hills in the world. That’s where the Sunshine, the Galena and the Coeur group are located. Fortunately, we still have tons and tons of ore in just about any form you want -- lead, zinc, silver and so on -- but I’m not sure it’s going to be very easy in the days to come to put in a new mill. Certainly we won’t see the zinc plants and the lead smelters that we saw.

But certainly the Lord shot this place full of minerals, and I can tell you, having taken cell samples on just about everything around this part of the country, you never get a cell sample that doesn’t have lead or zinc in it. It’s unfortunate, and I hope I live long enough to see the day that it does come back.

But the good thing is, tourism is bringing in people from the outside; and they see the quality of life that we have here and the potential of what this valley can bring. And as you are seeing now with Eagle Crest, I think we’ll see more and more possibilities of economic development. And when I say that, I mean people who come in here and say, “you know, I’ve got a small factory, or I’ve got a work force somewhere that has 25 or 40 people, and man, wouldn’t it be nice to live here and enjoy what is here.” and I think that will happen.

Q: Can the valley's infra-structure handle that potential growth?

A: One of the things we have to do in this process, and we’re starting that now, is to look at an industrial park. We go back to the old saying, “if you build it, they’ll come,” and I think that’s very true.

But it is also putting a tremendous strain on the infrastructure. As time goes on, that strain will become more and more evident. And one of the other things besides the infrastructure is affordable housing. Certainly as you saw Sun Valley and Mccall grow, you will see the same thing here. It is happening here now, and what happens is, the people who are on the lower level of the income scale can’t afford to live here. So we’ve been working through the Economic Development Corporation for nearly two years now, trying to find some combination that we might bring in, to bring affordable housing here.

It’s a tough fight with the funding being cut back. But those are our priorities: find affordable housing, get the infrastructure in place, and make room for an industrial park for people to come in here that have small businesses and a place for them to go.

Q: It doesn’t seem like it’s a hard sell to convince people this is a great place to live.

A: I don’t think it’s a hard sell to convince people it’s a great place to live. I qualify that to some extent, when you get into larger corporations. They tend to want to live in the larger cities. It’s nearly an hour from here to the airport. I think there are some people who look at it and say we really need to be in a denser population to make sure that all the people we bring in with the higher degrees might be more happy.

There’s no doubt that what we have here, this is a terrific place to live. It’s a great place to raise children. Certainly our crime rates and so on are much better. We have good schools here, a brand new hospital in Kellogg, which serves the Silver Valley. We now have a branch of North Idaho College in the Silver Valley, which I think will be a great thing for us. So all that stuff builds wealth, and somewhere along the line, the people will come in and see that this is a great place to live and move forward.

Q: I’ve heard the valley might get a Wal-Mart soon?

A: Wal-mart has taken an option on a piece of land down by Smelterville. My personal feeling right now is that I think they are premature, and certainly that’s typical of a Wal-mart. They want to get in and get their foothold before things happen. But I think we’re still 3 to 5 years out before this builds up.

Jerry Andres from Eagle Crest has made the comment that probably a few years from now, you’ll see 9,000 more people in the valley as a result of their expansion. But all of those people aren’t going to live here at one time. At one time the population in this valley was over 21,000 people. It’s now down to 13,000. So we’ve got a long ways to go before we ever get back to that, but certainly at some point in time the Wal-mart’s of the world will look at this area. I just think it’s a little premature.

Q: Haven't the land values in this area started to climb?

A: Even in the last year, prices of homes here have doubled and tripled. The land prices have gone completely out of whack. Not in relation to the rest of the world, don’t get me wrong. But when you have lived in this valley through the bad times that we’ve lived through, we didn’t realize that there were people out there who had money. I mean, real money.

And so when they come in here and spend half a million dollars for some land, you think that is a big deal. That’s nothing. That’s a little lot in most towns. People here weren’t used to that type of thing. And now when you get people coming in here from Hawaii and all over the country with 8, 10, 12 million dollars and start spending the money, people look at you and say, how did they get that kind of money? Well, there are people who make lots of money.

Q: What does EPA and the expansion of the Superfund site do for economic development?

A: Those that are in favor of it say, well, if it’s cleaned up, it makes it better and so on and so forth. But my own personal feelings are all of these mountains that surround us right now are full of lead and zinc and silver, but primarily lead and zinc. And as it flows off of those mountains, it comes into one place. It comes into the stream down here. So over the years, as it oxidizes and so on, it comes into there.

The background of this river, in their infinite wisdom, the EPA and the DEQ gave it a background count of lead and zinc and so on. But they don’t really know what that count is. And so they went up to the top of the mountain somewhere and said, “let’s take a stream up here, and that’s probably the background count.” Does that make sense if you go up to the top of the mountain when everything is coming down here, that that is the count? That’s not right.

And when you look at the valley now, our blood levels here are certainly no different than they are anywhere else in the country. And part of that may be due to mediation. But the other part of that is, if you look at the curves in the United States and look at the blood leads, as they took the lead out of gasoline, and you see those drops, they’re almost the same as they are here in the valley.

So, did the mediation do it? Or did taking the lead out of gasoline do it? When they got into saying, you know, you’ve got to repaint these houses that have lead based paints. No one can really get their fingers on it. In the fifty some years that I’ve been a pharmacist here, I’ve never seen a leaded child. I’ve seen a couple of men who were leaded when they were working in the lead smelter and they were taken out of the lead smelter, naturally. But I’ve never seen a child that was leaded in this valley. So it’s very difficult for me.

I think a lot of this has been way, way overblown and hopefully it will get past us one of these days so we can get on with our lives here without Superfund stigma. But certainly expanding this over onto the North fork of the Coeur d’Alene River is crazy. It’s absolutely crazy.

Q: So how should tourists, who know nothing of the history of this area, view the possibility of getting lead poisoning?

A: Well, I think they should view it as a very pristine, beautiful part of the country, a great place to live and it doesn’t pose a health risk. It’s like your mother told you when you were little, if you’re outside playing in the mud and you came in, what did she tell you to do? Wash your hands, right? Well, I’m going to tell you, if you wash your hands, you are probably never going to have any trouble.

But the other part of that is, you couldn’t eat enough lead here, because this isn’t soluble lead. What came out of that stack at one time with the blow-out, that was lead oxide; and yes, that’s soluble. But the lead that is here is not soluble; and so what is it going to do to you? You couldn’t eat enough lead. You don’t have a big enough possibility of eating that many tons.

So to your friends who would come here, I would say, if you have some fears about it, wash your hands before you eat, and you’ll never have any problems, because you aren’t going to inhale it, you aren’t going to eat tons of it. So just be a little cautious, if you’re really scared about it.

I live here. I don’t pay any attention to it, and I never have; and I’m 74 years old.