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Borough Mayor Dave Carey says he wants to extend PacRim Coal LLP's lease-option on Ladd Landing for another five years.

While no ordinance to achieve that has yet been written, Carey said in an interview Tuesday that discussions with the borough's legal department and others lead him to believe a new agreement between PacRim and the borough is warranted.

Many of the provisions of the existing agreement, first signed in 1987 and extended several times, are no longer appropriate, Carey said.

"Twenty years ago there were different priorities," he said.

PacRim is assessing the viability of a huge strip coal mine project called Chuitna in the Beluga Coal Fields on the Upper Cook Inlet's west side. The company holds a lease on 20,571 acres northwest of Tyonek thought to contain an estimated 1 billion tons of ultra-low sulfur, sub-bituminous coal, which PacRim hopes to mine of the course of several decades.

The borough's connection to the project involves Ladd Landing, a borough-owned parcel on the west side of the inlet at which PacRim would build docking facilities for transshipments of coal, likely to Asia. It is the option to lease that site that PacRim and its predecessors have held since 1987.

State and federal permits are still at least two to three years out, perhaps longer, before PacRim could be ready to begin mining operations, Carey noted -- plenty of time to rewrite a new lease-option agreement.

"We want to provide time for input from citizens and to look more closely at the ramifications of an agreement as it now stands," he said. "So, I want to set it on the back burner."

The current lease-option is due to expire in April. A provision in the document requires PacRim to notify the borough of its intent to exercise its option at least 90 days prior to taking that action. To beat the deadline, PacRim would have had to make that announcement by Jan. 9.

Prospects for the borough and PacRim penning a new agreement by that date were considered dim late last month when the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly agreed to a one-time waiver of 90-day notification provision, giving PacRim and the borough at least until early April to negotiate a new agreement.

Carey's decision to pursue a new 5-year extension of the current agreement would allow sufficient time for the borough to fully explore all its options without the hammer of an arbitrary deadline hanging over deliberations.

The current agreement was "pretty nice" to PacRim, Carey said.

It needs, he added, "comprehensive enforcement provisions" for any state and federal permits attached to the mine project.

While the borough has no direct authority over those permitting decisions, Carey said he believes the borough could be part of the discussion, and he said he hoped to see that permit enforcement "would be a high priority."

The Ladd Landing area is close to commercial and subsistence fishing areas, and the prospect of a major mine in the region and a facility at Ladd Landing has led to concerted efforts by several groups to oppose the mine.

Bob Shavelson, head of Cook Inletkeeper, noted that changes to the Alaska Coastal Zone Management Program coming out of Gov. Frank Murkowski's administration left the borough without a substantial voice in permitting decisions. Murkowski began pushing amendments to the Alaska CZMP in 2003. By late 2005, the Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management had acquiesced to state demands.

The borough might have maintained a greater voice had it protested, but "threw all that away" when they agreed to the coastal management program changes, Shavelson said.

Hal Spence can be reached at hspence@ptialaska.net.