The public meeting and open house on the Dome Road relocation and future housing lots was exactly that, and it did not meet with the approval of the most vociferous members of the two dozen citizens who arrived to attend the meeting at the Downtown Hotel.

They had paraded a bit outside with signs expressing their displeasure over the deal that has been reached to relocate the Dome Road and allow Slinky Mines to search for gold under the old road bed.

Inside they were even more upset to learn that the deal had been inked and signed back on May 14 and that negotiations had been quietly going on among the three parties to the agreement for about 18 months.

A one and a half page handout summarized the negotiated settlement that will see the Yukon government assume the cost and responsibility for relocating the Dome Road to improve it, over a one-kilometre stretch that happens to coincide with the boundaries of the bench which contains the claims that are owned by the Slinky Mine's Carey family.

Energy, Mines and Resources manager Bryony McIntyre summarized the government's position, saying that this agreement was first and foremost about closing out the claims on that bench off to the west of the Dome Road so that the area could be developed for country residential lots.

Carey had a right to mine claims that he had owned prior to the town's boundary expansion in the 1990s, she said, but both the town and the territory had identified that bench as being a prime candidate for lot development. McIntyre's position was that the government was assisting both the town and the miner by undertaking the $1.3 million project to realign the road at this time.

The government plans to have the road realignment completed by late in the fall season this year. While this will improve the safety of the road by rounding out a very sharp curve just below the Slinky bench, McIntyre said the safety issues were secondary to freeing up the bench for lot development.

Once the new Dome Road section is completed, Darrell Carey will be free to push his mining activity under and through the old road, and will be given until the end of December 2017 to finish all his mining in that particular area, then abandoning the claims.

Where this gets tricky is that Carey will still retain rights to fractions of claims on the east side of the new road, and a number of people in the audience wanted to know why that kind of sloppy detail hadn't been ironed out during the bargaining.

Mayor Wayne Potoroka, along with councillors Bill Kendrick and Stephen Johnson, were united in saying that they felt they had managed to get the best deal they could for the town, which has been dealing with this issue for most of the current century. They did indicate that they weren't especially satisfied with some of the outcomes – would have preferred to extinguish more of the Carey claims; were not happy that the miner was to be allowed to get free of the

penalties that had been assigned him by the Yukon courts after he broke a number of city bylaws over the last several years, going back through two council terms.

Early in the meeting, protesters, who had hoped that this would be more than an information session, got up and left when it became clear that nothing in the signed deal was up for alteration. Jim Taggart put it that there was no point in being there if this was not a consultation, and departed with several people.

While others were not as strident, there were still plenty of concerns expressed.

MLA Sandy Silver wanted to know how the $1.3 million figure had been arrived at, but the answer that it was a political decision handed down to the departments to actualize didn't tell him any more than he had been able to learn in legislative debates.

Glenda Bolt, whose property is adjacent to the existing mining claims, above them on the Mary McLeod Road, said that this was a Band-Aid solution which would not really create the end point that both the city and the territory were saying it would. Until this was dealt with as a broader issue, she said, it was going to keep coming back.

Bill Holmes was particularly dissatisfied that the solution at hand encompassed only a small portion of the problem that exists because of mining claims being grandfathered within the town's boundaries. While he understood that the $1.3 million was going to benefit the town's future development, and was not simply a Slinky Mine subsidy, he felt that Carey could surely have been persuaded to give a bit more for the deal he was getting, had the government been willing to push harder.

Councillor Stephen Johnson felt that this was not a 100 per cent solution; but that it was in the 80 to 90 per cent range given the constraints the town had faced in dealing with the other two parties.

Miner Mark Favron was in favour of the agreement in that it would get Carey into mining out his claim and get him out of the area as quickly as possible.

Other topics which may need more clarification according to the discussion are the provision of pedestrian pathways along that section of the road, and the pros and cons of realigning the junction of the Dome and Mary McLeod Roads.

Both subjects were batted around but it seems that further discussions will be held at the administrative level.