St. Louis attorney Al Watkins spent Wednesday afternoon alternately listening to, getting yelled at by, and, after a few hours of dialogue, finding some common ground with, dozens of residents of Fredericktown, a small city in the foothills of the St. Francois Mountains, an hour and half south of St. Louis.
Watkins’ mission was to try to convince the people of Fredericktown that they ought to let Critical Mineral Recovery rebuild in the area after its lithium-ion battery recycling plant burned down last month just outside of town. But in order for him to make that case, he first had to absorb the frustrations of the 60 or so townspeople who showed up.
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One woman made it plain to Watkins and his colleagues that, “You are not welcome to come back to this community.” She accused the company of endangering the lives of school children, whose classroom was only a mile from the fire, all for the sake of “75 jobs.”
Another particularly vocal man told Watkins the town wasn’t interested in “Joe Biden’s battery plant.”
“We don’t really want you here,” he said.
Critical Mineral Recovery launched its operation just outside Fredericktown a little over a year ago to great fanfare from city officials and other leaders in Madison County. They held a launch party replete with a concert and a tour of their 225,000-square-foot facility. CMR’s business is to take in used lithium-ion batteries and extract the valuable minerals. The business could boom as early generations of electric vehicles, which use lithium-ion batteries weighing around 1,000 pounds each, reach the end of their lives.
Then, October 30, the plant caught fire. Watkins said that the $8 million fire suppression system turned into “a fire acceleration system.” He added, “No matter how much you pay for these bells and whistles, if they don’t go off, they’re worthless.”
A subsequent lawsuit filed against the company by several residents alleges that the fire may have released a slew of potentially hazardous chemicals found in lithium batteries, including hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen cyanide, among others, even as a middle school sits a mile down the road from the facility. Fortunately, as Watkins put it, “The wind gods were with us that day,” and the smoke blew in the other direction. But others weren’t so lucky and had to evacuate their homes. Thousands of fish turned up dead in a nearby river.
Wednesday’s meeting at the Follis & Sons Banquet Hall, right next to the Follis & Sons funeral home, was the first of its kind since the blaze three weeks prior. It was supposed to have been a private meeting between Watkins and a handful of town officials, but the email invitation leaked online and upset masses came in droves. Watkins made the game-time decision to open it to everyone, which he said afterward had been the right call. Throughout the back and forth, trays of sandwiches and desserts—more than enough for the invitees, but not quite enough for all who arrived—sat awkwardly in the background.
For all the alarmism about “Joe Biden’s battery plant,” there was plenty of legitimate concern and reason to be wary about CMR rebuilding in the area, as they plan to do, with an even bigger presence than before.
The expansion of CMR is one of the reasons that the meeting on Wednesday had an outsized importance. There is a very real chance that Missouri could carve out a perch for itself at the top of the supply chain connected to the burgeoning electric vehicle industry. However, that will be made more complicated if people in Fredericktown and the surrounding areas emphatically want nothing to do with it.
Fredericktown’s history with mining dates back centuries, and the city of about 4,000 is basically sitting right on top (or, to be strictly accurate, right next to) one of the few spots in the continental U.S. with significant reserves of both cobalt and lithium.
Adding to the stakes is the fact that CMR is now more than just CMR. Last week, the company announced that it, along with three South Korean companies that process magnets used in lithium-ion batteries, had been acquired by a special purpose acquisition company, the publicly traded Evolution Metals. Pending the deal’s final approval by the SEC, the new entity is going to move its corporate headquarters to St. Louis. (As Watkins points out, it’s a big deal to have a publicly traded company move into town.) In addition to the 60 executive jobs in St. Louis, Evolution Metals will hire about 450 employees in Fredericktown as they scale up Missouri operations in the next three years.
All of that is in addition to U.S. Strategic Metals, the other multi-hundred-million dollar concern in the EV supply chain space in Madison County. They have invested more than a quarter-billion dollars into setting up a cobalt and lithium mine and processing facility, just south of Fredericktown’s city limits. Its first operations are set to go online in 2026. “You’re going to see a potentially billion-dollar enterprise in Fredericktown, Missouri,” Darren Chapman, the company’s deputy commercial director, told SLM earlier this month.
It’s unclear exactly what power the people of Fredericktown would have to stop any of this, or if a majority of them even want to. As Madison County Commissioner Larry Kemp told SLM after Wednesday’s meeting, the area outside Fredericktown essentially has no building code. Someone builds something and then “hopefully” the assessor finds it.
But, as Fredericktown Mayor Travis Parker said, “You can’t find 400 employees to pick up and move [to small-town Missouri], so they have to have the support. If the community doesn’t support it, they’re not going to have a business.” Parker, it’s worth noting, seemed sympathetic to giving CMR a second chance.
As the meeting progressed, the real fault line in the room revealed itself to be not the townspeople versus Watkins and CMR, but the citizens of Fredericktown versus themselves.
Parker said that people had threatened to put dead fish on his front porch after he’d posted on social media that the town’s water supply, which is separate from the fish kill site, was safe. “I’ll go pour a glass of tap water right now,” he said.
Fredericktown realtor Gabe Swinford, who sold CMR the land where their facility burned down, said that he and his family had been “torn apart” on social media.
“Nobody in here can tell me that I wanted this to happen, or anybody else wanted this to happen, or knew it was going to happen, or, ‘Some no good son of a bitch was getting money from it,’” Swinford said. “That’s bullshit. Everybody in here that had any say … only had the best of our community in mind.”
Watkins insisted to the meeting’s attendees that CMR, too, has the community’s best interest in mind. He acknowledged that building the facility so close to a school may have been a mistake, one that doesn’t need to be repeated again. He acknowledged that trust had been broken with many in the town before it had fully been established.
But just after the fire, Watkins tells SLM, the company’s CEO, Rob Feldman, had learned that people displaced by the fire were staying in hotels, going without vehicles and rides to doctor’s appointments.
“It’s a Saturday. Banks aren’t open. Rob comes over, raids my petty cash pay,” said Watkins. “Literally he, himself, without fanfare and no media, he drove down there and gave a shit-ton of cash to the sheriff.” Watkins says he told her to dole it out to people who needed immediate expenses covered. “We want receipts, but there’s no release, there’s no there’s no agreement to repay. It’s not a loan. We just want to be able to account for it,” Watkins said.
Asked yesterday how he felt the meeting had gone on Wednesday, Watkins said, “It started out a bit rough. And it evolved. By the end of it, I think temperatures had dropped significantly.”
I was last in Fredericktown two and a half years ago. The downtown looked, if not hollowed out, then well on its way to it. As I noted then, you couldn’t walk more than a few feet without spotting a missing persons poster. A pair of business owners said they’d been robbed multiple times. They said meth was a scourge.
The downtown looks a bit better now, though it’s hard to know how much of that is due to small town main streets improving the further we get from the pandemic and how much has to do with job creation thanks to the burgeoning EV-related boom.
The residents who packed the meeting on Wednesday seemed all too aware that their town had first boomed along with the lead mine, but when lead lost its value, the prosperity it had created didn’t stick around.
As one attendee put it: “Back in the day when the mines came in, oh, it was a free for all. Everybody has good jobs and everybody’s making money. And now? Nope, well, we all got lead poisoning.”
It’s that legacy that Watkins, CMR and a potentially billion-dollar industry may really be contending with, more than smoke from any fire.
