Permitting in Montana just got a shared clock. An agreement announced on October 28 by Governor Greg Gianforte and the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council puts Montana's state reviews and the federal reviews for participating projects on the same track, in public — the kind of structural change that reaches every mine proposal in the state, not just one company.
- The agreement: Montana will coordinate state and federal permitting reviews under the FAST-41 framework, with the aim of completing them at the same time rather than in sequence.
- The count: Montana is the 11th state to enter into such an agreement, according to Falcon Copper's October 29 Business Wire release welcoming it.
- The transparency piece: state permitting actions will be tracked alongside federal actions on the Federal Permitting Dashboard, so milestones, target dates and progress are visible in one place.
- What does not change: applicable environmental requirements and public participation procedures are unchanged, and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) continues to review and decide applications under Montana law. Each agency keeps its decision-making authority.
- A live example: Falcon Copper's proposed expansion of its Blue Copper exploration project near Avon, in Powell and Lewis and Clark Counties, is under review by the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and Montana DEQ, and is already listed on the Federal Permitting Dashboard as a FAST-41 Transparency Project.
- The signing setting: Gianforte signed the memorandum of understanding during a visit this week to Contact Mining in Philipsburg, a tungsten-focused processing facility built in 1981, idled for eight years and restarted last year to process material for mining operators across the state — a visit welcomed publicly by Matt Vincent, Executive Director of the Montana Mining Association.
Coordination is not a shortcut — and the participants say so
Falcon Copper President and CEO Ryan Moss made the distinction the agreement itself makes: "Montana has strong water, reclamation and public participation laws, and Falcon Copper's work must meet those requirements. This agreement changes none of that. What it adds is better coordination and transparency, so Montanans can see where each review stands and track progress."
That framing matters for how to read the news. FAST-41 coordination attacks the sequential, opaque part of permitting — agencies waiting on each other, timelines no one outside the process can see — not the substantive standards a project must meet. For explorers, developers and the communities next to them, a single public dashboard with target dates is a predictability gain whether a given review ends in approval or denial.
Falcon's Montana team has worked in the Avon area since 2022, and founder and Executive Chairman Travis Naugle — who says his family lives in the area — committed the company to continuing to show up in person for neighbours and Powell County officials as the Blue Copper reviews proceed.
The honesty box
Participation in FAST-41 does not constitute project approval and does not guarantee a particular permitting timetable or outcome — Falcon's own release says so in its forward-looking statements, and the expanded Blue Copper program remains subject to all required state and federal reviews and approvals. Coordination can reduce avoidable delay; it cannot promise that reviews finish on the dashboard's target dates, and approvals may still be delayed, conditioned or denied. One count note: local coverage of the signing described Montana as one of 10 states signed on, while Falcon's release says the 11th state — this post uses the Business Wire release's figure as its primary source and flags the difference rather than blending the two.
What to watch
Which Montana projects beyond Blue Copper take up coordinated review and appear on the Federal Permitting Dashboard, whether state and federal milestones actually converge on shared target dates in practice, and how DEQ runs its side of the first coordinated reviews.