The City of Yellowknife wants to be compensated for land at the Giant Mine site that will not or cannot be cleaned up, Mayor Gordon Van Tighem said Wednesday.

The defunct gold mine, which produced more than seven million ounces of gold from 1948 to 1999, sits within the N.W.T. capital's boundaries.

The federal Indian and Northern Affairs Department is responsible for cleaning up the remaining contamination on the property.

It has a $300-million remediation plan that would involve bringing the site up to industrially acceptable standards.

But that isn't enough for the city, which wants the land to be clean enough for homes to be built on it some day.

Otherwise, the city would lose money, Van Tighem said Wednesday at hearings being held on the Giant Mine cleanup plan.

"As you will be aware, at the municipal level of government, our main revenue source is property taxes, which means the property has to be developable," Van Tighem said at the hearing.

"Removal of that land quantum would indicate a significant reduction of our available future income."

Van Tighem said that if the government won't do a more thorough cleanup, the city will need money to do its own work to bring the land up to residential standards.

The other option, he said, would be to change Yellowknife city boundaries to exclude the Giant Mine site.

The Yellowknives Dene say they also want compensation for any hunting and berry-picking grounds it would not have access to if the Giant Mine site cannot be fully restored.

No 'magic bullet' for toxic arsenic dust: engineer

The Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board has been holding hearings into the federal government's remediation plan in order to give residents a chance to voice their concerns.

One of the biggest issues that has surfaced is how best to handle 237,000 tonnes of poisonous arsenic trioxide dust left over from 50 years of gold production.

The arsenic trioxide dust is currently stored in chambers underground, and the federal plan is to keep the dust frozen and sealed underground.

But some questioned that plan at the hearings Tuesday, despite nearly a decade of work by experts to come up with a solution that works for everyone.

"We looked long and hard for a magic bullet that would make the problem go away, because we knew that would be very attractive to all the stakeholders," said engineer Daryl Hockley, who is a senior technical advisor on the arsenic cleanup portion of the Giant Mine remediation plan.

"There wasn't any eight years ago, there wasn't any five years ago, and there aren't any now."

The Mackenzie Valley Impact Review Board must decide how much of Ottawa's plan requires a more comprehensive assessment. Its hearings end Thursday.