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VAIL — This go-around there were no walkouts or demands to be heard about the proposed Rosemont Copper Mine.

For Saturday's forum at Cienega High School on the proposed mine, the crowd kept the peace and played by the rules, which was a step up from a few weeks ago when U.S. Forest Service officials walked out of a similar forum after it dissolved into chaos.

But just because things were copacetic doesn't mean anything has changed. Almost all of the several hundred people who attended the meeting were against the proposed mine.

Rosemont Copper wants to develop an open-pit copper mine on a combination of public and private land in the Santa Rita Mountains, southeast of Tucson.

But a coalition of environmental and community groups has rallied against the plan, and Saturday afternoon they manned booths outside the forum.

Volunteers armed themselves with handouts and a PowerPoint presentation showing their interpretation of how the pit will look nestled into the heart of the Santa Ritas.

For the most part, though, the volunteers were preaching to the choir. "I'm against it, that's for sure," said Dieter Schaefer, a resident of Green Valley. "I love the Santa Ritas. I love to hike there. I don't want to look at another copper mine."

"I'm generally opposed to drilling a mine in a location like this," said Steven Rooke, of Vail. "It's pristine national Forest Service terrain."

The Forest Service has plans for two additional open houses and will follow those with three meetings across Southern Arizona. The agency will then take the public comments to shape an environmental impact statement, which will probably take at least a year.

Chief among the public concerns is water use. The mine's plans call for 100,000 acre-feet of water over the next 20 years. But there are also concerns about traffic, environmental contamination, dust, noise and destruction of a pristine environment.

"There are a lot of pretty places," said Jamie Sturgess, vice president for Rosemont Copper. "But there are only 14 other places in the country that have this much copper."

Copper is in demand, Stur-gess said, and it has to come from somewhere. To ease concerns of those who live near the proposed mine site, Sturgess said he is willing to give tours.

And the mine is designed in a way to shield it largely from the view of nearby residents. As for water, he said the company plans to pipe in 105,000 acre-feet over the 20 years. And he highlighted the potential for jobs.

"My take is that people fear change," he said. "What people are afraid of, most of the people are afraid we are gong to build a new mine that looks like it was from 50 years ago."

He bristled at the statement that nearly everyone at the forum was against the mine. That wasn't so, he said, and to prove his point he called over Karl Weiss, a Tucson resident, who said he supports the jobs.

Weiss referred to the crowd as a mixture of "yuppies," "college kids" and "senior citizens" who have time to come to such a forum. Anyone working, and presumably supporting the mine, would be with their family, he said.

He then acknowledged that he was biased for the mine because he works for the firm. "I do some work as a consultant for Rosemont," he said. "Obviously, I have a vested interest in seeing the mine go in."