WASHINGTON, D.C. – Lawmakers on Wednesday questioned a federal agency’s commitment to work with the mining industry during a hearing by the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources.
The hearing was on the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation Enforcement’s proposed 2017 budget and its impact on private-sector job creation, deficit reduction and domestic energy production.
Committee Chairman Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, said the agency was pursuing a “war on coal” with its recently announced stream-protection rule and several legislative recommendations in its budget proposal that would reallocate federal funding.
“One such proposal reallocates $1 billion to a community reinvestment program from its intended purpose of addressing abandoned mine lands, or AML sites, that pose the most serious threats to human health and safety,” Lamborn said. “Essentially, this proposal takes money that would protect people and communities away from hazardous AML sites.”
The stream-protection rule, announced earlier this year, has earned the ire of Republicans for what they perceive as a rewrite of coal regulations and their impact on the surrounding environment without any public or industry input.
Lamborn likened the agency’s legislative proposal to a “buy off” of workers impacted by what he called the agency’s federal overreach, saying that the proposal took remediation funding and invested it in unnecessary economic programs.
“If OSMRE really cared about economic development, they would stop pushing job-killing regulations, like the stream-protection rule, and let these hardworking Americans get back to what they’re good at – providing our nation with the energy that made it a world power,” Lamborn said.
But Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia, the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, said the rule was “a major step on this long and arduous road to provide better protection to people and the environment around mountain-top coal mines.”
The 2017 budget request from the surface mining office totals $157.9 million in discretionary spending, down from the 2016 level of $240.6 million that included $90 million in one-time grants for Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to undertake reclamation projects. The proposed budget also includes an estimated $914.4 million in mandatory funding.
Lamborn criticized the proposed budget’s legislative recommendation to expand the agency’s abandoned mine lands reclamation activities to abandoned hard-rock mines.
“OSMRE’s proposed budget would terminate payments to certified states and tribes, raise AML fees on coal production and expands OSMRE’s abandoned mine land’s activity to hard-rock mining,” Lamborn said.
In his submitted testimony to the committee, agency Director Joseph Pizarchik discussed a legislative proposal in the 2017 budget that would expand the abandoned mined land’s reclamation program from coal mining to hard-rock mining sites.
Abandoned hard-rock mines, especially numerous in the West, do not have a dedicated fund to remediate sites on public lands.
“The coal industry should not be paying to clean up the abandoned mine problems created by the hard-rock mining industry,” Pizarchik said.
egraham@durangoherald.com. Edward Graham is a student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald.
