Mine reform burdensome, attorney says

A Salt Lake attorney was among those who testified at a U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday morning on proposed legislation that would reform a 127-year-old law governing the nation's mining industry.

Jim Butler, from the law firm of Parsons Behle & Latimer, told committee members that a provision in a Senate bill that would impose additional requirements on mineral exploration would be overly burdensome and without environmental benefit.

As it stands now, mineral-exploration efforts on areas 5 acres or less are subjected to a "notice" process with the Bureau of Land Management that is much less time-consuming than the more comprehensive permitting requirements.

Exploration efforts on that small of a scale still have to be accompanied by a reclamation plan and a cost estimate to conduct that cleanup and cannot be done on environmentally sensitive lands, he said.

Ramping up the process would overwhelm BLM regulatory workers with paperwork "tenfold," he said.

That provision is one of many reform efforts contained in a pair of bills heard Tuesday in the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources.

SB796 and SB140 seek to exact royalties from the hard-rock-mining industry on federal lands and include provisions to ensure that cleanup of the environmental damage left in the wake of mining isn't paid for out of the taxpayers' wallets.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told committee members that reform is long overdue.

"While the responsible development of our mineral resources is critical to both our economy and our environment, this statute has not been updated in 137 years. In those years, much has changed … It is time to ensure a fair return to the public for mining activities that occur on public lands and to address the cleanup of abandoned mines."

Salazar said the trick to reform is to strike a balance between keeping hard-rock-mining industries as strong players in the U.S. economy and protecting the environment.

According to the Department of Interior, the U.S. gold-mining industry alone directly or indirectly creates 66,000 jobs and nearly $2 billion in earnings annually. The United States is the second-largest producer of gold and copper in the world and the leading producer of beryllium, gypsum, and molybdenum.

Still, Salazar said, some of the environmental impacts of mining have been widespread, with an estimated 40 percent of the headwaters in Western states impacted by mines.

"There is a fact of life in the West that we have mines that have continued to degrade the environment with the discharge of heavy metals and acids into streams."

The committee meeting also included testimony from the environmental conservation group EARTHWORKS — which advocated an outright ban on hard-rock mining on public lands — and a representative from the National Mining Association, who said levying additional royalties on the industry would be financially devastating.

e-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com