1872 Mining Law
The outdated 1872 Mining Law subsidizes mining companies in several
ways: 1) mining companies have been able to extract billions of dollars of
minerals from publicly owned lands without paying a dime in royalties; 2)
mining companies can buy public land containing billions of dollars in
minerals for $2.50 to $5.00 an acre; 3) mining operations have abandoned
more than half a million mine sites, leaving the cleanup tab for
taxpayers.
Although little progress has been made in reforming this archaic law,
in 1997 the Solicitor General for the Department of the Interior announced
he would enforce a provision of the law limiting the area of land that
mining companies can take for outrage ously low prices for the dumping of
toxic mining wastes. In March of 1999, for the first time in decades, the
Interior Department denied a mine proposal for exceeding the waste dumping
limit. Subsequent to this, there were two attempts to overturn the waste
dumping limit. On the fiscal year 1999 Emergency Supplemental bill (S.
544) Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) attached a legislative rider that allowed
the mine to go forward.
During the Senate consideration of the fiscal year 2000 Interior
Appropriations bill (H.R. 2466), Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) attached
another rider in an attempt to overturn the waste dumping limit. Craig's
rider would have weakened the 1872 Mining Law by allowing all recent and
future mines to have access to unlimited amounts of public land at
outrageously low prices for the dumping of toxic wastes.
In response to the Craig rider, Senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Richard
Durbin (D-IL) and John Kerry (D-MA) offered an amendment to strip the
Craig rider out of the bill. This amendment failed on a vote of 55 to 41.
However, Representatives Nick Rahall (D-WV), Chris Shays (R-CT) and Jay
Inslee (D-WA) led an effort in the House of Representatives to oppose the
Craig rider. They passed an amendment to the House version of the fiscal
year 2000 Interior Appropriations bill on a bipartisan vote of 273 to 151.
During the final negotiations for the bill, the Craig rider was altered
to exempt from the law all existing mines and all mines proposed by
November 1997. President Clinton signed the modified rider into law. While
an improvement over the existing law, this rider will mean that thousands
more acres of public land will be given to the mining industry at low
prices, while taxpayers bear the burden of cleaning up more toxic mining
wastes.