Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 23, 1994 TAG: 9407290050
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Big mining companies are buying up mineral-laden real estate - and giving the shaft to the American taxpayer. At giveaway prices of from $2.50 to $5 per acre, the hardrock-mining industry is gobbling up or gaining mineral rights on huge chunks of taxpayer-owned land, and paying no royalties on the ore extracted from beneath it. The companies are not subject to federal environmental regulations, nor necessarily held accountable for cleaning up the damage caused by modern mining's use of toxic chemicals.
It's a scandal. But it's legal under provisions of the General Mining Law of 1872. That's right, 1872.
The prices set in this antique law were below-market even then, designed to encourage settlement of empty areas of the West in the days of pick-and-shovel mining. Today, after decades of inflation and long after the industrialization of mining, those prices are an outrage.
The original law was written before much was known about environmental protection and before deadly chemicals such as cyanide were used to extract minerals from the earth. Today, when some 47 hardrock mines are Superfund clean-up sites, the requirement that only weaker state environmental laws need be followed - on what is or had been federal land - is ridiculous.
The lack of provision for royalties may have made sense when the point was to get settlers into the West. Today, when other industries such as coal and oil routinely pay royalties on what they extract from public lands, it is indefensible.
In short, the General Mining Law of 1872 as it works today adds up to a kind of socialism whereby the public treasury is raided so a certain category of the rich can be made richer, and a favored industry can remain favored. It has become a welfare program for the wealthy.
This is a bizarre sort of national industrial policy. Even the most ardent advocates of such governmental intervention should shudder at a policy that favors exactly the wrong kind of industry - the extraction of raw resources, often by foreign companies, rather than high-value-added enterprises.
The Clinton administration has been trying to halt the hemorrhage of treasures from the treasury. It has deferred approval of claims filed, at 1872's bargain-basement prices, for mineral rights to or outright purchase of public lands. It has pushed for updating the law. But the administration and its point man on the issue, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, are being stymied by the courts and Congress.
Or, more precisely, by the courts because of Congress' failure to act. So long as the 1872 statute is in force, the courts may have little choice but to order the administration to follow its provisions and award the claims. The real shame falls on Congress.
The House has passed a good bill sponsored by Democrat Nick Rahall of West Virginia. But progress has been stalled in the Senate by a filibuster threat from Western senators, many of them self-proclaimed conservatives, with mining interests in their states.
Requiring commercial interests to pay market prices for the use or purchase of public assets is neither a liberal nor a conservative proposition. It is simply the businesslike way of managing resources on their owners' - that is, taxpayers' - behalf.
The Senate should get on with business. Invoke cloture on the would-be filibusterers, and pass the Rahall bill.
by CNB