Bush Aides to Reverse New Rules on Mining

The Department of the Interior will issue new mining regulations today that will reverse some Clinton-era provisions but keep a requirement that mining operators post bonds to guarantee they will clean up after themselves, senior department officials said.

Among provisions being removed is one giving the Interior secretary authority to prohibit new mine sites on federal land where they could cause lasting harm to communities and the environment, the officials said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 264 million acres of federal land, mostly in 12 Western states, planned to announce the regulations today. They are to be published as a final rule Tuesday, taking effect 60 days later.

Separately, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton intends to ask Congress to join with the Bush administration in an effort to overhaul mining laws dating to 1872, the officials said.

And the department’s top-ranking attorney, Bill Myers, is reversing a legal opinion issued under former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to block Glamis Gold Ltd. of Reno, Nev., from putting an open-pit mine near Indian cultural and religious sites, the officials said.

Babbitt had said the sites, which are sacred to the Quechan tribe, would be irreparably harmed by opening the mine on 1,571 acres of BLM property about 45 miles northwest of El Centro, Calif.

According to industry officials, 120 well-paying jobs and 1.1 million ounces of gold worth about $300 million are at stake.

Myers’ new opinion says the legal basis for blocking the mine was flawed and could enable the mining proposal to be revived, a senior Interior official said.

Interior officials are making changes to mining regulations that went into effect on President Clinton’s last day in office but stem from hearings and discussions since the first Bush administration in 1991. The regulations, put in place over industry objections, apply to miners of hard-rock minerals, mostly gold, silver and copper in the United States.

Before Clinton’s regulations, mining on public lands was governed by a weaker set of laws approved by the Interior Department in 1980. In March, President Bush’s BLM proposed suspending Clinton’s regulations interpreting the Federal Land Policy and Management Act passed by Congress in 1976.

But the Bush administration is keeping two standards regulating the use of cyanide in leaching gold from ore and in controlling the acid that drains from rocks exposed to air and water. It also is retaining the new reclamation bond aimed at ensuring that miners, rather than taxpayers, pick up the tab.

The bond requires all mining operations, large and small, to prove they will be able to pay for damages once a mine is closed by putting up bonds, before opening a mine, that must be equal to 100% of the estimated cleanup cost.

A spokesman for the National Mining Assn., a trade group, said doing away with the Interior secretary’s ability to veto a proposed mining project doesn’t mean the government will be unable to deny a mining permit. “What it means is a company won’t spend a lot of money and then be told they can’t open a mine,” spokesman John Grasser said.

But environmentalists said the new regulations gut most meaningful protections and diminish the benefits of financial protections, such as the bonding requirement.