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Editorials on Pombo's Amendment Great Falls Tribune Editorial Nov 22, 2005 Conferees should block Pombo bill's land sale It's now up to a committee of senators and representatives to block a measure that would allow hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of acres of public federal land to pass into private ownership. That's because an old joker, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. —the guy who last month proposed selling off almost a fourth of the national park system to balance the budget, then laughed it off as a joke—has really pulled one off this time. Tucked into the huge Deficit Reduction Act of 2005—the one the House passed by two votes in the wee hours last Friday—was Pombo's measure to lift the 11-year moratorium on passing mining claims on public land into private ownership, a process called "patenting. " Further, the measure would separate patenting a claim from the 133-year-old requirement that the claim contain profitably minable minerals. In other words, the fear is that it could turn the 1872 mining act into a vehicle for real estate development—which wouldn't be too surprising, coming from real estate developer Pombo. It's ironic in a way. After years of arguing that the old mining law was a shameful anachronism in need of modernization, we join a lot of other lovers of public lands in recoiling at Pombo's vision of "modernization" —especially the way it was slipped into this huge bill without significant debate or study. The Pombo measure would do two major things: first, it would end the moratorium and restore the ability of a mining company (or any other holder of a claim) to patent the claim. However, instead of the $5 an acre maximum price provided in the 1872 act, it provides for a more "modern" $1,000 an acre or market value, whichever is higher. Reasonable people can disagree on whether this is a good thing. We're inclined to think not, regardless of the price—the 1872 act was intended to induce settlement of the West, and today's West is pretty much settled. It's the second effect of Pombo's measure that is truly troubling. It eliminates the requirement that a claim contain an economically viable quantity of minerals before it can be patented. Even when "proving" the viable minerals on a claim was required, under the General Mining Law of 1872, Congress in 1994 viewed it with enough alarm to suspend its application. Now as we approach an election year, it appears some in Congress are getting nervous about record deficits run up by the Bush administration—as well they should. The big bill in which the Pombo measure is buried takes a stab at reducing the deficit, reaching into almost every area of government in the process. The Senate has passed its own, very different version, and a conference committee will be named to try to reconcile the bills in the coming weeks. Both bills contain other high-profile and controversial provisions that could overshadow Pombo's backdoor rewrite of the mining act—for example the Senate's version includes drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But federal lands should not go on the auction block without a more open discussion—certainly not just to make a few fast bucks to throw into the deficit vortex. It is important that the conferees block this legislation.
Dirt cheap
Think you’ll never see this ad in the Chronicle? Think again. As of this writing a provision in a federal budget bill, which has dark nooks and crannies for all sorts of mischief, would revise the General Mining Law of 1872 to allow the immediate and condition-less sale of public lands for $1,000 per acre. While this sounds like a big improvement from the current $2. 50 to $5 price per acre for a mining patent on public lands, this particular legislation eliminates the “mining” requirement and allows the land to be owned and used for any economic purpose. The amended law lifts the Clinton-era moratorium on mining patents and would allow the public to stake claims and buy land adjacent to existing claims for a pittance. According to the Environmental Working Group’s (www. ewg. org) “Dirt Cheap” report, this means that congressional action has the potential to:
In Montana this means that nearly 250,000 acres, with 20 claims within five miles of Yellowstone could immediately be sold and another 26 million acres of Montana land could potentially be used for almost anything one can imagine—everything, as EWG notes, from “strip mines to strip malls,” theme parks and condos, oil wells and trophy homes. In the Gallatin National Forest alone there are 951 such claims with an additional 523 inside the roadless areas. Other areas affected include the national parks of Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, the Carlsbad Caverns, Joshua Tree and the Grand Canyon, all of which have claims within five miles of their boundaries—all of which could be privatized. Sometimes, don’t you just wonder what is going on in Washington? How any member of Congress could believe that the American people - right, left or center - would support such a preposterous financial landslide for private interests, conveniently buried in the budget bill, defies one’s bleakest imaginings of political chicanery and opportunism. Yet, here you have Bush’s Department of the Interior and Rep. Jim Gibbons, (R-Nev.), and Richard Pombo, (R-Calif.) , consorting in a cynical disregard of the public trust, conspiring to open public lands to unfettered sale and development while pandering to fill private pockets with speculative gains. This certainly is an issue which deserves scathing derision from Montana Sens. Conrad Burns and Max Baucus as well as Rep. Denny Rehberg. A recent search of their Web sites reveals nothing with regard to their respective concern or position. With the federal deficit at $8 trillion, the discussion of selling federal land assets may just be starting. In September, Rep. Richard Pombo also suggested selling 15 national parks to help reduce the federal deficit. Though he has insisted that this bill was a “conversation starter”without real intent to sell, it was introduced the same week that another California congressman suggested selling 15 percent of federal lands to help pay for the Hurricane Katrina damage. Congress now seems reduced to bankrupt ideas while busily bankrupting our country. One day the U. S. government (www. usabk. com), penniless and paupered, may resort to federal flea-markets where one can purchase used Hummers, postal routes, advertising rights for national monuments and one-acre home sites on Yellowstone Lake. That first sale date may be closer than we think. Bill Muhlenfeld is a past member of the Chronicle editorial board, local businessman and self-described serial entrepreneur. His email address is bmuhlenfeld@dailychronicle. com BILL MUHLENFELD
The View from Mount Ellis
Your Birthright, Up For Grabs For sale cheap: 270 million acres of national forest and public land. It could happen under a budget bill being debated in Congress by Mike Dombeck All my life, I have introduced people to our nation's public lands, as a seasonal fishing guide in the Upper Midwest, as the head of the Bureau of Land Management and as the chief of the U. S. Forest Service—agencies that manage hundreds of millions of acres of public land. One thing I learned was that Americans love their national forests, parks and grasslands. Americans inherit a birthright that is the envy of the world: hundreds of millions of acres scattered across all regions of the country. The public estate includes famous places, such as Yellowstone National Park, and obscure places that make up picnic spots, fishing holes and weekend getaways. It has been that way for 100 years, thanks to the conservation legacy sparked by President Theodore Roosevelt. Unfortunately, our federal public lands are now under siege in Congress. It seems that some folks simply do not like the idea of the public owning land. These radicals and ideologues are taking advantage of the fact that Americans are preoccupied with economic insecurity, high fuel prices and a war abroad to promote their personal interests by pushing language in the federal budget bill that would put a "for sale" sign on 270 million acres of national forest and other public land. Here's how it would work: Congress would reinstate an obscure, obsolete portion of an 1872 mining law. This would allow mining companies to stake claims on public land and eventually take ownership through a process called "patenting. " (Congress, with good reason, stopped allowing patenting in 1994. ) But the greed-driven special interest supporters aren't stopping there. They want to expand the sale of public lands to allow any individual or corporation to stake a mining claim and purchase it without having to prove that it contains minerals. This is so broadly defined as to enable developers, for example, to buy federal land at bargain-basement prices and "flip" it quickly for projects such as ski chalets or housing units. The public would never stand for this if it were done in the open, so the provision was tucked inside the huge budget-cutting bill being considered by Congress this week. There, it was obscured by bigger issues, such as offshore drilling. There are plenty of examples of how companies have used the 1872 mining law's patenting provisions to get their hands on public resources dirt cheap. In 1970, Frank Melluzzo "patented"—bought—public land near Phoenix for $150. Ten years later, he sold it for more than $400,000. Today, the Pointe Hilton Hotel in Phoenix sits on this mining claim. In 1983, Mark Hinton patented national forest land adjacent to the Keystone ski resort in Colorado. He later sold the parcel for more than 4,000 times what he paid for it. In 1994, American Barrick Corp. patented about 1,000 acres of public land in Nevada. That land contained more than $10 billion in gold reserves. But under the 1872 mining law, it paid only $5,000 for the land and paid not a dime in royalties to the federal Treasury. No wonder Congress has prohibited such land deals ever since. Taxpayers were getting a raw deal. Now a few folks in Congress want to turn back the clock. The results of these policies will be a fleecing of the American taxpayer and a cheating of future generations of public land. Theodore Roosevelt put it this way: "The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value. " That kind of leadership is why Roosevelt's face is carved on Mt. Rushmore. The leadership we are seeing in some dark corners of Congress will leave Americans with a much different legacy. Mike Dombeck, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, served as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management from 1994 to 1997 and chief of the U. S. Forest Service from 1997 to 2001 Back to Take Action |
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