label: ABANDONED MINE LAND

WASHINGTON - Wyoming lawmakers will be keeping wary eyes on their colleagues from Appalachian states when Congress returns to the Capitol in early September.

The abandoned mine program law is set to expire on Sept. 30, and Wyoming lawmakers want to make sure that the state does not receive the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

The top priority for the Wyoming delegation is to make sure that the reauthorization and overhaul includes a provision paying the state more than $400 million in backpayments that it is owed.

Members of Wyoming delegation are afraid that West Virginia lawmakers will try to reauthorize a part of the law that provides health-care benefits for coal miners whose companies have gone out of business, and ignore the reauthorization of the abandoned mine program.

The two programs were yoked together in 1992.

Wyoming lawmakers are particularly concerned about Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., who is the top Democrat on the Senate committee that has jurisdiction over all of the federal departments and agencies' annual spending bills. Lawmakers know these spending bills must pass for the government to function, so they frequently try to attach issues that they consider important to them.

"What we've got to do is figure out what to do with this abandoned mine land fund thing," Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., said. "We don't have time to get a bill passed, so we've got to be careful that Byrd doesn't get to keep the health-care part and throw the rest away."

Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., shares Thomas' concern that the West Virginians may try to reauthorize the health-care program and ignore the backpayments that Wyoming is owed.

"It's been my position from the beginning that (abandoned mine program) reform can't be done without first making sure that Wyoming is repaid the hundreds of millions of dollars the state is owed," Cubin said. "Anything short of that is just an extension of the unfairness in the program and a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. My first concern is the taxpayers of Wyoming, not special interests in West Virginia."

A Byrd spokesman said that the senator supported reauthorizing the entire law, but would not rule out an effort to only reauthorize the health-care program.

"What he may or may not do I cannot say," Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin said. "The abandoned mine program is important for a lot of reasons, including the cleanup part. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. We shouldn't let it lapse."

Gavin says the best solution would be to simply extend the program as it is for one more year to give lawmakers time to work.

The 1977 law and the difficulty updating it is bound up in the history of the United States coal industry.

The law authorizes per-ton fees on mining operations to raise billions of dollars to clean up abandoned mines left over from the earlier century of coal production. Since the law was passed, the nation's coal production largely shifted from east to west over the past 30 years and thus mining operations in Rocky Mountain states are largely financing cleanups in Appalachian states.

The Office of Surface Mining estimates that $3 billion worth of abandoned mines still need to be cleaned up.

The geographic shift in the coal industry also drove many Appalachian state coal companies out of business, which left the miners who worked for them without health-care benefits.

Under the law, states get to keep half of the money raised from coal mining in their borders and the federal government uses the other half to clean up the most serious problems. The coal companies pay the federal government and then congressional spending committees are supposed to give the money back to the states.

The spending committee has frequently paid Wyoming less than the half it is owed, which has resulted the more than $400 million backpayment.

Cubin and Thomas have pushed reauthorization proposals that would require the federal government to dip into the federal treasury to pay Wyoming the more than $400 million it is owed. Their proposals also would provide the state with future payments.

The Bush administration has offered a proposal that would instruct lawmakers to pay Wyoming the $400 million it is owed rather than simply take the money out of the federal treasury. Under the Bush administration plan, Wyoming would not receive any money in the future.

The Wyoming delegations adamant opposition to the administration's proposal has stalled the effort to overhaul the law.

Washington bureau reporter Ted Monoson can be reached at (202) 408-2726 or at Ted.Monoson@casperstartribune.net.