New Federal Law May Cost PA Mine Program Millions

From StateImpactPA:  Lan­guage in a bill Pres­i­dent Obama signed into law ear­lier this month may reduce Pennsylvania’s fed­eral mine recla­ma­tion fund­ing by up to $200 million.

For­mer Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Sec­re­tary Dave Hess ana­lyzed an amend­ment added to a trans­porta­tion bill and reached this conclusion:

The amend­ment sets a limit of a max­i­mum of $15 mil­lion in total annual pay­ments from the AML Fund to a cer­ti­fied state, a state that has com­pleted recla­ma­tion of all of its high-priority coal min­ing AML features. …

The annual loss to PA’s AML Pro­gram dur­ing those years would be approx­i­mately $17.8 mil­lion if the reduc­tion is $52 mil­lion and as high as approx­i­mately $23.2 mil­lion if the reduc­tion to the his­toric coal fund is $67 mil­lion.   This would then trans­late to a cor­re­spond­ing loss of approx­i­mately $5.3 – 7.0 mil­lion annu­ally to Pennsylvania’s 30 per­cent Acid Mine Drainage Set-Aside Program.

The total loss to Pennsylvania’s AML and AMD Set-Aside Pro­grams over the remain­ing ten year life of the fed­eral AML Pro­gram could well be in excess of $200 million.

What’s the fund­ing reduction’s impact? Hess emails StateIm­pact Penn­syl­va­nia that “the fed­eral Aban­doned Mine Recla­ma­tion Pro­gram now pro­vides most of the fund­ing Penn­syl­va­nia now uses to reclaim aban­doned coal mines and treat acid mine drainage now that Grow­ing Greener Pro­gram fund­ing has all but dis­ap­peared. Statewide there are a total of more than 184,000 acres of aban­doned mine lands and 4,000 miles of bio­log­i­cally dead rivers and streams due to mine pollution.”