Feds to send $52M for Pa. abandoned mine cleanup, development
WASHINGTON — The White House announced Monday it will send more than $52 million to Pennsylvania to clean up its extensive abandoned mine lands and boost economic development in those areas, as Congress debates the reauthorization of such federal funding before it expires in September.
Organizations in the Keystone State, which has the most abandoned mine lands in the country, can apply for federal grants totaling about $27.4 million to clean up land left behind by legacy mining operations. Another $25 million in federal grants is in a separate fund that leverages mine land reclamation with local economic development.
The awards for Pennsylvania came as part of a $260 million national funding round to 25 states and three tribes. West Virginia received nearly $44 million and Ohio got $30 million, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Lawmakers face the Sept. 30 expiration of the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Trust Fund, which was created in 1977 to help states and tribes restore long-defunct mine sites that have no existing responsible owner.
The fund is filled with fees assessed on coal companies for every ton of coal produced. It is the central source of money to jumpstart projects that can range in cost from $500,000 to as much as $15 million for large-scale water treatment plants, according to abandoned mine land experts.
Two competing proposals introduced last year have pitted a bipartisan group of House lawmakers from Pennsylvania, who support extending the fund at current fee rates, against senators from Wyoming, who support a much shorter renewal and cutting the rates by 35%.
Rep. Glenn Thompson, R Centre — whose district in north-central Pennsylvania includes the most abandoned mine lands in the country — signed onto a measure sponsored by Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Lackawanna, that would extend the fund another 15 years, until 2036.
It would maintain the current fee rates of 28 cents per ton for surface-mined coal and 12 cents a ton for underground mined coal. (That translates to about $3 million in fees assessed on Consol Energy, the Cecil coal company whose underground mines produced 27 million tons in 2019.)
Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso, meanwhile, introduced a proposal to scale back the fees and reauthorize the fund for seven years, leaning on the fund’s current non-allocated balance of $2.2 billion. That bill also orders the Interior Department to identify cost savings and assess unnecessary overhead costs on reclamation projects.
Mr. Thompson, in an interview last year, opposed that move. “We have this intense need that is still out there,” he said.“Why would we cut that program?”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Thompson did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
The trust fund has distributed more than $8 billion since it was established in 1977, according to the department. It estimated that federal funding directly resulted in the closure of over 45,000 abandoned underground mine shafts and openings and the restoration of over 52,000 acres of clogged streams and land. But there remains more than $10 billion worth of work.
In the Pittsburgh region, the fund has been touted by both parties.
In 2018, the Trump administration’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, visited a Washington County site to announce a $55 million federal grant to clean up a 45acre site filled with debris and hazardous material from coal mining.