By Northern Plains Resource Council

OSM, BLM, DOI – what does all of this alphabet soup mean to you? OSM is the Office of Surface Mining and is the federal agency charged with regulating our nation’s coal mines. BLM – the Bureau of Land Management – as many of you are all too familiar with is the agency charged with leasing federal minerals, including coal. BLM is in the process of carrying out an aggressive push to lease federal coal in Montana and Wyoming – including the nearby Signal Peak Mine in the Bull Mountains. The Department of Interior, or DOI, has put forth an ill-advised idea to combine these two agencies, which would create a large conflict of interest surrounding coal mine inspection and enforcement amongst other problems.

We need your voices to tell the Department of Interior to drop its bad idea and keep coal mine regulation with the Office of Surface Mining. Even if you don’t live near a coal mine, it’s important for Secretary Ken Salazar and the Department of Interior to hear from you.

Please tell Secretary Salazar that:

  • Combining inspection and enforcement duties of OSM and BLM will create conflicts of interest for both agencies and will violate the fundamental principles of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. We learned a hard lesson from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill about problems that can happen when an agency has a monetary interest in producing energy and places its inspection and enforcement duties in a second tier. We don’t want coal mine permitting and enforcement to turn into another Deepwater Horizon;
  • This proposal is not likely to save either agency any money and it won’t help OSM do better oversight of coal mine permitting and enforcement, which is needed in coalfield communities across the country;
  • This proposal will bury citizen input under layers of bureaucracy;
  • If the Secretary’s proposal is about saving money the Department would be better off to launch a thorough and rigorous review of its coal leasing fair market value procedures where it is failing to capture billions of dollars of value for coal in the Powder River Basin as it proceeds at break neck pace giving coal rights away to private companies that are posting enormous profits at public expense.

Attend public meeting in Billings

You can attend a public meeting in Billings on January 23 at 8:30 a.m. at the BLM office, 5001 Southgate Drive (near the South Billings Boulevard Exit off I-90).

Submit your comments by February 1

You can also submit comments online at http://www.doi.gov/bureaus/blm-osm/Comments.cfm  Please submit your comments by February 1!

If you have any questions about this issue or if you are interested in attending the public meeting in Billings, please contact Becca at rebecca@northernplains.org or 406-248-1154.

More information on the Department of Interior’s proposal can be found at: http://osmrewatch.wordpress.com/osm-blm-merger/