U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

67–088 u WASHINGTON : 2000

ABANDONED MINED LAND RECLAMATION NEEDS

OF THE PENNSYLVANIA ANTHRACITE FIELDS

FIELD HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

JANUARY 24, 2000, SCRANTON, PA.

Serial No. 106–82

Printed for the use of the Committee on Resources

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/house

or

Committee address: http://www.house.gov/resources

(II)

COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

DON YOUNG, Alaska, Chairman

W.J. (BILLY) TAUZIN, Louisiana

JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah

JIM SAXTON, New Jersey

ELTON GALLEGLY, California

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado

JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California

WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland

KEN CALVERT, California

RICHARD W. POMBO, California

BARBARA CUBIN, Wyoming

HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho

GEORGE P. RADANOVICH, California

WALTER B. JONES, JR., North Carolina

WILLIAM M. (MAC) THORNBERRY, Texas

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

KEVIN BRADY, Texas

JOHN PETERSON, Pennsylvania

RICK HILL, Montana

BOB SCHAFFER, Colorado

JIM GIBBONS, Nevada

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

GREG WALDEN, Oregon

DON SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania

ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina

MIKE SIMPSON, Idaho

THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado

GEORGE MILLER, California

NICK J. RAHALL, II, West Virginia

EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts

BRUCE F. VENTO, Minnesota

DALE E. KILDEE, Michigan

PETER A. DEFAZIO, Oregon

ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American

Samoa

NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii

SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas

OWEN B. PICKETT, Virginia

FRANK PALLONE, JR., New Jersey

CALVIN M. DOOLEY, California

CARLOS A. ROMERO-BARCELO ́, Puerto

Rico

ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam

PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island

ADAM SMITH, Washington

CHRIS JOHN, Louisiana

DONNA MC CHRISTESEN, Virgin Islands

RON KIND, Wisconsin

JAY INSLEE, Washington

GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California

TOM UDALL, New Mexico

MARK UDALL, Colorado

JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York

RUSH D. HOLT, New Jersey

LLOYD A. JONES, Chief of Staff

ELIZABETH MEGGINSON, Chief Counsel

CHRISTINE KENNEDY, Chief Clerk/Administrator

JOHN LAWRENCE, Democratic Staff Director

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held January 24, 2000 .............................................................................. 1

Statement of Members:

Gekas, Hon. George, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Pennsylvania, Prepared statement of ......................................................... 8

Holden, Hon. Tim, a Representative in Congress from the State of Pennsylvania .......................................................................................................... 24

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 26

Kanjorski, Hon. Paul K., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Pennsylvania ............................................................................................. 19

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 22

Sherwood, Hon. Don, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Pennsylvania ................................................................................................. 9

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 11

Staback, Hon. Edward G., a Representative in Congress from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Prepared statement of .................................. 57

Young, Hon. Don., a Representative in Congress from the State of Alaska 1

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 5

Statement of Witnesses:

Blanchard, Mary Josie, Assistant Director, Office of Surface Mining, U.S.

Department of the Interior ........................................................................... 31

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 33

Campbell, Bradley M., Regional Administrator, Environmental Protection

Agency, Region III ........................................................................................ 41

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 43

Carlo, Laure, Legislative Assistant ................................................................. 55

Dolence, Robert, Deputy Secretary for Mineral Resources Management

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection ........................... 49

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 51

Donlin, David A., President, Economic Development Council of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Executive Director, Schuylkill Chamber of Commerce .............................................................................................................. 109

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 111

Hughes, Robert, Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine

Reclamation ................................................................................................... 151

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 154

Klemow, Kenneth M. Ph.D., Certified Senior Ecologist and Botanist, Professor of Biology, Wilkes University ............................................................ 124

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 127

McDade, Joe, Prepared statement of .............................................................. 16

McGurl, Bernard, Executive Director, Lackawanna River Corridor Association ............................................................................................................ 114

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 117

Rogers, Alex E., the Upper Susquehanna-Lackawanna Watershed American Heritage Rivers Initiative, and the Pennsylvania GIS Consortium . 138

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 140

Skrip, Andy, Vice President, Scranton Chamber of Commerce .................... 95

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 99

(1)

ABANDONED MINED LAND RECLAMATION

NEEDS OF THE PENNSYLVANIA ANTHRACITE FIELDS

MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2000

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES,

Scranton, Pa.

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:30 p.m., in the Collegiate Hall Room, Redington Hall Building, University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Hon. Don Young (chairman of the

committee) presiding.

The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will come to order. Please take your

seats.

The Committee on Resources is meeting today under its oversight jurisdiction to take testimony on the subject of mine land reclamation needs of the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. Congressman

Don Sherwood of the 10th District, a valued Member of the Committee, has graciously hosted our visit to this historic region. I’d

like to thank the University of Scranton, as well, for making this

venue available to us, and the efforts of all involved today to coordinate our tour we had this morning.

Seeing with my own eyes the magnitude of the environmental

impacts of the unreclaimed coal mines and the facilities of this area

will help guide my understanding of the testimony which we are

about to hear.

I understand that this great coal-bearing region was where our

Nation’s industrial revolution first took hold. Some 7 billion tons of

hard coal had been mined from Eastern Pennsylvania since 1769—

and that estimates are about 20 billion tons remain in the earth

here. Furthermore, my understanding is the demand for your coal

gives way as bituminous coal elsewhere was found to be more economic to mine in those areas.

For many decades the hard coal from the Lackawanna Valley

and nearby fields fueled the forges of our Nation’s industry, fired

the boilers of our locomotives and heated many homes and took

care of the barge and railroad network which grew up here for the

coal market. It’s your historical legacy and one in which I am sure

the folks of Scranton and Eastern Pennsylvania are quite proud

and rightly so.

Unfortunately, there is an environmental legacy that followed

from your industry, as well. The hard coal was mined, broken and

shipped under few regulations then, but the environmental consequences of these practices did not really hit home until our NaVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:08 Nov 28, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 J:\67088.TXT HRESOUR2 PsN: HRESOUR2
2

tion became wealthy enough to afford a clean and safe environment.

I was in my third term in office when Congress enacted the Surface Coal Mining Reclamation Act of 1977. This law made it a national policy to require more stringent regulations of active coal

mining and required reclamation plans backed up with financial

guarantees to ensure the restoration. The feds stepped in because

it was widely perceived that the states were lax in their own regulations out of concern that the operator would simply move if the

rules were too tough in their states. The states were allowed to

seek enforcement practices under the new Federal agency and the

Interior Department, the Office of Surface Mining but the feds

were there to oversee the state need to commit them to the task.

This is all well and good for active operations, but the Congress

decided that mining disturbance made prior to 1977 ought to be reclaimed too and recognized in many cases the former operator had

no obligation under state law to do so. Thus, the Abandoned Mine

Land Reclamation Trust Fund was established to create a funding

source to begin to tackle this problem and a delivery mechanism

to get the money out for on-the-ground remediation.

Congress estimated that 15 years of the AML fee levied on every

ton of coal mined in the county would provide the necessary funds.

In 1992 we extended this fee collection through Fiscal Year 2004

and provided the trust fund to earn interest with a diversion of a

portion of the interest into the health benefits fund for retired coal

miners and their dependents.

During debate on the establishment of the AML funds, many

states were concerned that the producers would pay into the fund

for reclamation projects elsewhere so Congress obligated by guarantee that every AML dollar collected from active producers within

a state—50 cents would be dedicated within the fund for ultimate

appropriations back to that same state. The remainder would be

known as the secondary share to pay for Federal emergency programs and additional grants to states based upon their historic

production. Western members understood this would be a net

transfer of funds from the coal states to the West, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, but this was the compromise that was reached.

So what is the problem? Why are we here today? Well, like the

Federal Highway Trust Fund which grew fast from gasoline taxes

levied for years, which were not sufficiently appropriated back for

more roads and bridges, the AML fund too was used to disguise the

true size of the Federal operating budget deficit for many years.

OSM would collect the AML fees and send it to the Treasury but

our budget enforcement rules kept both the Congress and the

President from spending on reclamation that is about half of what

had been collected each year. Instead, an IOU went to the treasury

but the real money went to pay for the Government program that

lacked a dedicated funding source. So the states who had been

promised a return of at least half of their collection had to wait and

frankly are still waiting.

OSM records indicate that approximately 49 million dollars

worth of IOUs to Pennsylvania are in the AML fund, the state’s

share balance, which doesn’t take into account the funds which

3

your commonwealth is destined to receive from the historic production factor in the secondary share.

For comparison purposes, I note that the state with the most to

complain about is Wyoming because the Governor is sitting on 258

million dollars of its guaranteed share. Please remember that the

interest earned on the AML fund balance goes into the secondary

share and not the state’s so that the 50 cents on the dollar promised to states is more like 40 cents or less by the time the states

see it.

Frankly, another broken promise to the states has been the Land

and Water Conservation Fund of 1965, in which the Federal Government dedicated 900 million dollars of annual out continental

shelf oil and gas royalties to efforts for conservation of environmentally sensitive lands, half to Federal agencies and half to the

states. However, the budget priorities have seemed to prevent full

funding of this program and often no significant funding for state

grants at all.

But there is hope. The Conservation and Reinvestment Act of

2000, which I am the sponsor of and negotiated a fair amendment

with the ranking Democrat of my Committee, Congressman George

Miller of California, would put an end to such broken promises. If

enacted, H.R. 701 will ensure that 3 billion dollars per year of the

6 billion dollar annual OCS royalties collection flows to the seven

conservation programs in this bill. Pennsylvania would see nearly

50 million dollars each year, much of it to be managed directly by

your Governor and legislature and the remainder by Federal agencies operating within the commonwealth’s boundaries.

I am not suggesting that Pennsylvania’s entire share should be

dedicated to AML. We will hear some other ideas today. Indeed,

there are constraints as to how the states may spend their funds

within several of these programs, but very frankly Pennsylvania

might decide to spend some of this money in solving some of the

reclamation priorities.

My bill has been heard, debated and passed out of the Resources

Committee, awaiting action by the full House of Representatives.

I am proud to report that Don Sherwood joined with me in supporting the amended bill adopted in a strong bipartisan fashion

last November. Likewise, Governor Tom Ridge has written to us

with his support for CARA. Both these gentlemen understand that

for too long we have passed legislation authorizing programs which

ultimately lack the needed funding.

Other legislative fixes for abandoned mine land restoration efforts, including those in Pennsylvania, must not suffer the same

fate. Today’s record will be compelling, I am sure, from the testimony of the witnesses who will appear, for freeing up AML trust

funds owed to the commonwealth, as well as establishing a need

for some funding mechanism beyond 2004. But let’s not lose sight

of where the money comes from and recognize it will be a battle

to be sure because frankly other states will demand the money but

this area deserves it because of historical value.

I want to thank all of you, my staff, Mr. Sherwood for hosting

this while the Committee holds this hearing in Scranton. Before I

turn over the opening statement of Mr. Sherwood, I’d like to make

note that our present colleague George Gekas from the 17th DisVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:08 Nov 28, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00007 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 J:\67088.TXT HRESOUR2 PsN: HRESOUR2
4

trict of Pennsylvania has talked to us many times on this subject,

as far as reclamation—is unable to join us today. He has contacted

me regarding this important issue, as I mentioned before, as late

as last night. I now would like to recognize my good friend, a member of the Committee, for an opening statement and then we will

have our first panel up. I’d like to recognize Congressman Don

Sherwood for his statement. Mr. Sherwood.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Young follows:]

5

6

7

[The prepared statement of Mr. Gekas follows:]

8

9

Mr. SHERWOOD. Good afternoon. First, I’d like to thank my chairman, Don Young, for agreeing to hold this extremely important

hearing to focus the Resources Committee’s attention on the challenges still facing the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in reclaiming our land and water.

This morning Chairman Young agreed to go to fly over some of

the abandoned mine sites to view first-hand the culm piles, the

acid mine drainage and the open strip-mine pits that are all too familiar to those of us whose home is in Eastern Pennsylvania—and

I think it made an impact. Thank you again, Chairman Young, for

your interest.

I’d also like to acknowledge my colleagues in the House, Congressman Paul Kanjorski and Tim Holden, who will both testify

today, and Congressman George Gekas, who has submitted a statement for the record. Thank you, Congressmen Kanjorski and

Holden, for your determination and hard work to elevate this discussion and to focus Washington’s attention on the unmet reclamation needs of the anthracite region. I believe that by continuing to

work in a bipartisan manner, we will prevail in creating greater

awareness and national interest in reversing the scars of coal mining.

Last but not least, I want to thank all of the witnesses who have

agreed to testify today. I want to mention in particular Andy Skrip

from the Scranton Chamber of Commerce and Bernie McGurl from

the Lackawanna River Corridor Association, who live and work

here in the 10th District and bring their many years of experience

to the discussion.

I also am happy to mention that former Congressman Joe

McDade, who I wanted to testify, has sent us a statement but he

just couldn’t be here in person. Mr. McDade worked very hard over

his 36 years in Congress to improve the lives of Northeastern and

North Central Pennsylvanians. But he also knows that there’s a

long way to go. He wanted me to thank you, Chairman Young, for

making this a priority for the Resources Committee and for inviting him. Joe will submit a statement, and I have it here, which I

am sure will shed some valuable light on this problem.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, so entered.

Mr. Sherwood, thank you. As we hear the witnesses today recount the history and the subsequent demise of anthracite coal

mining and the current efforts to reclaim the use of the lands and

waters polluted by it, I believe that similar themes will be recounted by many of us. Anthracite coal literally and figuratively

fueled the industrial revolution and helped us to win two world

wars, but in the process the coal mining devastated the landscape

to such a degree that it will take decades to restore at the current

rate.

The Abandoned Mine Land Trust Fund is not being used in its

entirety to fund reclamation activity and it should be. As any economic development person will tell us, Northeastern Pennsylvania

is greatly hindered by the existence of these unreclaimed sites. A

new industrial plant or a new firm—when the CEO of a new firm

who is interested in our area comes and looks it over, they often

decide that they do not want to locate their new plant in sight of

10

the ravages of past mining. That has been a fact that has hindered

our development.

All of these statements are considered true by interested groups,

environmentalists, lawmakers, business people, academics and government experts. What’s not so easy to come to agreement on is

how to accelerate the cleanup. Do we increase funding for reclamation? Do we rely on technology to increase the speed and efficiency

of the cleanup? Do we enhance existing programs to coordinate the

reclamation efforts? Or do we create new programs? And we will

hear various ideas today.

My inclination is that the answer lies in some combination of

better technology, increased funding and a heightened interest and

awareness nationwide. The purpose of this hearing is both to focus

the attention of the Congressional Committee overseeing abandoned mine reclamation on the magnitude of the problem and to

begin to create a consensus about answers to the questions that we

have posed. What can we do to make things better? The people of

the anthracite region are ready and more than capable of making

things better, but we need some concerted help from our government, the business community, academics and environmental

groups.

What’s often lost in the discussions and debates about the legacy

of coal mining and its environmental impact is the pride of the people in the region in the accomplishments of their family members

who worked in the mines. Chairman Young today has already gone

a long ways in acknowledging the nationally significant impact of

the coal mining heritage by allowing my bill to recognize the

Lackawanna Valley as a national heritage area to move forward in

his committee.

Mining has provided steady work and a chance to fulfill the

American dream for over a century for immigrants wanting a better life. This legacy endures in the work ethic and the tenacity of

Northeastern and Central Pennsylvanians. Even though anthracite

coal mining created substantial adverse environmental impacts to

our area, it also greatly contributed to the current prosperity of our

country. Now it’s payback time. If we can tap into that prosperity

and harness the ingenuity, the work ethic and the tenacity of the

people of the region to figure out how to solve the problem, I have

no doubt that it will be solved. The wealth that was created by

mining anthracite coal in Eastern Pennsylvania is gone but the

scars remain. Today is our day to start the process to correct that.

I look forward to hearing the witnesses’ testimony and thank you

again for taking the time to be here.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Sherwood follows:]

11

12

13

14

15

[The prepared statement of Mr. McDade follows:]

16

17

18

19

The CHAIRMAN. I thank the gentleman. A few ground rules for

the witnesses that will appear. I run a fairly tight ship. I say fairly

because I used to be in that business of a very tight ship. I will

be under the 5-minute rule and don’t be offended because your

written testimony will be put into the record, the full content. And

I say that at every hearing that I conduct because I think it’s no

more than fair to address the witnesses that are going to be here.

I might allow a little latitude to my colleagues because politicians

have a tendency to talk too much anyway but not too much—let’s

put it that way.

But with saying that I would like to call at this time Paul Kanjorski of the U.S. Congress and the Honorable Tim Holden, from

Pennsylvania 11 and Pennsylvania 6. I guess that means the Districts 6 and 11. Am I correct?

Mr. SHERWOOD. That’s correct.

The CHAIRMAN. See, I don’t have that problem. I’ve got just one

big district. With that I’d like to have, Paul, you start the testimony out and then we will have Tim and then if we have some

questions, hopefully you’ll be available to answer them. Paul.

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE PAUL K. KANJORSKI, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA

Mr. KANJORSKI. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I’ve had

the pleasure of being in your lovely state so I know you’re a key

person who flying over the beauty of Northeastern and Central

Pennsylvania appreciate what devastation has occurred because of

past practices. And I don’t want to spend my time on reiterating

a great deal of Mr. Sherwood’s statement because all of it is correct. We know where we are and I want to thrust some of the ideas

that we have as to what we can do to help cure the problem.

First and foremost, let me put it into context. Although Mr. Sherwood, Mr. Holden and I—ever since we’ve come to Congress and

long before—have been heavily involved in economic development

and restoration of the coal lands of Northeastern Pennsylvania, it

really wasn’t until this summer when I flew across the country

with the President and went to various economically distressed

areas—in discussions that night, the President said see if you can

find any commonality in these areas and then come up with some

demonstration ideas of what we could do.

And over the course of that week I gave it a great deal of thought

and almost every airway we went to, from Nazareth, Kentucky, to

the Black Hills of South Dakota to the ghettos of Los Angeles, they

all reflect a certain commonality in that they suffer from an inferiority complex as a result of some material lacking, either in the environment or in the basic necessity of educational level of the population or something—or the loss or lack of investment capital. All

of these areas have substantial deficiencies unaddressed and undirected to, regardless of what we do beside that. We really can’t

start to move these distressed areas.

And I was particularly struck that clearly in Northeast and Central Pennsylvania through the years of endeavors of Members of

Congress, like Dan Flood and Joe McDade and many of my present

colleagues, we’ve made strides and Northeastern Pennsylvania is

20

better off today than it’s ever been economically in my lifetime. But

we aren’t getting there and we can’t get there for a simple reason

and that is our environment both land and water was so materially

devastated by past practices that there seems to be an inferiority

complex locally among the citizenry that they can’t expect or exact

excellence either from government or from business or from themselves in their communities, and second that we just can’t correct

the things ourselves and therefore we’re not going to get to the

level of average middle class economic existence in this area of the

state. I think the resolve of how to address that has been handled.

A lot of positive past legislation that clearly has failed.

The Office of Surface Mining I think will testify—or certainly in

my discussions with them, they know that what presently exists is

not nearly enough, is not properly funded by the Congress, is not

executed by the Administration regardless of what Administration

it is, to get this job done.

In reality, Mr. Chairman, you put your finger on our problem.

This is not something that can be afforded on a year-to-year appropriation basis because regardless of how high at any one significant

time people of this country focus on an environmental problem of

this nature, you can’t sustain that focus over the years necessary

to make the major improvements and investments necessary to recover. So as a result even if we increase the mine fund, even if we

challenge more of the mine money for a few years, that would be

perfectly good. Changes in the political structure of the country and

the attention of the country would deplete the attention and focus

on this particular area or other coal lands in the country.

So what I prepared at a request of the President was a memo

of how we could demonstrate what we could do not only in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania but some of the other waste coal

lands across the country which are quite significant but nothing

quite to the extent of the anthracite field. So first we isolated a

field that we could do a demonstration project in and that’s clearly

the anthracite field. It’s contained in only 12 counties of Eastern

Pennsylvania, no where else in the country except a little smattering of anthracite coal in your home state. It was the early material and there is not the capacity to get the local community to support or pay for the recovery program on a very simple basis; they

didn’t cause it, they didn’t benefit from it and if they pay for it

they’ll not reap the benefits in their lifetime because it won’t be

completed for 25, 30 years so there’s no incentive for the local community to tax themselves and assume that burden.

And I may say in defense of the coal mining industry across the

country, as we look at the legislation of this new fund, it is rather

harsh to create a tax that makes it uneconomical for these companies to exist today to pay for a process that they did not cause, they

did not benefit from and they will not benefit in the future from

and yet we’re doing that. By putting a tax on coal in Montana or

in Wyoming, we’re basically saying you’re paying back for something that a coal operation long gone in Eastern Pennsylvania has

caused.

Now, what—the approach that I gave to the President was simple, to get a demonstration project, identify our 12 areas and then

find a financing vehicle that could allow us to have a certainty of

21

money so that we could plan, design and implement all in a period

of 20 or 25 years and we would know for certain and never have

waste or overlap of the process. We have started on that. We now

have underway a GIS system which will encompass 3,000 square

miles of Eastern Pennsylvania in the most sophisticated GIS system available, making it much more efficient and cost wise much

lower to examine and engineer the land recovery program. That’s

already started, enacted by Congress, undertaken by the Core of

Engineers, EPA and other agencies of the Federal Government so

that within 2 years we will have the most sophisticated GIS system

to make the recovery possible of the land and the water.

The next problem however is the Office of Surface Mining. Regardless of how many allocations—if we double the allocations of

9 million to 18 million dollars, it’s a pithering of what we need. It

would take us 100 to 150 years at that rate to make a recovery.

So what I’ve suggested in my proposal is to create tax credits by

the Federal Government to independent bond holders—and I’ve

had the insurance industry show great interest to buy these bonds

if they are structured the way we’ve been designing them over the

last several months, and that is to have the Federal Government

through the Secretary of Interior or Secretary of the Treasury authorize an authority created by the State of Pennsylvania to issue

1.2 billion dollars in bonds, and it’s in lieu of paying interest, to

allow the buyer of those bonds to take a Federal tax credit of whatever the municipal tax rate is at that time at the sale of the bonds.

It would cost the loss of revenue to the Federal Government of

somewhere around 50 million dollars a year for 30 years and the

bond issue will be paid off in a self-created sinking fund. So the entire investment of the Federal Government to accomplish this end

would be approximately 1.5 billion dollars.

By building the mechanism of arbitrage with—the money actually would be about 2.4 billion dollars that would be available for

expenditures, almost 100 million dollars a year in a well-conceived

plan with proper financing under anthracite bonds or other type

bonds with Federal tax credits, we could bring back this area both

economically and environmentally to the stage that it was in that

we could all make the speech some day that we had a dream and

the fact is the dream would be that we recovered our land back to

the status and the way it existed when the Indians first settled

this area. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Paul, for a very eloquent statement.

Tim.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Kanjorski follows:]

22

23

24

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE TIM HOLDEN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA

Mr. HOLDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank

you for holding this hearing and I’d also like to thank Mr. Sherwood for hosting us here in Lackawanna County and his leadership

on this issue as well as my good friend Congressman Kanjorski.

Mr. Chairman, I have a statement that I will submit for the

record to avoid being redundant. I’d just like to briefly summarize

it. But quite frankly, Mr. Chairman, you summarized my statement when we were flying in the helicopter earlier today. When we

came into Schuylkill County and we were over Mahanoy City and

Shenandoah and Girardville, as we looked out at all the coal operations that are currently working and ones that have been abandoned, you looked at me and you said, wow, we have a lot of work

to do and we certainly do have a lot of work to do.

As sons of the coal region we are all proud of what a great interest that we had in developing the Industrial Revolution in this

country, how we fought two world wars that was fueled by anthracite coal, as Mr. Sherwood mentioned. We are all proud of that. But

what has been mentioned, there has been some very, very unfortunate consequences and as a result of that we are left with scarred

land that makes it very, very difficult for our economic development people to attract industry or convince industry to expand and

also that our environmental problems with our rivers and our

streams and the acid mine drainage that we had a chance to see

first-hand.

I believe in Lackawanna County I think that was that we could

see that the water was basically orange as we looked out the left

side of the aircraft and as we looked to the right it was of course

blue. So again there are very, very tremendous problems that we

are facing and it has been something that has been going on for

well over a hundred years in this part of Pennsylvania. Federal

and state laws came into effect I believe in the mid 70’s to late 70’s

and since that time we’ve been able to reclaim land but there was

a hundred years of damage that was done before that. We do not

want to interfere with commerce or any of the production that is

going on in anthracite currently.

I think that there’s a need to look for alternatives of anthracite

coal. I know Paul Kanjorski and myself are constantly doing that

and there are several plans we are looking into but we need to

clean up what was done before the Federal and state government

stepped up to the plate and did the right thing. So Congressman

Kanjorski has put forth a plan that I’ve looked at very closely and

I think it has merit and it certainly should be part of the discussions.

There are other vehicles that we also need to explore, and you

mentioned it in your opening statement, Mr. Chairman, how the

Abandoned Mine Trust Fund is being used for other Government

expenditures and Government operations just as the Highway

Trust Fund was used. We were able to correct that and we need

to do that with the abandoned mine trust fund also.

So with that, Mr. Chairman, I want to again thank you for holding this hearing and look forward to the testimony this afternoon.

25

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Tim. Do you have a written statement you are going to submit for the record?

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, so entered.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Holden follows:]

26

27

28

29

The CHAIRMAN. I’d just like to remind Paul we haven’t addressed

one issue that—I don’t know how we’re going to get around it—

with your bonds issue, it would probably not come under our jurisdiction and that probably goes to Ways and Means and that’s something we will have to figure out how to do because they’re not inclined sometimes to do such things.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Mr. Sherwood has been talking with the House

leadership and there seems to be some indication and a willingness

to certainly seriously look at it but this Committee will have jurisdiction over the second part of the idea, the process of creating a

specific Federal corporation for administration. Our problem has always been institutional members, Mr. Chairman. None of us will

be here 25 or 30 years—either hopefully we will be on the face of

the earth but we probably won’t be in office.

The CHAIRMAN. I am not going anywhere.

Mr. KANJORSKI. We need a special structure and we have suggested a trust be established as a very lean and mean organization

to make sure everybody does what they can do and bring all the

parties, Federal, state, county, local and business community, together to accomplish that and keep it together.

The CHAIRMAN. You mentioned bonds. Have you explored the

concept of the state issuing the bonds with a Federal guarantee?

Mr. KANJORSKI. Well, actually an authority bond. The state has

an authority’s act and it allows the various counties to get together

and form a municipal authority, multi-county in size, and then the

Secretary of the Treasury or the Secretary of Interior would empower that authority under certain conditions that would be expressed in the indenture to issue those bonds with a Federal tax

credit. We have done that.

There is one example of school bonds that are presently being

done by the Federal Government for that purpose. The President

has made the suggestion of Better America Bonds for green ways.

It’s the same type of funding mechanism. But what it allows us to

do, it’s really creating within our non-capital budget structure a

capital budget rather than relying year to year on appropriations

and authorizations that tend to go up and down with economics

and with politics. But to do long-term planning and long-term implementation of that planning, it is not the most effective and efficient way to accomplish the end of something that is large, 120,000

acres, 3,000 square miles, to attend to.

The CHAIRMAN. I can tell you that one of the things both of you

mentioned that pleases me is that you’re not trying to punish the

industry or what’s left of it, although we do have the Super Fund

and in the Super Fund we do punish industries that had nothing

to do with the problems that happened a hundred years ago. So I

am pleased to hear you say that because this is a very tenuous

market right now. The price is not good and I am glad to hear that

the present miners following the rules are not being punished for

what was done. Actually, the most damage was probably done during World War II.

And we ought to make an issue of that, too, by the way, Don.

When you think about it, this area has built the tanks and built

the military might that defended this country in one major war on

two different fronts and that should be something we can sell as

30

part of the problem. Coal was mined very rapidly to fill furnaces

and build those hard-shell tanks and everything else was done because we were at conflict. A lot of things we do in war we wouldn’t

do ordinarily so that’s one of the major problems. I don’t have any

other questions at this time. Mr. Sherwood.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Well, I listened with interest to both and they

outlined the problem very well. And with Paul’s bonds, we just

have to see if that’s an issue that can be worked through Ways and

Means and that we can get people’s attention on. And it’s intriguing in that it doesn’t require an appropriation. It just requires the

Government to decide that we are willing to forgo the interest that

those bonds would normally pay and then make fiduciaries like insurance companies would pick them up so if it’s a 1.2 million dollar

issue that would normally pay a 6 percent tax free and that’s how

you come up with approximately—or 50 million dollars a year in

deferred revenue to the Government. It’s a very interesting idea

and we will have to work it through.

The CHAIRMAN. I would like to ask one other question and maybe

a couple more. You’ve stated, Paul, your frustration with Federal

rules contracting out grants, funds, et cetera. Have you discussed

this with the Administration about any ideas how to streamline the

process? You heard me today on the helicopter, I’ve been so frustrated in my state with the money that’s dumped into the agencies

that never gets to the ground.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Absolutely. Mr. Chairman, that’s why we’re suggesting the corporation, just to remove it from the bureaucracy and

allow an administrator appointment by the President and confirmed by the Senate, to have a very lean and mean organization

of 25, 30 people with the purpose of oversight, direction and assistance but not to manage it. Let it be managed on a local level.

We’ve got some already good examples of organizations that are

taking on earth conservancy in my district. That’s 17,000 acres of

land that they’ve been making restoration on for about 5 years

now, very efficiently, every effectively at about half of the cost of

what the Federal Government normally spends for that type of

process.

Second, you want to encourage local planning and participation,

how the land will be used, what it will be done for, and to help

plan out the use of that long into the future. This should not be

a top-down project of the Federal Government. This should be locally—how we can help is to provide the security that the financing

will be in place to implement the final plan. But let the localities,

the communities and the state decide their plans in the various

areas, go about it and do it in a very efficient way and allow them

even to operate countercyclically; that when unemployment goes up

that they can put a fence in the field but when we’re in a high type

point like this, let’s not be counterproductive to the business community.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Paul, have you thought about Section 148 in the

IRS Code which I am familiar with from school district bonds?

We’re not allowed to earn arbitrage and arbitrage is one of the

main features of your plan. How do we get around that?

Mr. KANJORSKI. OK. I’ve been meeting with Gene Spurling at the

insistence of the President and with Treasury officials and we alVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:08 Nov 28, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00034 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 J:\67088.TXT HRESOUR2 PsN: HRESOUR2
31

ready have some very strong indications of a willingness to allow

arbitrage to a much longer period of time than it is in existence but

I still think we should take it out 20, 30 years. I think we can get

an accomplishment of that because as long as the arbitrage funds

go for the intended purposes, there’s no abuse of that authority and

that’s exactly what we do. All this money in the bond issue as arbitrage would be returned back and paid up—the long-term end sight

of the reclamation work.

Mr. SHERWOOD. I understand its use but that means we have to

have a policy change, a new ruling.

Mr. KANJORSKI. No. Actually, in the enactment of the bond itself

we can accomplish that. It’s very simple. If we left it out entirely,

we would have the right to arbitrage indefinitely but we can waive

this particular provision or put in a special provision for arbitrage.

The CHAIRMAN. Now I’d like to call up the second panel, Mary

Josie Blanchard, Assistant Director, Office of Surface Mining, U.S.

Department of Interior; Brad Campbell, who had the pleasure of

riding with us today on the helicopter, from the Environmental

Protection Agency, Region III; Robert Dolence, Deputy Secretary of

Mineral Resources Management, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection; Laure Carlo, Legislative Assistant, the testimony for Edward Staback, House of Representatives, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, is I call

out Mary Blanchard, you are up first. You are recognized for 5

minutes.

STATEMENT OF MARY JOSIE BLANCHARD, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF SURFACE MINING, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF

THE INTERIOR

Ms. BLANCHARD. Thank you, Chairman Young, Representatives

Sherwood, Kanjorski and Holden. My name is Mary Josie Blanchard. I am the assistant director of the office of surfacing mining.

With me today is Bob Biggie who is in charge of our Harrisburg

field office and Gene Krueger who’s in charge of our division of reclamation support.

On behalf of Director Karpan and Secretary Babbitt, we appreciate the opportunity to appear here in Scranton before the Committee on Resources regarding abandoned mine land reclamation in

the anthracite region of Pennsylvania.

The abandoned mine land program does three things. It removes

health and safety detriments, it improves the environment and it

restores resources to make available for economic development.

When the lands and waters are restored, jobs are created, the infrastructure can be improved, individuals can develop a sense of

pride in their community and the stage can be set for economic

growth.

As you know, coal operators pay a fee to the abandoned mine

land fund to reclaim and restore areas affected by past mining. In

total the industry has paid approximately 5 billion dollars.

Through Fiscal Year 2000, Congress has appropriated 4.2 billion

for the purposes of reclaiming land and water. Once funds are appropriated then OSM grants money to the states and tribes based

on an established formula.

32

For the last several years, Pennsylvania has received approximately 24 million dollars a year. For Fiscal Year 2000, the abandoned mine land grant will be 26.6 million dollars; the largest

grant to any state. Once a state receives its abandoned mine land

funds then the state sets the priorities on the funding for the specific reclamation sites.

Abandoned mine land problems are found nationwide but are

highly concentrated in Appalachia. According to the information in

the abandoned mine land inventory system, the cost of reclaiming

Pennsylvania’s inventory of sites would be 4.9 million dollars. Of

that, anthracite’s region claims approximately 1.9 billion dollars.

Almost half of these costs are associated with acid mine drainage.

To deal with the number-one water quality problem in Appalachia, acid mine drainage, OSM created the Appalachian Clean

Streams Initiative in 1995. Under this initiative the Office of Surface Mining provides grants to states to attract funds from other

public and private organizations for restoring streams with acid

mine drainage. The combined effort magnifies the effectiveness of

any one group of funds.

Pennsylvania receives approximately 1.7 million annually in

clean streams funding, which is more than any other state. An example just right here is in McDade Park where the clean streams

initiative will restore Lucky Run. As part of the clean streams initiative, OSM began the Watershed Cooperative Agreement Program last year with local nonprofit watershed organizations that

are already improving the water quality in their own communities.

In fact, one of the first cooperative agreements was for the Carbon

Run site in Northumberland County. Funding of 22 thousand dollars will be used to install a passive treatment system to reduce

iron loading in Carbon Run.

In order to proceed more quickly with reclamation work, in 1990

the Administration proposed an increase in appropriations such

that by Fiscal Year 2003 it is hoped that appropriations would

equal revenues from the fee on coal production. As a first step toward that goal, the Fiscal Year 2000 budget proposed 211 million

AML appropriation which would have been a 25 million increase

over Fiscal Year 1999. The final AML appropriation for Fiscal Year

2000 dollars is 196 million, which is a 10 million dollar increase

over the previous year funding. The Administration is committed

to increasing the AML appropriations because it would be tangible

economic and environmental benefits in a short period of time.

In summary, a core mission of OSM is the reclamation of land

and water damaged by a century of coal mining activities. Nowhere

is that legacy more evident than in the anthracite region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. EW Technologies in mapping, treating abandoned mine lands and waters are providing better and more efficient treatment each year. Yet, after a century of cumulative pollution, there is still much work to be done. We are committed to finding better and more effective ways to restore land and water to productive use. We should appreciate the opportunity to appear before

the Committee, especially here in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, and to testify on this issue. Thank you very much.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. Brad.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Blanchard follows:]

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

STATEMENT OF BRADLEY M. CAMPBELL, REGIONAL ADMINISTRATOR, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, REGION

III

Mr. CAMPBELL. Chairman Young and Members of the Committee

present, good afternoon. My name is Bradley Campbell. I am the

Regional Administrator for EPA’s Mid-Atlantic Region which encompasses Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. Thank you for the invitation to

talk this afternoon about the impact of abandoned mine drainage

on the streams and on the economy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

As, Mr. Chairman, you, and the Members present witnessed in

dramatic terms today, 175 years of coal mining in Pennsylvania

has left a legacy of approximately 15 billion dollars worth of abandoned mine problems that dot the landscape in 45 of the state’s 67

counties. The figures speak for themselves. More than 2,500 miles

of streams polluted by acid mine drainage, 250,000 acres of

unreclaimed surface area, 100 million cubic feet of burning coal

refuse and potential subsidence that scars the landscape.

In Pennsylvania alone, the acid mine drainage problem encompassing those 2,500 stream miles accounts for approximately 52

percent of all degraded waters in the state and the significance of

that problem from EPA’s perspective, responsible and charged with

implementing the goals of the clean water act, is clear. It is of

paramount priority to EPA and to this region that we take headon the problem of acid mine drainage and we do so seriously.

I appreciate the occasion of this hearing to call attention to really

three aspects of the problem, all of which have been mentioned to

some extent but which I want to highlight today in my testimony.

The first is EPA’s programmatic commitment to addressing this

problem and in doing so in partnership with OSM and the other

agencies that are involved in this issue, and particularly the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, so that we are approaching this on a

unified basis, so that we’re setting priorities jointly and so that

we’re exploiting the expertise of the individual agencies that are

represented.

The second is the need for public investment which I think Mr.

Kanjorski spoke to eloquently. But I want to add as well a mention

of private incentive so that not only the work of the Federal agencies is coordinated and well supported but so that wherever possible we have incentives in place that bring to bear the resources

of the private sector.

Just briefly, in terms of EPA’s programmatic commitment, acid

mine drainage is obviously a central focus of the Administration’s

clean water action plan initiated by President Clinton and Vice

President Gore. Under the framework established by that plan and

working on a coordinated basis among agencies, the Administration

is committed to—and EPA in particular is committed to increasing

to 150 miles per year the stream miles of acid mine drainage that

we’re addressing on an annual basis. We’re committed to increasing

by 50 percent and have now increased by 50 percent the number

of on-the-ground projects we as an agency have or are putting in

place to address this problem.

42

We are also further committed, again coordinating our work with

the other agencies, to demonstrating new technologies, new approaches that can be used to address this problem and we’re particularly thankful to Mr. Kanjorski with whose help we have a 1.2

million dollar project on the ground that is using constructive wetlands as a means of filtering acid mine drainage to see—not only

to address the problem in that particular area but also to demonstrate as part of a broader effort to try out the new technologies,

as Mr. Sherwood recognized, that we’re going to need if we’re going

to take on this problem in a cost-effective way of making the best

use of the public resources.

Moving to the issue of public investment, we as an administration and EPA in particular believe that this problem here in Northeastern Pennsylvania is typical of the type of problem that could

be appropriately addressed through Better America Bonds. The

President’s proposal for a bonding mechanism that would generate

more than 9 billion dollars nationally for precisely the types of

projects that would protect clean water from acid mine drainage,

that would help redevelop the kind of mine-scarred brown fields

that dot the landscape here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Again,

it follows the type of model that the Chairman outlined earlier in

this hearing, not creating new Federal offices or positions but using

local initiative, locally lead projects, locally developed proposals but

funding them using a mechanism that would offer investors a tax

credit in lieu of a payment of interest to investors and we think

that’s an important proposal, that it offers a great deal of promise

for this region, as I’ve discussed with certain Members of this Committee, and one that we hope that Congress will go forward with

in this session. It also by the way is fully accounted for within the

President’s budget proposal which is another aspect of the Better

America Bond proposal which would allow us to move forward with

it quickly.

The final issue I want to raise just briefly is that of private incentive. Mr. Kanjorski among others has been a co-sponsor of a bill,

H.R. 1750, that in addition to the elements of programmatic commitment and public investment, would help bring private investment into areas that are mine scarred like those in Eastern Pennsylvania. Specifically it’s a brown fields bill on which there’s broad

consensus of the elements of it but in particular is relevant to this

problem that would clarify the rules of liability—Super Fund liability for new investors, redevelopers, who on the margins of some of

these affected towns and communities might be able to bring greater resources and could be encouraged to add their investments to

the solution to addressing the problems we saw today. And with

that, I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Brad, for coming. Robert.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Campbell follows:]

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

STATEMENT OF ROBERT DOLENCE, DEPUTY SECRETARY FOR

MINERAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

Mr. DOLENCE. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Members of

the Committee. My name is Bob Dolence and I am the Deputy Secretary for Mineral Resources Management at the Pennsylvania’s

Department of Environmental Protection. On behalf of Governor

Ridge and Secretary Jim Seif, I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about mine reclamation.

Pennsylvania’s rich industrial heritage and abundant natural resources have been and will continue to be strengths in providing

jobs for our citizens and in increasing the prosperity and economic

vitality of the commonwealth and of our Nation. A portion of that

legacy, however, is a large inventory of abandoned mines, acid-degraded streams and unsafe shafts and high walls around the state.

Repairing that damage from the past is one of the best ways we

can improve both the economic vitality and the quality of life in

Pennsylvania in the future. I will not provide the detail verbally

that’s in the written, submitted testimony. We estimate the cost of

addressing these priority 1 and 2 problems in the anthracite region

to be almost 2 billion dollars excluding AMD treatment costs.

As mentioned earlier, the AML fund established by Congress and

funded by the coal operators in Pennsylvania as well as other mining states has been appropriated sparingly in recent years resulting in a large balance of funds. Over 1.3 billion dollars collected for

reclamation is sitting idle while problems are still unaddressed. It

is a great frustration to the citizens of Pennsylvania, to the coal operators of Pennsylvania who contribute to the fund, to DEP and to

this Administration that such a large sum of money collected expressly to meet this important need has been held hostage to the

budget process in Washington.

Getting this money released from Washington so that it can be

put to the use for which it was intended is one of Governor Ridge’s

top priorities. He has personally carried that message to Washington several times in the past and I reiterate that request today.

For the past several years, Pennsylvania’s annual allocation from

the Title IV appropriation has averaged about 22 million dollars,

down from a high of 66 million dollars in 1984.

In the anthracite region, DEP has completed 306 reclamation

projects with direct construction costs of about 160 million dollars.

These projects have involved about 10,000 acres. We believe that

Pennsylvania has put to good use the funding that we have received under Title IV, and I believe that the best chance to accelerate our rate of progress throughout the state is for Congress to

increase the appropriations from the AML trust.

While we cannot address all of our mining reclamation needs

throughout the state without increasing funding from Congress, we

have not rested on that hope alone for progressing. Governor Ridge

recently signed into law the Environmental Stewardship and Watershed Protection Act, which embodied his Growing Greener Initiative. This legislation was adopted with the very effective help

and leadership of Senator Ray Musto and Representative David

Argall, both of whom represent districts in the anthracite region.

Growing Greener is the largest single investment of state funds in

50

our history to help improve Pennsylvania’s environment, making

nearly 650 million dollars available over the next 5 years for grants

for projects that protect and restore watersheds.

Another legislative change that was adopted by the general assembly on the same bill as Growing Greener was the Environmental Good Samaritan statute. This statute provides protection

from legal and environmental liability for groups voluntarily undertaking mine reclamation or gas well reclamation.

The Ridge Administration is stating to the public, ‘‘if you take

this challenge on in good faith and are not negligent in doing so,

you are protected from third-party lawsuits and with Growing

Greener, you have the opportunity for funding to assist with the

restoration.’’

Additional program enhancements designed to involve public

participation and encourage more industry reclamation of abandoned mine sites may be found in the Governor’s Reclaim PA initiative. This effort compliments Growing Greener and Environmental Good Samaritan.

Pennsylvania coal has powered this Nation’s industrial growth in

the past and it continues to fuel the industrial and heating needs

of today. Pennsylvania is committed to doing its share and more to

remedy the scars of mining that remain.

We would urge the Congress to release more of the funds that

have already been collected for reclamation so that we can accelerate our progress in repairing the environment and protecting the

safety of our citizens throughout the commonwealth. Thank you

very much for the opportunity this afternoon.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Robert. Laure.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Dolence follows:]

51

52

53

54

55

STATEMENT OF LAURE CARLO, LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT, THE

HONORABLE EDWARD G. STABACK, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA

Ms. CARLO. Good afternoon. Laure Carlo, aide to Representative

Staback. I am offering testimony on his behalf. He’s in Harrisburg

today.

Dear Committee Members, I appreciate this opportunity to

present testimony to the Committee. Unfortunately, since the State

House of Representatives is in session today, I am unable to attend

your meeting in person, however, I do have very strong feelings regarding the abandoned mine projects left undone in the Northeast

and am pleased to have this forum to share my thoughts with you.

At the beginning of the Year 2000, our state’s lands remain

scarred by the remnants of its past. Pennsylvania’s contribution of

coal to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and 20th Centuries

has left a legacy of depleted, dangerous terrain and polluted waterways throughout the commonwealth. Over 250,000 acres of mine

lands are abandoned and 2,400 miles of streams are polluted with

acid mine drainage spotting the state with hazards to health and

obstacles to growth. Pennsylvania has one-third of the Nation’s

abandoned mine lands. Currently, there are 44 underground mine

fires and 34 surface mines burning; throughout the state, there are

2,400 documented health and safety hazards and the estimate to

repair our land and water is 15 billion dollars. The Department of

Environmental Protection Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation

completes around 150 projects each year through the expenditure

of approximately 20 million dollars received from the Federal Government. Approximately 10 million dollars from that expenditure

goes to the bituminous region in Western Pennsylvania and 10 million goes to the anthracite region in the Northeast. From that Federal allocation, administrative costs are taken from the top. In the

northeast, after administrative costs are subtracted, only about

half of the original allocation of 10 million dollars remains for actual use on projects in the field. The cost to repair the projects already identified in just my legislative district, the 115th, is greater

than the total yearly expenditure for the entire anthracite region

of Central and Northeastern Pennsylvania. At this rate of funding

and reclamation, our state’s present problems will be solved in just

under 469 years. Needless to say, that is totally unacceptable. The

recent Growing Greener law, House Bill 868, creates the Environmental Stewardship and Watershed Protection Fund. From that

fund, the Department of Environmental Protection will receive a

percentage to serve, in part, as a state funding source for abandoned mine reclamation projects within DEP. However, since abandoned mine projects will compete against restoration projects for

watersheds and reclamation projects for oil and gas wells, no one

knows how much money the state will contribute in the future.

Budgets for mine projects cannot rely upon a floating percentage

that has no statutory limits. Therefore, though Growing Greener

offers potential for new state contributions to abandoned mine reclamation, the value of that effort is yet unproven. As our state

faces the immense environmental challenge of reclaiming its damaged lands, programs such as Growing Greener and other related

state efforts such as Reclaim Pennsylvania, frankly, are steps in

56

the right direction with proper intentions but which are nearly insignificant when compared to the enormity of the cleanup task.

While these efforts are underway to scrape together funds and

stretch resources to accomplish just a few of the health and safety

projects necessary throughout the state, the Federal Abandoned

Mine Reclamation Fund grows. I am aware of the obvious budgetary maneuverings that has placed the more than 1 billion dollars

of this fund out of grasp of needy states. However, the fund still

grows. We who are involved in this issue understand why the billion-dollar jackpot is not to be allocated. But why should companies

continue to contribute dollars that could be spent by states on

cleanup efforts to a fund that is an established budgetary facade?

The trust fund needs no additional dollars if they are to be used

merely as accounting tools to balance the Federal budget. Obviously, the yearly payments by mining companies at work in this

state would be best used for cleanup projects within Pennsylvania’s

borders. The freezing of its assets has thwarted the purpose of the

Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund. By returning the new contributions, those yearly allocations could be spent wisely before

they are lost along with the other resources now awaiting allocation in the fund. I urge the Committee to support the return of

these yearly contributions to the states in which the contributing

company mines. While the spoiled lands of the northeast await reclamation, its economy and its people suffer. Opportunities for economic rehabilitation are lost because of spoiled landscapes and polluted waters. Simply stated, quick and complete reclamation will

result in quick and complete economic recovery. Every dollar that

is spent in mine reclamation prepares the land for economic investment, whereas, abandoned mines are now wasted property, each

reclaimed site becomes a land of opportunity. I have submitted a

list of projects to the Committee for its file that are identified for

reclamation within my legislative district in Lackawanna County.

Each of these sites is a present-day danger and represents a lost

opportunity for residential and economic development. With your

help, the lands of the northeast will no longer be a scarred testament to Pennsylvania’s past but will become a reclaimed promise

for its future. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Staback follows:]

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

The CHAIRMAN. I thank you. I have a couple of short questions.

Thanks to the panel for your testimony, No. 1. Mr. Campbell, we

have a little problem with a lot of our agencies in that some people

don’t see the forest for the trees. Are you aware of any EPA-implemented regulations for soil, air and water quality that get in the

way of bringing more efficient on-the-ground solutions to mine

cleanup, and if so, how do we get around those problems?

Mr. CAMPBELL. I am not aware of any particular regulations that

stand in the way currently, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. What about the ash—the coal ash, what is it?

Mr. SHERWOOD. Fly ash.

Mr. CAMPBELL. Well, I think the fly ash has not been an obstacle

of any specific reclamation project—.

The CHAIRMAN. I understand before your agency though someone

is proposing they make it a toxic—classify it as a toxic waste—hazardous waste, and if that occurs, there’s very little chance of really

reclaiming this land.

Mr. CAMPBELL. I am aware that that is being looked at in the

context of a broad variety of uses of ash.

The CHAIRMAN. Who in the world is recommending that?

Mr. CAMPBELL. Well, Mr. Chairman, this issue comes up in a

bunch of different contexts including areas where ash has been inappropriately used as fill, and the agency has not proposed to

change the current regulatory structure. I think the concerns specifically with respect to abandoned mine reclamation have been

very squarely raised to the agency, and we will make sure that

those concerns are addressed in a common-sense way before any

regulatory proposal or change is made.

The CHAIRMAN. I am not picking on you. I just don’t have a

whole lot of faith in your director and some of her ideas. I really

believe she cannot see the forest for the tress in solving problems.

You’re not the only agency that does this, because everybody can

give you a thousand reasons of why you can’t do it, and yet we

really still have the problem. So I want to suggest whatever you

can do, being from this region—remind them that I am very concerned that no one makes a stupid mistake of logically trying to

solve a problem by applying some idea out here that doesn’t work.

I just wanted to make sure of that.

Secondly, you talked about in 1994 you spent $12 million.

Mr. CAMPBELL. Since 1994, I think.

The CHAIRMAN. That’s not a whole lot of money. What’s in your

budget this year?

Mr. CAMPBELL. This year we are—it’s under—we’re still in the

process of allocating. As you know, there was at the last minute a

cut in the overall budget, and we’re as an agency in the process of

seeing how that cut is being allocated. So I will be able to get back

to the committee on the specific allocation for this year. But even

if we doubled the resources, Mr. Chairman, as you know, and as

the witnesses reflect, the problem here would dwarf our budget

even if we doubled the resources, and that’s one reason why we’ve

seen it as a priority to get something like Better America Bonds

moving forward so that the resources could be made available to

local governments, to communities that put together clean water

projects that would address problems like these.

89

The CHAIRMAN. Again, not you personally, I’d just like to see the

EPA start directing some of their real efforts toward solving this

existing problem that we know is there instead of worrying about

the particulate amount of volcanos in my State. I don’t have any

way yet to put a harness on a volcano. It might be suggested, but

I am not—Congress creates a lot of things, but I don’t think we can

do that. But that is really being considered because it is the one

factor that puts the particulate amount in the air that—in human

activity—that if, in fact, the EPA’s regulations were put in place,

that we could not meet air quality. And I keep saying this is a silly

idea, and nobody listens to me.

Mr. Dolence, Governor Ridge’s proposal, Growing Greener, but

the bill that I’ve introduced here, I believe the Governor supports

that, that would bring some money into your program, would it

not, about $50 million?

Mr. DOLENCE. This is the OCS?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, the OCS.

Mr. DOLENCE. I believe the Governor supported that in principle,

but there were some questions on the details of it.

The CHAIRMAN. But, as I understand it, I talked to him person- ally, he does support it. But it would bring about $50 million into

that package. Lawsuits, who would sue somebody for trying to

clean something up?

Mr. DOLENCE. Third-party lawsuits, sir—the impetus for the

Good Samaritan legislation was in western Pennsylvania, an abandoned discharge known as the Langeloth bore hole. It was a highiron alkaline discharge from a deep mine, and a local group had

suggested building a passive treatment system to drop the iron out

so it would not discharge into the stream. A local coal company

owned the property—well, it was not responsible because the discharge—came from the 1940’s, and said, I’ll sell you the land for

$1, 7 acres of prime land to build a wetland, because the coal company did not want to be liable under its ownership and control regulations of the Federal and State governments.

The local watershed group went—we’re worried about the liability as well. A third party could come along and say that is not

meeting the effluent standards and then sue the voluntary group

in Federal court. And that was a concern with many groups. They

could sue in State court as well. So we provided not only for environmental liability for those groups, but also if someone is working

there and got hurt, tripped and broke a wrist or an ankle, but it

was not due to the negligence of the group, then that person could

not sue the group as well. It took some of those legal barriers away

from those projects.

The CHAIRMAN. I think it’s a great idea, but I hate to see something discourage solving a problem, and this legislation could do it.

Ms. Blanchard, I just want to make one comment. This Committee that I’ve been chairing for 6 years has always requested

more money, about $20 million, and unfortunately I am not an appropriator. If I had my way, we’d eliminate the appropriating committee and the Budget Committee, and they’d let us authorize, who

listen to the people, figure out how to do it, but we try to get the

money to you because we know how valuable it is in this total

package. And we’re glad to see you’re working with EPA that heads

90

the States because this whole thing should be a joint effort. It cannot survive on its own, and just not on this problem of coal mines,

but any other area you’re trying to make a go.

Mr. Sherwood.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Ms. Blanchard, I want to commend the Office of

Surface Mining and all the great projects they’ve had. And as we

were in the air today, you could see where these reclamation

projects stood out. Here we’d be in the midst of devastated coal

ground, and there would be a ridge or a site hill that was planted

and looked like it had lots of grass on it, and it was a successful

project. But as Laure Carlo stated for Representative Staback, they

are such a small percentage. And I think that’s something we need

to stress today. All this money that’s been spent by the Office of

Surface Mining, the abandoned coal mine reclamation projects, if

you get in the air, as we did today, there are 10 or 20 times more

projects that need to be done than have ever been done. In other

words, there’s a nice little green spot in the middle of all these

culm banks and high walls and strip-mine pits, and so the process,

again, as Representative Staback’s testimony said, is just going to

take too long unless we find a new way to go about it.

The question I’d like to ask you, I was very interested that you

say OSM has developed with local nonprofit watershed organizations to improve water quality, and I’d like you to give me some

examples here in the 10th Congressional District on how they

work.

Ms. BLANCHARD. The one that—I am not sure exactly where the

boundaries are on—we haven’t had any applications from the 10th

District. This is something that when a local community organization would approach—a watershed group would approach the Office

of Surface Mining, and then we would evaluate their particular

projects and be able to see if we’re able the give the money. But

as of right now, we haven’t received any requests from the local

watersheds. We would certainly encourage local groups to be able

to provide—.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Well, there’s been tremendous work done cleaning up the Lackawanna River and great success made, and yet

today when we flew up the river by Old Forge, you could see it go

from blue to orange and then back to blue again. So it’s just that

we have those problems that we have to work on.

And, Brad, I’ve got to get back to the fly ash deal because I don’t

think we can make that important enough. But we have sent a letter to Secretary Browner, my colleagues and I, asking that that be

turned around because we can’t understand a ruling by EPA that

would disincentivize the mine land reclamation. And one of the

things that has worked so well to clean up some of our culm banks

is the ruling a few years ago where the power companies had to

buy the power. So, you know, they’re burning all this culm, producing power, it’s working, they’re cleaning things up, but then we

have to use the fly ash. It has to be land-filled, it has to be used,

and to make it more difficult sounds counterproductive to me.

Mr. CAMPBELL. I agree. I’ve seen the press accounts and some

columns on this issue. Again, there isn’t even a proposal yet, but

let me just offer the assurance that I will personally focus on this

91

and make sure that any proposal that comes forward does not

present the kind of issues you present.

And let me also acknowledge Bernie Sarnopski of the EPA staff,

who is not only an expert on this problem, but is a son of this region, and I’ll make sure that we have expert advice to make sure

it doesn’t present any of those obstacles.

The CHAIRMAN. Not to pick on you, Brad, but you know the last

of the EPA under a different administration—by the way, it happened to be my administration—they insisted upon putting additives in our gasoline in Alaska, and we fought that tooth and nail,

and rightfully so. We find out now that someone’s got egg on their

face because it creates too many illnesses, and we said that at that

time because—I don’t know who ever came up with the idea of putting this stuff in the gas. It was supposed to make it cleaner, and

instead it added formaldehyde in the air. And we have an aversion

there—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Alaska—that really hurt

people, but that’s besides the point.

Mr. Kanjorski.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me get the record

straight in a couple of moments.

Ms. Blanchard, I think you may be aware of the fact of the cost

per congressional district of reparable land. The 11th Congressional

District of Pennsylvania has the highest price tag, as I understand

it, of the Office of Surface Mining for cleanup and reclamation; is

that correct?

Ms. BLANCHARD. Well, what I stated previously was that for the

whole anthracite area, that it would be—1.9 billion is the amount

that is in there right now for cleanup in the inventory system.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Right. But as I understand, the study does it in

more detail on a congressional district by congressional district. Apparently my district, the 11th, has the highest price tag. Mr. Rahall’s district in West Virginia has the second, and Mr. Boucher’s

district in Virginia has the third highest price tag. Do you have any

knowledge of that?

Ms. BLANCHARD. We received your letter requesting some information on this last Wednesday, and we’re in the process of checking it out to find out exactly what it is. Certainly, as you pointed

out, it’s one of the top two or three for sure.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Brad, I am just going to go at you for a second.

In terms of the Better America Bonds, you know that I favor those

bonds, but unless the administration changes the full faith and

credit requirements, unless they change that, they can only be

given to local government and municipalities, and unless they provide for the lack of comprehensive planning that’s in there now,

there’s absolutely no vital way for this type of massive cleanup—

that those bonds become usable. There’s no way that these 460

communities are going to come together and just all decide on one

plan. There’s no way they’re going to place full faith and credit in

their communities. I mean, we can’t even get that done for hospitals and schools.

And, finally, I think not only from what you’re talking about

what the EPA can do, what the Office of Surface Mining—the one

thing that’s lacking here—I think that the Chairman put his hand

on in our flyover today, and you may have heard that on the earVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:08 Nov 28, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00095 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 J:\67088.TXT HRESOUR2 PsN: HRESOUR2
92

phones when we were talking back and forth—this can’t be done

on a project-by-project basis. We’re going to end up spending an incredible fortune—I think the numbers, Robert, you gave about 10

million comes to Pennsylvania’s anthracite, and after you pay for

engineering costs and administration, only 5 million gets into the

field.

Mr. DOLENCE. That’s the construction costs.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Right.

Mr. DOLENCE. Those are on-the-ground dollars.

Mr. KANJORSKI. That’s only 50 percent that gets on the ground.

From my study of these projects, it’s 25 to 35 percent end up before

any work gets done on the ground because you’re going from

project to project bringing in engineers from all over the world or

country that are bidding on this stuff. They’re doing individual site

operations.

What we’re trying to make, Mr. Chairman, evident is that this

can’t be done a spotty project-to-project basis. It’s got to be done

comprehensively. We’ve got to get a cost containment on these engineering costs, design costs and inspection costs, and the real dollars have to flow to the ground.

I guess what I’d like to urge our distinguish panelists—and I

happen to agree with my good friend Mr. Staback, I think he’s got

it right on—but it’s a responsibility of not only myself, Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Holden to come up with some ideas as to how we

could fund this, but the agencies—you know, I am embarrassed

that we all sit here and say, well, the dispute is whether at the

present rate it’s going to take 260 years or 410 years, and that

doesn’t make anybody slip under the table and get embarrassed.

That means we’re closer to the American Revolution than we are

to cleanup, and maybe twice as far from cleanup. I don’t think

that’s acceptable.

And more problems are occurring. As the Chairman mentioned,

the additives to gasoline, I’ve been reading about it. Suddenly

that’ll get a high profile, everybody will run in there, and—I would

like to charge my administration, not the Chairman’s administration, to work with us in the Congress. If you don’t like our anthracite bonds, make the Better America Bonds work, but just don’t say

Better America Bonds, because I tell you right now they won’t

work as they’re presently constituted, Brad. And I am going to tell

you that whatever problem—I think all my colleagues locally that

represent Pennsylvania—this is a strange State in terms—we have

2,500 municipalities, 67 counties and a total lack of planning probably in 90 percent of our municipal governments, and I think, Robert, you know that. That’s Pennsylvania’s problem. So we need

somebody comprehensively to—understanding what this concept is,

to come with the Federal Government and say, here’s how we can

help, and here’s some ideas on how it can be done; the State government coming in and saying, here’s what we can do and how we

can help administer and get this done; and then at the local level

and the communities themselves and the people. But if we keep

talking about how wonderfully we’ve done for the last 25 years, and

we spend $10 million a year, and we’re only going to have to do

that for the next 400 years, that doesn’t give me an awful lot of

93

satisfaction or even—it doesn’t impress me that we’ve got people

really thinking about this.

So I’ve worked with Cathy Karpan, and I’ve worked with you,

Brad, in your other capacity and look forward to your service now

in region three as the administrator. But we really have to come

within the next month or 2 or 3 months with a very comprehensive

program that everybody can live with, that we believe that we can

implement and get done, and then let the Congress and let the

Chairman take it on his shoulders and carry it down the field and

score that touchdown for us. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Tim.

Mr. HOLDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ms. Blanchard, just one quick question—and you might have

said it in your testimony—how much revenue was generated into

the trust fund, and then how much was appropriated in the last

budget cycle? Something like 390 million generated and only 310

appropriated?

Ms. BLANCHARD. We had 275 million coming in and the 196 million go out.

Mr. HOLDEN. So about 80 million unspent.

The CHAIRMAN. Plus all the interest.

Mr. HOLDEN. Thank you.

And then finally, Brad, I just want to associate myself with remarks made by the Chairman and by Mr. Sherwood dealing with

the fly ash. I know the administrator knows clear well where the

Pennsylvania delegation stands on this issue, but it really is disheartening when you think of this 100 years of eyesores that we

face. And then finally through the Purple legislation we finally find

a use and a way to get rid of these culm banks, and then to have

this proposal, whether it’s real or implied, about being classified as

hazardous waste, it really would be a giant step backward. And I

know you’ve been worked over twice already, but I wanted to land

a third punch and say that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Sherwood, do you have any other questions?

Mr. SHERWOOD. No.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Kanjorski?

Mr. KANJORSKI. I just want to thank the panel that came today

because I think we’re finally trying to just get to the issue, and I

appreciate all of your effort. I don’t want to appear as though I am

not genuinely pleased with the effort you’re making, but we need

even a stronger effort.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, I want to thank the panel again. I can say

my goal is to try to solve this problem, and frankly my conservation

reinvestment act will do part of that. And I tell my good colleagues

on the opposite side of the aisle and I tell my colleagues on this

side of the aisle, right, wrong or indifferent, when you read the papers, there’s $2 trillion now supposedly in surplus which may be

predicted, but if we’re going to do things, we ought to do things by

solving problems and not creating some new, great, grandiose program.

That’s one of my objections to President Clinton every day. You

read where he’s going to spend so many millions of dollars on a

new program, and I commend him for having the imagination, but

94

I also condemn him for not addressing this problem. This money

has been collected. We ought to take the money out of the Congress

and we ought to spend it and solve the problem, which would create tremendous wealth.

I mean, I am convinced of this. You have the power here, you

have the land mass here, you have the work force here, you have

a strong work ethic, and if you had the land space, you clean this

water up for New Jersey and Maryland and the rest of it and also

get this land cleaned up, that’s what I would like to see done, and

we can do it jointly. I will try to do that. I can’t do it all by myself.

This is going to take a lot of joint effort. I think that Mr. Kanjorski

said a good thing. I want the administration to come down with

some good ideas; not a new idea on something else, but something

that addresses this problem. With that you’re— .

Mr. DOLENCE. Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, may I?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mr. DOLENCE. I’d like to offer to Brad to share with him our position that this—the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s position on

the ash. And there’s an element that is missing in the discussion

so far, and that is if the ash is classified as hazardous, it is not

only going to be a burden to the cogens, it will put them out of

business. We will not have the benefit from the ash. We will not

have the culm being cleaned up, and we won’t have that green—

I consider green electricity coming from those cogens. Those cogens

will shut down because they’re on a fixed-cost basis. And I wanted

to emphasize that.

I think Mr. Kanjorski is right on the mark. A holistic approach,

that was the whole impetus behind our Growing Greener initiative,

and I can’t agree more that we look at the big picture. You don’t

just look at one project and another one. We’re looking at them watershed by watershed.

And as a final note on the market, remining in Pennsylvania in

1998, we received 3,300 acres of reclamation free by the coal industry. Government, the Federal EPA, OSM, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we spent $26 million and reclaimed 2,000 acres. We need

to maintain a market, especially in anthracite. That is a unique

product, and it is hurting. It does not have the market that bituminous has. In anthracite—the surface mining in anthracite is well

over 90 percent remining, meaning 90 percent of the time when an

operator goes out there and mines, he or she is reclaiming old

abandoned sites at no cost to the taxpayer. You want to talk about

holistic and being smart on how we spend our dollars, if we put

that industry out of business, we lose it. It’ll never come back.

Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. I appreciate that. As you know, my stand on the

mining has been very strong because those that are mining are

doing it right, and I don’t think they should pay for the sins of

those who created it. I go back to World War II. That’s when all

this damage really was done, not all of it, but some of it and most

of it, and we ought to recognize that.

With that, you’re excused. Thank you very much. If you would

like to stay with us, you can. If you’d like to leave, that’s your prerogative.

95

We will have the panel III, Andy Skrip, Vice President of the

Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce; David Donlin, President,

Economic Development Council of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Executive Director, Schuylkill Chamber of Commerce; and Bernard

McGurl, Executive Director of Lackawanna River Corridor Association.

And if you would, Mr. Sherwood, would you take the gavel for

me and run this for a moment.

Mr. SHERWOOD. [Presiding.] Certainly.

We are going to hear from Andy Skrip, the Vice President of the

Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce, and no one will be better

able to tell us the problems that are associated with economic development in conjunction with the scars of our anthracite heritage.

Andy.

STATEMENTS OF ANDY SKRIP, VICE PRESIDENT, SCRANTON

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE; DAVID A. DONLIN, PRESIDENT,

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL OF NORTHEASTERN

PENNSYLVANIA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SCHUYLKILL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE; AND BERNARD McGURL, EXECUTIVE

DIRECTOR, LACKAWANNA RIVER CORRIDOR ASSOCIATION

STATEMENT OF ANDY SKRIP

Mr. SKRIP. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Members of the

Committee on Resources. My name is Andy Skrip. I am the vice

president of the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce. I am

here today representing the Chamber and the Scranton Lackawanna Industrial Building Company, SLIBCO, the industrial development arm of the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. SHERWOOD. If we’re not quiet in the back, we can’t run the

hearing.

Continue.

Mr. SKRIP. I have been associated with the Chamber and

SLIBCO for 20 years and have been involved with economic development for 25 years.

On behalf of the Chamber’s board of directors and our membership consisting of over 2,600 businesses in the greater Scranton

area, I am here to share with the committee members mine land

reclamation problems specific to northeastern Pennsylvania.

By way of background, the Scranton Lackawanna Industrial

Building Company, SLIBCO, is a not-for-profit community economic development company. Our mission is to create and retain

jobs by developing real estate and obtaining financing for businesses.

SLIBCO was created out of necessity when the coal industry bottomed out after World War II and post-war depression had set in

on northeastern Pennsylvania. Under the SLIBCO umbrella, public

and private sectors began pooling their resources to attract businesses to the greater Scranton area. Since SLIBCO’s inception over

55 years ago, SLIBCO has been responsible for the planning, financing and/or construction of over 287 projects, creating over

25,000 new jobs and adding approximately $423 million to the

economy.

96

SLIBCO currently owns six buildings totaling over 1.1 million

square feet and leases them to J.C. Penney, Prudential, Fleet Financial Services, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Diversified Information Technologies. We also have developed 10 office, technology and industrial parks in Lackawanna County.

SLIBCO is the largest developer of abandoned mine lands in

Lackawanna County and has direct experience in the marketing

and development of these lands.

As you are aware, the economic development in the United

States is fierce. Every state and community throughout the Nation

are fighting for new corporate expansions and relocations, new jobs

for their communities. The marketing of lands within the mining

measures as they currently exist will always place northeastern

Pennsylvania at a disadvantage of attracting industry to the area

when these sites are compared to other sites without similar problems.

The result of being in this disadvantaged position are loss of jobs

for the community and the loss of millions of dollars invested into

the state through our payroll, services and operating expenditures.

Our experience in Lackawanna County has borne out these observations. The Scranton labor market has been one of persistent and

substantial unemployment and underdevelopment for decades.

The industrial sites available in the older industrial areas of

Lackawanna County situated over abandoned mines have been

available for decades, but have failed to attract new investment.

The successes in attracting high technology, office and growth industries have occurred primarily at greenfield sites outside of the

mining measures. These include the Northrop Grumman facility in

Benton Township, Chrysalis facility in Scott Township, Fleet Financial Services, Cigna, Alliance Capital at the Glenmaura Corporate Center, Prudential and J.C. Penney offices at the Office

Park at Montage and Met Life in Abington Executive Park.

The development of attractive business parks within abandoned

mine areas has many challenges. The cost, risk, appearance, engineering challenges and time delays are all the barriers that prevent the reuse of these properties for job-producing locations.

Before a company would even consider sites over mined areas,

they would have to evaluate the risk. Up-front moneys would have

to be spent for subsurface geotechnical reports, testing and drilling.

Then ultimately, if chosen to proceed to the next step, the premium

cost to design and construct remedial measures such as the removal of above-grade structures, the filling of mine openings and

voids, grading and compaction of strip pits are all too often costprohibitive. These additional tasks take time and money that the

prospective companies are not willing to make, especially if other

competing sites don’t require the same outlay and time delay.

Another major environmental and liability concern associated

with these sites are the stripping pits and deep topographic depressions. These geological features were historically used as community dumping sites. Even today, illegal dumpers use these areas as

dump sites for all types of waste.

Land located within the mining measures have poor soil conditions and/or subsurface voids which presents a high risk of subsidence problems or differential settlement.

97

One of the basic rules of risk management is avoidance. Site selection teams and executives use engineering reports and common

sense that ultimately forces them to eliminate abandoned mine

lands because of the risk. Coal-scarred land with the existence of

culm banks, red ash piles, strip pits and the lack of vegetation are

contrary to the clean and sleek corporate image of the 21st century

corporate America. These lands not only bear the additional cost

and risk, but studies have shown direct links between employee

morale and productivity relative to operating in such an unsightly

environment.

Another key factor employers consider is the amount of time necessary to get the operation up and running. Time issue all boils

down to identifying an area where the company’s performance contracts can be executed. This always requires a fast-tracked project.

The major component to a fast-track project is the availability of

land or buildings that already have all the necessary permits and

approvals to start construction. In other words, the site must be

ready to go. Unfortunately, prospective companies know the impacts, cost, the risk, time, aesthetics and image of developing over

mining measures and automatically eliminate these sites without

any consideration.

The failure to develop industrial land sufficiently attractive to induce job-producing investment by growing, technologically competitive industries will result in continued economic stagnation, substandard income, underemployment and the continued out-migration of our young minds, our children.

The existing abandoned mine land program as authorized under

Title IV of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of

1977, SMCRA, has served our region well. Under SMCRA, the

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the Bureau

of Abandoned Mine Reclamation has abated many dangerous conditions such as open mine shafts and dangerous high walls and has

regraded many of our blackfields.

Also under SMCRA, the Office of Surface Mining addresses

emergency AML problems. While SMCRA has addressed and continues to address many health, safety and environmental problems

in northeastern Pennsylvania, there are two reasons why SMCRA

funding alone cannot address the reuse of abandoned mine lands

for industrial development.

One, under SMCRA, AML reclamation is prioritized with health

and safety problems ranking highest, environmental problems

ranking next, then followed by economic development. Currently,

SMCRA guidelines limit reclamation activities at health, safety

and environmental problem sites to regrading and preclude the additional compaction and subsurface stabilization required to prepare a site for industrial reuses.

Two, Pennsylvania has the largest inventory of abandoned mine

land problems in the country, and northeastern Pennsylvania has

its fair share, or unfair share, of the Commonwealth’s problem

areas. Given the current AML fund appropriation levels, it will be

decades, if not centuries, before AML moneys can be expended to

economic development.

In summary, if we are to realize the productive reuses of the

thousands of acres of blackfield sites in northeastern Pennsylvania,

98

we need the financial resources to eliminate these barriers and provide a level playing field for northeast Pennsylvania in our effort

to attract corporate expansion and relocation.

Mr. Chairman and committee members, we need to augment

SMCRA with special legislation to provide additional grant funding

to stabilize, compact and revegetate mine-scarred lands if we truly

want to put these degraded and abandoned lands back to productive use.

Thank you for your time, and I will be happy to assist your Committee in the future.

The CHAIRMAN. [Presiding.] Thank you, Andy.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Skrip follows:]

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

The CHAIRMAN. David.

STATEMENT OF DAVID A. DONLIN

Mr. DONLIN. Thank you Congressman, Congressman Sherwood,

Congressman Holden. I am not an expert on anthracite mining, nor

am I an environmental expert, but all my life has been spent here

in the anthracite coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, with the

exception of service to my country in the Air Force.

For nearly 10 years I have served as the paid executive of the

Schuylkill Chamber of Commerce, which is based in Pottsville. I

currently serve as the volunteer president of the Economic Development Council of Northeastern Pennsylvania, which serves seven of

our counties. I have served in many volunteer leadership positions

in economic and community development and in human services

capacities in three of our counties. Another current voluntary involvement is as a task force cochair on economic development for

Schuylkill County’s VISION, a citizen-based program that’s developed a strategic plan for the recreation of Schuylkill County. I

share the experience of many of my professional colleagues

throughout the region, that of working to recreate communities and

opportunities while having one arm tied behind our backs.

The visionary legislative proposal that you are considering here

in Scranton this afternoon represents the beginning of what I believe is the third phase of our regional restoration to the benefits

of full American citizenship. After our region and our ancestors

fueled the industrial revolution in America, we were left with the

environmental devastation and the almost total destruction of our

regional economy. Both of these experiences have been quantified

and recorded for history.

I also happen to believe that the invisible devastation that occurred to our collective human dignity still remains, limiting our

capacity to develop our region’s infrastructure or our collective

human potential. We have been successful in surviving 25 percent

unemployment rates over decades by self-investment in jobs with

limited pay and benefits that represented the post-World War II

experience. Not only did we end up at that time beginning to export some of our finest and well-educated sons and daughters, because of the limited opportunity of that era, we were also exporting

the environmental residuals of the devastating mining experience

of the previous hundred years. Unfortunately, this experience continues today. However, positive experiences that we did discover at

that time were found in the excellent work ethic of our neighbors.

Our second phase has been more successful in that our excellent

educational institutions working together with community-based

local, regional, State and Federal development organizations have

created a work force with greater skills and that same strong work

ethic. Wages and benefits have grown, and unemployment has been

reduced, but we still lag behind our State and Nation in both employment and wage and benefit programs, and we still lack the regional community and the financial capacities to tackle large

projects because of the absence of developable land and the conditions of the land that we have inherited.

This proposal, in my opinion, represents the great opportunity

that our region needs to once again participate as equals in the

110

American society. The restoration of our sacred lands will reestablish our collective spirit and allow all of us to work together to

share in the great benefits of being United States citizens.

Through the use of the opportunities represented in this program, we can work through regional mechanisms, leverage additional public and private investment using as examples the American Heritage River Initiative, the Commonwealth’s Keystone Opportunity Zone Program and others to reclaim our land and to

move forward as a regional community. We could recreate the region, and most importantly, in my opinion, to create that new vision of northeastern Pennsylvania, a community that shares the

same opportunities, the same environmental qualities, the same

spirit that has made the United States a great country.

Through this new commitment to northeastern Pennsylvania, we

can continue our great work ethic and create new investment opportunities that will make our region an attractive quality-of-life

experience. We will be able to recover many of our sons and daughters who have migrated away from home to rejoin their families,

to offer an entirely new generational experience for new citizens

that will be moving to our communities, and stop export of the acid

mine water that pollutes all of the northeastern Pennsylvania tributaries all the way to the Chesapeake Bay.

The anthracite mining experience of past generations has left us

with our heritage, both good and bad. Currently, the anthracite industry through favorable tax credit consideration by the Congress

back in the 1980’s initiated a number of cogeneration facilities that

provide appropriate environmental measures that have been absent

in the past. Proposals for conversion of coal energy to liquid fuel

and carbon research technology both represent new approaches to

anthracite coal recovery that also recognize and meet environmental standards of the United States in the 21st Century. This

proposal would assist us in cleaning up our region, restoring its

natural beauty, while also recognizing new technologies that meet

environmental requirements.

Many regions of the United States have suffered through environmental and economic devastation and with public investment

have recovered to become important cogs in the United States economy. Here in northeastern Pennsylvania we have shared our resources by fueling the industrial revolution which built the United

States. We have done everything within our collective capacity to

reach the American dream. The opportunity represented in this

proposal created by our congressional delegation is the expressway

to our future of national equality as a region. It is our road to full

participation in the wonderful experience encompassed in being

United States citizens. We thank you for your interest and look forward to a wonderful new partnership in recreating northeastern

Pennsylvania.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, David. And if you ever think about

going into a second career, you might think about writing.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Donlin follows:]

111

112

113

114

The CHAIRMAN. Bernard.

STATEMENT OF BERNARD McGURL

Mr. MCGURL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Bernard

McGurl. I am the executive director of the Lackawanna River Corridor Association, a nonprofit community watershed associated created in 1987 to promote the restoration of the Lackawanna River.

And I’d like to thank you, Mr. Chairman, Congressman Sherwood,

Congressman Holden, Congressman Kanjorski, and your staff for

conducting this hearing. I am pleased to provide this testimony on

the impacts that over 150 years of anthracite mining and related

activities have had on the Lackawanna River and its watershed.

It’s appropriate that this hearing occurs in the winter when the

stark legacy of the anthracite industry is more visible along our

rivers and hillsides. We had an ample opportunity to see that in

our flight this morning. Issuing from these seemingly static scars

are a wide variety of active and ongoing problems which continue

to adversely affect the environment and the economy of northeast

Pennsylvania.

I believe it is useful to understand the scope of these complex

issues in a historical context. While the intent of the Surface Mining Reclamation and Control Act of 1977 was to promote the reclamation, the level of funding authorized in subsequent years by

Congress has been inadequate and has not resulted in the type of

holistic and comprehensive efforts that many of us in the anthracite region believe are necessary to restore the environmental and

economic vitality of the region.

Again, in an historic context, I offer one exhibit, a map prepared

in 1904 by William Dodge, a mining engineer. This map, this is a

blueprint copy of it, shows the location of breakers up and down

the Lackawanna and Susquehanna watersheds. If you can imagine,

the rivers are like tree trunks, and the coal mines are like the bad

fruits on there that have been polluting the water since mining

first began. This study was commissioned by the State’s mining engineers in cooperation with some of the mining companies in 1904.

They knew they had a problem then. It was studied and it’s been

studied for a hundred years, and it’s time to do something about

it.

In addition to the direct flows of acid mine drainage from flooded

underground workings, our rivers are impacted by the loss of freshwater flows in the tributary streams. The mining that has occurred

underneath these streams has resulted in the water leaking out of

the stream beds and percolating down into the flooded mine voids.

These result in added flows of surface water to the interrupted

ground water flows, with both of these streams of water interacting

with the pyritic materials in the coal measures forming acidic solutions which reenter the rivers through outflow tunnels or bore

holes lower in the watersheds. The dried-up tributary stream corridors are then subject to dysfunctional morphology during storm

events. These dry stream beds are rapidly surcharged with urban

storm water flows and carry large quantities of coal waste sediments into the rivers.

The surface features of abandoned mine lands are a major source

of these sediments. Culm dumps, those large black mountains

115

which are such an evident feature of the man-made topography,

are piles of sorted coal and rock waste, a residual of the coal preparation process. Culm has a marginal fuel value. It varies from 60

to 100 percent rock, but there are large amounts of coal embedded

in the rock material. These piles are expensive to remove or regrade on their own. The material is generally not adequate to support the construction of buildings. This material has obviously,

with the cogeneration industry, a fuel value and an economic value.

There are many culm dumps actually located adjacent to or actually on the Lackawanna floodplain and in several cases, in the riverbed itself. We have a dump up in Jessup at the mouth of the

GrassyIsland Creek where a 20,000 cubic yard mass of material

was washed into the creek and down into the river during the

floods in 1996.

Other notable features are some of the red ash piles we saw

today. These are culm dumps where the residual coal is burned. In

some cases these fires have continued over a 50- to 75-year period.

These ash piles are again used for aggregate purposes. They have

the potential of supporting some types of buildings. Other piles

that we saw today were the rock piles and the overburden piles

that are other features of the stripping activities. The stripping pits

and overburden piles themselves are remnants of open-pit surface

mining, and it’s common on the flanks of the Lackawanna and Wyoming Valley as the coal outcrops toward the ridge tops. Many of

these mining sites were created in response to peak market demands during the First and Second World War when there were

no requirements for reclamation, and the expedition of the war effort meant to get the coal out and worry about the damages later.

Strip mining along the outcrops was common from 1900 through

the 1960’s. In fact, several strip mining activities continue in the

northern anthracite field, although it is diminishing as the years

go by. There are greater amounts of strip mining and remining activities in the southern and middle field.

The use of culm material as a fuel source for auxiliary fuel in fluidized bed electric cogeneration plants is another factor affecting

mine reclamation issues as well as the economics of site reclamation. The recent action by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposing to classify culm material combustion ash as a hazardous waste may unfortunately and unwisely, I believe, remove

the market asset of culm material as a fuel and make the reclamation of culm sites and associated mine sites more expensive and

problematic. Culm ash has a variety of uses in reclamation work

both geotechnically and agronomically. The loss of this product will

be detrimental to the reclamation in the anthracite region.

A major consideration affecting the economic reuse of anthracite

mine sites is surface integrity and subsurface stability. Due to the

nature of historic underground mining practices and surface alterations, the geotechnical considerations creating a buildable mine

reclamationsite are complex. The presence and condition of underground workings, their depth below the surface, the condition and

nature of the intervening rock strata and the situation of subsurface hydrology are all factors which must be considered by anyone wishing to build in the anthracite fields. The situations at sites

116

within reclaimed strip mine pits have the additional concern of

proper compaction when new building construction will occur.

These conditions and situations that I have just discussed are

only the physical challenges we face. I believe that Congress must

give new tools, resources and capabilities to conduct more effective,

multiobjective reclamation activities. We need not only reclaim the

land and water resources, but to use the process and product to advance the economic stability of our communities to compete in the

global market of the 21st century.

The CHAIRMAN. How much more do you have?

Mr. MCGURL. Just one more page.

I just refer briefly to some observations. I believe we need new

tools to get reclamation work underway. I believe the current implementation strategy is not going to be effective even with new

funding through existing OSM or EPA programs. I believe that we

need a regional program that has a strong county and watershedbased source of local decisionmaking. I believe that the county/watershed reclamation should be a partnership effort; it should be

consensus-based, and we should have implementation agencies on

a local level. The involvement of State and Federal agencies with

this process is vital. I believe that restoration programs need to

have multiobjective outcomes. Environmental restoration needs to

address land and water recovery. Site reuse needs to make both

economic and environmental sense and have broad economic and

community benefit. Projects need to be integrated into community

plans and act as an alternative to sprawl. Each project process and

product needs to have an ongoing goal of stewardship and sustainability.

In summary, I would also note that the reclamation of abandoned mine sites offers this region and the Nation an opportunity

to reutilize these valuable industrial resources. Many of the sites

are adjacent to existing road and rail infracture. By focusing new

industrial, commercial and institution uses of these abandoned

mine sites, we will provide our communities with focused growth

and further protect our agricultural, timberlands, watershed areas

and natural habitat from unwise urban sprawl and speculative development. Our reclamation of abandoned mine lands can help us

restore the natural functions to our rivers and watersheds, enhancing downstream waters such as the Chesapeake and Delaware estuaries.

And last I suggest that we understand that water is a carrier of

messages. It tells everyone downstream how well we understand

and value our environment. Progressive action by Congress can

provide us with the capacity to enhance the environmental value

of the messages that flow downstream clean and clear from our anthracite headwaters to our great east coast estuaries. These are

messages that can enhance the lives of millions of our fellow citizens. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Bernard.

[The prepared statement of Mr. McGurl follows:]

117

118

119

120

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Dolence and Skrip, both of you, David, you’re

in the private sector, right?

Mr. SKRIP. Right.

Mr. DONLIN. Private, nonprofit.

The CHAIRMAN. I am just curious. Do you think—and I happen—

Congressman Kanjorski’s reclamation bonds in the private sector,

do you think that that can be sold? Would people be interested in

those type of bonds? I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but—.

Mr. DONLIN. Congressman, I think they would, first of all, with

the Congressman’s sales capacity, but more specifically corporate

America’s interested in good investment, and they’re interested in

helping us as communities progress, so I believe that it’s a saleable

commodity.

The CHAIRMAN. I am going to make a suggestion. I can do it, but

I think you ought to do it. You ought to invite the Secretary of

Treasury up here and maybe Bill Archer of Ways and Means to try

to educate them, because I think you’re right. There are people

looking to invest money, and it’s something—I am not questioning

you—I just—the private sector and not the Government— .

Mr. KANJORSKI. And if I may just respond just for the record, Mr.

Chairman, this didn’t come out of a vacuum. Actually, while H.R.

10 was pending, the banking bill, the insurance industry came to

me, and they asked whether or not they would be subjected to

CRAs, and I assured them not with this bill. But not too far in the

future the banks are going to come in and say, we want an even

playing field, so we want to be excluded from CRAs, or we want

the insurance companies included. I think that’s where the trend

is going to be. So I said to them, you know, if they wanted the support of people like myself—and I have not been a proponent of

CRAs in the past—I said, why don’t you do something prophylactically. So the insurance companies went back and they came to me

and they said, we would like to participate in environmental and

economic development bonds and that they buy in their portfolio

about $20 billion of these bonds, and they said that they felt they

could probably cover that type of expenditure very readily.

So we’ve been working very closely with some investment banking houses and Wall Street, some outstanding legal firms to write

these bonds, and I think they’ve given us assurance of about—the

sale of the bond would be about 99.5 of face value, and they’re

ready market. As a matter of fact, I did talk to major CEOs on the

President’s plane, and they said they felt for their two companies

alone they’d pick up 4- to $6 billion.

The CHAIRMAN. I think it’s a great idea, but you’re going to have

to get it through Congress. That’s going to be our biggest problem.

There has to be an interest that’s evident, or otherwise they’re

going to—go ahead, David.

Mr. DONLIN. Congressman, we’ve had a conversation with Congressman Kanjorski from the Economic Development Council prospective—two conversations—with the intent of going to Congressman Sherwood and Congressman Holden and Congressman Gekas

to establish what we’ve referred to as a congressional summit.

They have the capacity to bring the government resources to us.

We have the capacity to recruit the private sector, to sit down and

start some real serious dialog.

121

The CHAIRMAN. We have to change the laws before this can happen, and it’s going to take some effort in the private sector to let

Congressmen know that this is a good idea, and that means the administration, too. They have to get on board, and I am sure you’ve

been talking to them about this.

Mr. McGurl, I am sure you’re aware I am a plaintiff against the

Clinton administration on the heritage rivers. I want clean water,

and I want you to have it, and I want it, and I want my rivers

clean. I just don’t like the administration taking the congressional

prerogative by executive order. And this administration has been

very guilty of doing this in many, many different areas. And I believe in this government very strongly.

America better wake up. We don’t want a king, regardless of

what administration. We don’t want the use of executive order.

This is a congressional obligation because under the proposal now,

you may have the money today, but it can be taken away from you

tomorrow. That is the role of the Congress, and it should act appropriately, and very frankly, right now I could not pass a heritage

river. I think the administration is wrong, but other than that, I

think you make some great points.

By the way, are you supporting the Carroll legislation?

Mr. MCGURL. Yes. I am.

The CHAIRMAN. Your recognition goes a lot higher.

Mr. MCGURL. I am glad you brought that up. I was looking for

an opportunity to encourage the process through the appropriations

committee.

The CHAIRMAN. You made some very good comments in your

presentation and most of them I support. I think all of you have

made good comments. Mr. Sherwood.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Dave, Andy gave some very definite thoughts

about bringing industry in and they had reasons not to come because of the anthracite scarring and your testimony was a little

more esoteric and I didn’t hear that from you. But have you had

that same experience?

Mr. DONLIN. Congressman, as Andy was testifying—and I was

not privy to his testimony—it was recreating our actual experience

in Schuylkill County, absolutely, the same experience.

Mr. SKRIP. If I can add to that, Congressman Kanjorski mentioned about selling these bonds to insurance companies. And in

Lackawanna County there’s a total of five insurance companies

that came into the area that we have contact with, Prudential, Met

Life, Cigna, Kemper, AIG. Not one of these companies are in a

brown field site. They all went for greenfield sites because of the

risk involved and that’s a pretty good example and we do have contact with these insurance companies.

The CHAIRMAN. All of you mentioned it and it was mentioned on

the flight today about compacting when we do reclamation work.

Should we change that where they have to compact because it

takes 35 to 40 years now—.

Mr. SKRIP. You’re absolutely right. The sites that you saw today,

the greenfield sites that are now reclaimed, they were big holes

and the material was just dumped in the holes. They were not compacted. A company just can’t locate on that particular site. It has

to be compacted. Or for this building here, as an example, there’s

122

probably more than a half dozen veins of coal underneath this

building and I would bet there was either caissons, pylons or concrete foundations underneath the foundation itself just to support

the building. So again we need more than just grading off the site.

We need proper compaction of these sites to buildupon.

The CHAIRMAN. What about the areas of deep shaft mine? Most

of what we’ve seen today, other than when we went to Don’s area,

was strip mining or open surface mining. The shaft themselves, if

we reclaim the land on top is there enough weight to support—do

you have to compact it if there’s a shaft underneath there or does

that have to be dropped?

Mr. SKRIP. The problem is we only see part of the problem when

you fly over the area. The biggest problem is what you don’t see.

And for the most part the mining engineers had very good mapping

of where the shafts were and at times you have to fill them in,

flush them, whatever it might take. So again, it’s all risky business

for a company to—.

The CHAIRMAN. Part of this reclamation that we’re talking

about—that I heard 15 billion, 4.5 billion, all of the billions of dollars, does that include imploding those shafts to make it stable?

Mr. SKRIP. Or filling them in, yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Wouldn’t imploding make it a lot easier?

Mr. KANJORSKI. You really can’t do it. You’d be fracturing everything above it. Plus, the fly ash and with the culm banks, pulverizing and flushing and filling the mines and they’re getting up to

1 or 2 or 3,000 pounds per square inch so that it’s a tremendous

support system.

The CHAIRMAN. Within the shaft itself.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Right.

The CHAIRMAN. We could require the surface mining group, when

they do reclaim or with this organization, the area around the municipality should be compacted or it has no value.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Right.

The CHAIRMAN. You wouldn’t have to do it at all.

Mr. KANJORSKI. No. Right. That’s why the comprehensive plan is

necessary.

The CHAIRMAN. OK. Don.

Mr. SHERWOOD. We talked about that on the way over. We’d

have to have some rules. If it’s out in the middle of a mountain

somewhere you wouldn’t have to spend all the money to compact

it like you’re building a highway but if it’s liable to be used for industrial purposes, when it’s being done it’s gotta be compacted

then. And the people that come in are very worried about the engineering costs that they’d have to go through to put a building up

here because of the underground mining and the voids and so

that’s something that has to all be worked out with this.

The CHAIRMAN. Before I go to Tim, my building—the state has

no liability for those that voluntarily clean up something. These

reclamation areas which we’re talking about, if we were to clean

them up, wouldn’t it be advisable to put in non-liability for someone that goes in and uses it? What I am saying—let’s say if someone finally decides there’s something toxic on the site after—if I am

Procter and Gamble, I shouldn’t be liable. I mean somewhere along

123

the line there should be some way to make sure that they won’t—

make it attractive that they use the property.

Mr. SKRIP. There is state law in place to cover that. And for the

most part the mine scarred lands that we have, the black fields,

if you will, or the gray fields are not contaminated. They’re just

scarred.

The CHAIRMAN. The areas have been burned were contaminated—.

Mr. SKRIP. Stripped or scarred—.

The CHAIRMAN. But they’re not contaminated.

Mr. KANJORSKI. They’re not contaminated. Our problem is filling,

backfilling properly and supporting—underlying support. But you

can’t really get to it project by project.

The CHAIRMAN. I’ll right. Congressman.

Mr. HOLDEN. Dave, I guess of all the counties in the anthracite

field, I believe I am right that Schuylkill is probably the most active in current mining operations. How many miners do we have

employed in Schuylkill County now?

Mr. DONLIN. We have about 900 now of which 300 are in the cogeneration field from about 600 and that’s from a peak of 140,000

in about 1930.

Mr. KANJORSKI. You’ve got two-thirds of the active mining.

Mr. DONLIN. Right.

Mr. HOLDEN. Two-thirds. OK. So we certainly wouldn’t want to

do anything to disturb or harm that in any legislative proposal. But

going back to Paul’s concept or his idea here, in Schuylkill, the information I received is there’s about 17,000 acres of unclaimed coal

lands. Do you think most of that would be privately owned or publicly owned? Do the commissioners have control over most of it or—

.

Mr. DONLIN. Of unclaimed?

Mr. HOLDEN. Yes.

Mr. DONLIN. I believe most of that probably went into tax default

and it’s controlled by the county.

Mr. SHERWOOD. You mean unreclaimed, don’t you? I mean you

say unclaimed—.

Mr. DONLIN. Right.

Mr. HOLDEN. It’s not reclaimed. Right. Do you think the commissioner has any control over it? I know you don’t know for sure.

Mr. DONLIN. I would say the vast majority would be held by the

county commissioners.

Mr. HOLDEN. OK. But also now I guess we have continuous mine

operations that were in existence predating the 1970’s laws that

would have a great deal of acreage that they are not responsible

to reclaim. So if Paul’s idea would move forward, we would have

to have some way of eminent domaining that land so we could

clean that up also.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Well, that’s been one of the problems. Without

the ability to get all of the lands as part of the project, you can’t

clean up 500 acres and then have 500 acres next to it that remains

deteriorated. So there are ways of—but by doing it comprehensively

the theory is you could deal with the owners, you could deal with

the prospective re-users at some point to get the job done and you

124

may have the capacity but under the authority’s act of Pennsylvania you’d have the power of eminent domaining it.

But I’ve talked to major holdings and I think that with little difficulty we could probably acquire 90,000 acres that they understand or—they really like to be excused from further liability and

that would be part of the key to recovery, that they’d have no future liability. I think we’d end up getting a good portion of

Girardville, a lot of the older coal companies down there—there are

two coal companies around the Hazleton area that have 25,000

acres and I think you have a large one up here of about 10 or

15,000 acres. The fact of the matter is I don’t think that’s much

of a problem as long as we have one entity that’s dealing with it

on a consistent basis so we don’t have every municipality being

called upon to do their own arrangement or deal.

The CHAIRMAN. A bit of advice is that any legislation that we

work on, let’s not put the accommodation procedure. Let’s leave it

up to the state because you’re going to raise all kinds of—.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Absolutely.

The CHAIRMAN. Just leave it up to the state or the municipalities, whatever you prefer. Mr. Holden, do you have any other questions? I’d like to thank you for testifying and I appreciate your

time. You will have clean rivers and I’ll guarantee it. They will be

clean.

Mr. KANJORSKI. In less than 400 years.

The CHAIRMAN. As long as I am mature enough to catch a trout.

Mr. HOLDEN. We’ve got great trout fishing in the Lackawanna.

Mr. SHERWOOD. But the interesting thing to me was we had two

men here who have spent their careers in economic development

and one who has spent his career in environmental concerns and

they by and large—they told us the same thing and that’s very important.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Gentlemen. Appreciate it very much.

The next panel is Kenneth M. Klemow, Ph.D., Certified Senior

Ecologist and Botanist Professor of Biology, Wilkes University; Mr.

Alex E. Rogers, the Upper Susquehanna Lackawanna Watershed

American Heritage Rivers Initiative, the Pennsylvania GIS Consortium; Mr. Robert Hughes, Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for

Abandoned Mine Reclamation, EPCAMR. Gentlemen, please.

STATEMENT OF KENNETH M. KLEMOW, Ph.D., CERTIFIED SENIOR ECOLOGIST AND BOTANIST, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY,

WILKES UNIVERSITY

Mr. KLEMOW. My name is Kenneth Klemow, and I am on faculty

of Wilkes University. I am an ecologist and a botanist and I teach

courses in those areas.

I do want to thank the House Resources Committee for giving me

the opportunity to say a few words about the ecological effects of

mining, which actually could be a rather complicated topic. I want

to try to summarize the high points from the ten page essay that

I put together and that’s in your packet. I do want to apologize for

getting the date wrong on the original draft of the essay. Some of

us are still operating, in the past millenium. Regardless, I do refer

you to the more complete comments there.

125

Ecologically, mining has left a profound environmental impact on

Northeastern Pennsylvania and in fact one of the reasons why I

chose to be an ecologist, being a native of Hazleton, is I wanted to

help solve some of these problems. Therefore I especially

apppreciate the opportunity to testify at this hearing.

To be fair to the mine operators, most of the mining-related damage that we have occurred before laws protecting the environment

were enacted and before the value of natural ecosystems was recognized. Often you hear ecologists railing against mine operators, but

the rules were different then. Much of the mining occurred as we

were fighting wars, so environmental concerns took a lower priority.

As I note in my essay, the impacts of mining has affected both

terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems covering 100,000 to, 120,000

acres, In general the ecological impacts of mining have been to reduce biological diversity and a number of very important ecological

functions and values like ecological productivity, water purification,

erosion control and sustainability. These are all very important

functions that we now no longer have in mine damaged areas. Most

of the damage to terrestrial systems—and again I’d like to contrast

between terrestrial versus aquatic—has been by the deposition of

a stony infertile substrate. That substrate has high concentrations

of toxic minerals like iron and aluminum. It also has high acidity,

is very poor in holding onto water and during warm summer days,

it feels like you’re walking on a hot asphalt parking lot. Temperatures can exceed 150 degrees and so imagine if you were a little

tiny plant trying to grow in that thing and it’s real, real hard. And

so because of these stressful conditions, plants have a very difficult

time revegetating mine sites. Generally when you go out to these

sites you see a very scrubby community composed of low-value species like gray birch, trembling aspen, blackberry and spotted

knapweed.

Likewise, animal species are also very relatively sparse in mineimpacted sites because there’s just not enough water and food is

limited. And as you have heard before, culm banks also create

water pollution because they allow rain water to infiltrate thereby

getting into the acid bearing rocks.

Mining has also impacted aquatic communities in the form of

lakes, creeks, and wetlands and these again are viewed as being

critical habitats. I am sure being from Alaska you would be appreciative of that.

Large scale earth moving and deposition of mine land obliterated

all these aquatic habitats. And in fact, in many cases—I know that

Bernie mentioned this on the last panel—but we have a situation

where creeks that drain, mountains, lose flow as they hit the mine

lands. The clean water is forced underground and it becomes polluted which is a real big problem.

Another way of looking at the problem is that we have a disconnect between the headwater areas and the lower regions of the

watershed, based on recent studies we have done, we have seen

that in headwater areas, populations of stream-dwelling species are

reduced because of that and that’s a problem. Again, we all talked

about acid mine drainage and the problems that it causes. In fact,

it’s interesting because I am doing a watershed assessment with

126

the USGS streams that are impacted by acid mine drainage are essentially dead with respect to macro in vertebrates—the little bugs

that fish use as food.

Well, how do we fix the problem? As far as terrestrial systems

go, we can regrade the site, add fertilizer, we can add seeds of

grasses and legumes. This leads to a meadow like condition. While

I think that’s better than a culm bank, I have misgivings about the

current methods of reclamation and specifically methods that basically create a meadow. Eastern Pennsylvania is part of the eastern

decidous forest, and thus woodland is a more natural ecosystem

type. If we do decide to do reclamation for green space, we can’t

create meadows we must adopt a more smart reclamation technique that I’d be happy to talk about in more detail.

In terms of addressing aquatic situations, there are many things

we can do that actually act to work together but we really must

adopt an ecological stream restoration approach. Using that approach converts degrading watercourse into natural watercourses.

This is being done quite a bit out in the western part of the Country. However not much ecological stream restoration is being done

here in the eastern part. I think there’s a tremendous potential to

do ecological stream restoration in the anthracite fields.

And, again, we talked about treating acid mine drainage by use

of constructive wetlands. I’ve been involved in a couple of projects

like that with the earth conservancy. Our second project that I’d

be happy to show you, is a wetland that is 97 percent effective in

removing 300 pounds of iron per day. That mine drainage treatment project is in Hanover Township in Luzerne County.

To me it’s unfortunate that here we are in the Year 2000 and

we’re still talking about fixing the environmental impact of mining

and to implement good reclamation techniques. I think that considerable resources need to be put into this effort.

Also, as Congressman Kanjorski mentioned, we do have to look

at the big picture. We can’t just simply go on a project-by-project

basis. By looking at the big picture, we can actually get rid of the

causes and that will allow us to prevent pollution, therefore we

don’t have to treat as much if we can get to the causes. You’ve been

mentioning that it would take, what, about 400 years to wait for

the abandoned mine land fund to reclaim the area. Well, I can tell

you that nature can clean it up on its own given 400 to 500 years.

I think if you condemn this region to the current level of devastation for centuries, that would be very bad public policy. I think we

have the know-how, we have the will, we just need the resources.

We can and must do better to do reclamation. And I think, again,

that we need to have a collaboration of agency officials, the private

sector and local scientists who are interested. I think that once we

get everybody working together, we will be able to solve the problem here. So I thank you very much.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Doctor, very much. Alex.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Klemow follows:]

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

STATEMENT OF ALEX E. ROGERS, THE UPPER SUSQUEHANNALACKAWANNA WATERSHED AMERICAN HERITAGE RIVERS

INITIATIVE, AND THE PENNSYLVANIA GIS CONSORTIUM

Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Chairman, good afternoon and thankyou to all

the Members here for including me in this group of witnesses. I am

here today on behalf of the local American Heritage Rivers Initiative steering committee, and the Pennsylvania GIS Consortium,

which is a nonprofit organization jointly administered by two colleges in this area and that is working on issues that Ken talked

about with respect to the big picture. I want to tell you a little bit

about the big picture that we’re working on.

I understand the American Heritage Rivers Initiative has some

controversy associated with it with respect to the authorization or

initiation of the project but I want to tell you, Mr. Chairman, and

other Members of the Committee, that the program has had a tremendously valuable effect here locally in this region. What it has

done is brought together communities and environmental groups.

Congressman Sherwood you mentioned this, the chamber of commerce sits at the same table now with environmental groups and

also at that table are county leaders up here in Lackawanna County, county leaders in Luzerne and then down to Congressman

Holden’s district. What this program has done on the local level is

bring people together to talk about a common challenge that—no

words could say it more eloquently than the tour you took today

that those black mountains of coal waste that you saw—they’re not

only the unfortunate tombstones of the anthracite mining industry

that largely doesn’t exist, but they are truly the barriers that stand

between today’s environmental and economic problems here in the

region and I think tomorrow’s healthier and more robust Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Who have you heard from today? You’ve heard from local residents who live adjacent to these piles. You saw this morning how

closely those abandoned mine sites are to communities. It is strangling these communities. They cannot grow. It is isolating them

and it has, I think, as Congressman Kanjorski said, a tremendous

effect on the psychology of the area.

Who else have you heard from? You’ve heard from business

groups that have told you that they lose prospective companies who

look at the area and turn away as fast as they got here and you

heard from the Federal and state administrators of programs. It is

a sad state that 23 years into this Federal program the OSM, as

they testified today, has cleaned up less than one-tenth of the problems.

What’s the effect on the local economy? I want to talk about several things. First, we have a dwindling supply of flatland and clean

water. As an earlier witness said, if we don’t clean these abandoned mine sites and get them compacted so that businesses can

locate there, we’re going to destroy the few pristine sites that still

exist.

What else? Population loss, I think Congressman Kanjorski

talked about this. This area—this region——is virtually leading the

Nation in population decline. From 1990 to 1998, this metropolitan

statistical area lost more than 23,000 people. That’s a 3.6 percent

decline. Of all of the MSA’s nationwide, this one experienced the

139

third largest population decline and that’s on top of population decline that existed years before. Our local groups have tracked it.

Between 1930 and 1970, our population reduction was 30 percent

and then between 1970 and 1980, we lost more.

What else? We have higher unemployment levels. To be sure, we

have made significant progress in bringing unemployment levels

down but we have been consistently above the national and state

average and I think one of the reasons for that is what you saw

today.

So what can we do to mend this region’s land and water? I talked

about the regional cooperation. We are starting with an environmental master plan and I brought for you today just a quick poster

that will provide a snapshop of some of the things we’re doing.

Congressman Kanjorski has been the leader in bringing together

groups in the area to provide a master plan, a GIS environmental

master plan, of the entire anthracite region. Thanks to his leadership, we have scientists like Ken and others, through this Pennsylvania GIS Consortium that I’ve talked about, who are studying all

of the topography, the hydrology, the population concentration of

the entire region. What that means is if this Committee and this

Congress are successful in freeing money for this region, we’re

going to know how to spend it in the most cost-effective and sensible way.

People have made reference to the Chesapeake Bay. I just want

to draw your attention to the right side of this poster. You can see

clearly that the anthracite region in green flows right into the Susquehanna and then right down into the Chesapeake Bay. Today, as

with every day in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 200 million gallons

of acid mine drainage will flow from this region’s mountains and

strip-mine holes into the Susquehanna River. And today, as with

every day in this region, this drainage will contain 740 tons of sulfate and 51 tons of iron and that’s why today, as with every day,

our region is the single largest industrial, polluter of the Chesapeake Bay.

But we’re going to have this GIS environmental study done very

quickly so that we don’t have just another fancy study to sit on a

shelf, but we have a blueprint for how best to invest the Federal

money that we hope or the private sector money that we hope is

freed up for this area. And we will know, instead of the patchwork

problems that we’ve been able to address today, how doing work in

one area will effect the entire region. We will develop priorities and

we will have the most sophisticated technology available to make

informed decisions about investing this money. So I appreciate your

attention to this problem and thank you for the invitation to appear.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Alex. Robert.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Rogers follows:]

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

STATEMENT OF ROBERT HUGHES, EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA

COALITION FOR ABANDONED MINE RECLAMATION

Mr. HUGHES. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My

name is Robert Hughes, a native of the Wilkes-Barre area located

in the northern anthracite coal fields just south of Scranton here

and a resident of the Borough of St. Clair down in Schuylkill County, which is located in the heart of the southern anthracite coal

fields. I am here today as the regional coordinator representing the

Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation.

First of all, I’d like to thank you for giving EPCAMR this opportunity to address you this afternoon on the familiarizing Members

of the Committee with mine land reclamation problems specific to

Northeastern Pa.

As for background on the Coalition, we are a regional nonprofit

organization made up of representatives of the conservation districts from 9 out of 16 eastern Pennsylvania coal counties affected

by the AMD and abandoned mine lands directly, the anthracite industry, over 20 local watershed organizations with well over a

thousand volunteers attached to those organizations made up of

sportsmen groups, conservation clubs, conservancies, and representatives from the general public. Our Coalition was formed in

1996 to identify how the county conservation districts and their

local cooperating organizations could promote and contribute to

local, state and Federal mine reclamation efforts. Our mission is to

encourage the reclamation and redevelopment of those abandoned

mine lands and remediation of waters affected by past mining practices in Eastern Pennsylvania.

An increasingly important role of our Coalition has been to serve

as a liaison between the local watershed organizations, private

businesses, economic development interests, the mining industry,

DEP, Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, the Federal agencies and other groups involved in abandoned mine reclamation. We

are also actively involved in raising the awareness of the general

public, our schools and our elected officials on a local, state, Federal and national level regarding these issues related to abandoned

mine lands.

It’s my job to provide technical assistance to support the conservation districts and these watershed groups through assisting in

grant writing, establishing public education and outreach programs, and rejuvenating local watershed groups. I am proud to say

there are more local watershed organizations active in abandoned

mine drainage remediation efforts in Pennsylvania than there are

in any other state in the Nation. Well over 50 groups in Pennsylvania make up this contingency. I work side by side with these

groups in Eastern Pennsylvania to inform and educate the public

on AMD and AML issues and technical interests relative to the

specific reclamation and remediation techniques being proposed for

sites and discharges in their local watersheds.

First, as a member of the National Coalition for Abandoned Mine

Reclamation, I know that our Coalition would like to see the Rural

Abandoned Mine Program (RAMP), which in the past has been financed by the AML fund and administered by the USDA-Natural

Resources and Conservation Service, be supported once again. The

RAMP has not been funded since 1996. This program worked

152

through local communities, community volunteers, conservation

districts and other agencies, to solve and address many AML problems. The NRCS provided most of the technical assistance, natural

resource planning, design and construction of many of the earlier

AMD and AML projects. Today in Eastern Pennsylvania there are

few staff available who have the time or financial resources under

other Federal programs that they are administering to fully support and commit their time to abandoned mine reclamation efforts

in Eastern Pennsylvania. Watershed organizations, county conservation districts and reclamation related groups will tell you that

the one area that truly we need assistance in is the design and construction of some of these passive treatment systems to abate abandoned mine drainage. NRCS used to—under RAMP, used to fulfill

that need very efficiently.

Our Coalition would like to continue to establish an open line of

communication with the Office of Surface Mining, DEP, Bureau of

Abandoned Mine Reclamation, Bureau of Mineral Resources, Pennsylvania Mining Reclamation Advisory Board, economic development interests, the chamber of commerces, the IDAs and the EPA

in the near future to discuss the flexibility on certain regulations

especially when the laws deal with redevelopment of abandoned

mine lands. EPCAMR is very interested in playing a role in conducting outreach meetings and coordination efforts, if there is

enough interest to develop regional task forces similar to the

Luzerne-Lackawanna Counties Brown Fields/Black Fields Task

Force, to address some of these obstacles to the regulations.

The mining industry of the past needs to be looked at in the future as potential brown field-like redevelopment areas we call black

fields or gray fields today. Many of these sites have great potential

for redevelopment due to their proximity of existing infrastructure,

potential boost to the local economy, elimination of public health

and safety features, clean up of ground water and surface water

contamination, and alleviation of the pressure on businesses that

build on previously undeveloped non-urban area green fields, pristine forestlands and farmlands. Yet very little Federal moneys have

been released or granted to inventory and assess these areas under

the AML program. Not much Federal funding has come to the anthracite region under the EPA’s as well as under such programs

such as the Brown fields Economic Redevelopment Initiative either.

There are thousands of acres that surround numerous communities in the anthracite coal region that remain today as unproductive as they did more than a hundred years ago. We should concentrate our efforts on having our communities be able to have the

access to these undeveloped acres for social, economic and as well

as environmental uses. Expanding and reconnecting our communities separated by mountains of culm, creation of open space

areas, wildlife habitat enhancement, water quality improvements,

recreational opportunities and economic development interests of

these abandoned mine lands should be of the utmost importance.

Mine reclamation restores communities and enables them to rebuild their economic base to attract more sustainable businesses

and jobs. Who wants to locate a business in a place that looks like

the surface of the moon, has orange-tainted streams and poor

water quality within its community, a poor local economy and an

153

unhealthy population. We should be at least asking Congress to demand that the SMCRA Promise be kept. Our communities have

lived—and learned the hard way long enough. Thousands of people

in Pennsylvania support watershed and reclamation activities

through their contributions of time, effort, donations and through

volunteering. The people of Pennsylvania understand that without

clean water, the social, recreation, economic and environmental vitality of the anthracite region will be severely disadvantaged for

our future generations.

With regard to your second question as to how the coalition describes the successes and failure of reclamation efforts of abandoned mine lands as well as present new solutions to improve past

practices, first and foremost local community support for reclamation and remediation projects needs to be in place for a successful

project to occur. Tapping local government municipalities, township

supervisors, contracting and construction companies for volunteer

services such as the use of a front-end loader, a bulldozer, dump

truck for hauling stone, pipe, even landfill liner are all crucial to

the success of locally driven environmental restoration projects.

Local involvement often expands what at first might be a narrowly

focused project to a more comprehensive watershed effort as additional people and financial resources are brought to the table.

These additional resources often assure that the efforts will continue long after the completion of an initial project. Federal programs need to be matched with the state grant dollars to continually support the efforts of such groups. You cannot ask for a better return on your investment when sweat equity, as I like to call

it, of the local volunteers committed to cleaning up abandoned

mine land impacts in their watershed is involved.

There is still hope for the anthracite region. The key to the Coalition’s success has been our ability to involve local groups in the upfront process of developing watershed restoration plans, identifying

problems, assessing the impacts, coming up with feasible solutions

and drawing on the strengths of each of our partners. Each group

has an active role in the decisionmaking process. However, we are

at a point where action must be taken to continue the work of

abandoned mine land reclamation and AMD remediation and restoration of our streams in Pennsylvania or our local efforts may be

stifled and fall by the way side.

The CHAIRMAN. Robert, how much more do you have?

Mr. HUGHES. Just a sentence.

The CHAIRMAN. OK.

Mr. HUGHES. More Federal funding to Northeastern Pennsylvania will assure that local watershed restoration efforts can continue complimenting the reclamation work that is completed by our

state Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation on a comprehensive

watershed basis. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hughes follows:]

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Just out of curiosity, have you two

sat in the same meetings together?

Mr. ROGERS. Oh, yes.

The CHAIRMAN. So you are working together.

Mr. ROGERS. Oh, you bet. As I said—.

The CHAIRMAN. You’re not a separate effort.

Mr. HUGHES. I am a member of the American Heritage River

Steering committee as well.

The CHAIRMAN. If we’re going to do this we have to do it all together and make sure that we work together to work on it. Doctor,

you’re aware that the OSM is actively working now on reforestation.

Mr. KLEMOW. That’s one of their strategies but when you look at

much of the reclamation that’s done around here—and actually I

think more reclamation is done more by the state, if I am not mistaken, than by OSM—their goal is to create a meadow.

The CHAIRMAN. It’s probably easier. But I have to agree with

you, I’d like to see more trees growing. I think it is—I am the wildlife specialist and I like to see trees that produce certain foods for

certain wildlife so I can pursue them.

Mr. KLEMOW. I guess one of the reasons for lack of trees is that

the species mixes that are sown on the site are herbs and grasses.

Even worse, they’re all foreign species that are actually aliens to

this area.

The CHAIRMAN. Why?

Mr. KLEMOW. Mainly to establish a vegetable cover quickly.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, that’s the meadow. I am talking about the

trees. Can they plant trees—.

Mr. KANJORSKI. No, not in the present morphology. They just

backfill with the rock and then they put a half inch or inch of topsoil and it can’t sustain vegetation of a tree. That’s the problem.

If we did it comprehensively we could move earth and then get the

clays and the soils necessary to sustain a root system for a tree.

It isn’t done that way.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, I am hoping that they look at the possibility. I don’t think trees would be that much more difficult if we

have the water base. I do believe it could occur.

Mr. KLEMOW. See, other problem is that the meadow actually

prevents trees from coming in.

Mr. SHERWOOD. If you look at the strip mining piles, they are

covered with white birch.

Mr. KLEMOW. Gray birch, yes.

Mr. SHERWOOD. White birch, gray birch. OK. But not knowing

about gray birch—but that must grow on those acidic sites.

Mr. KLEMOW. Right.

Mr. SHERWOOD. So therefore, why wouldn’t trees grow after they

get them—I mean I know a strict meadow inhibits the tree but it’s

not easy to start a Pennsylvania forest from scratch because the

normal trees that are planted in the west aren’t our native species

anyway. It’s very easy if you cut one over to have it regenerate but

not when you bulldoze. So what is the solution?

Mr. KLEMOW. I think we just have to be a little bit patient because if you want to reclaim a site and go out there 3 months later

and see a lush community, then all you’re going to be able to grow

165

is a meadow. But if you’re willing to wait two to 4 years and then

go out, eventually you will have the forest that will be starting to

come in. As a matter of fact, there’s some areas on Earth Conservancy lands that have been rough graded that are now starting to

look very good because you get the revegetation—.

The CHAIRMAN. If you do birch or gray birch growing, that’s a

very short leafed species and the more desirable species will grow

up in the shade.

Mr. KLEMOW. If you amend the soil. Right now in a culm bank,

I don’t see that happening that much.

The CHAIRMAN. Let me go back. Alex, if what you say is true;

that your consortium is working well together and you have the

plan, why do we have to have a plan? All we have to do is to figure

out how to sell the bonds so the plan works, right?

Mr. ROGERS. Well, I think we’re working on parallel tracks. We

are developing the plan. We’ve discovered that many of the Federal

agencies weren’t talking to each other—.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, actually they never do.

Mr. ROGERS. But really for the first time we’re going to build an

integrated data base inventory of acid mine drainage outfalls in the

area, abandoned mine land sites. This will be the blueprint that

when the money frees up, we will know how to spend it.

The CHAIRMAN. That goes back. Why do I have to use the Federal agencies at all if you have a plan and the consortium in place

and we fund it?

Mr. ROGERS. If you fund it, I think that’s exactly right. I think

you’ll streamline the Government significantly.

The CHAIRMAN. I am afraid, with all do respect to my friend, if

the EPA gets involved in it—which reminds me, do you know—

every time we have cleanup area here, reclaimed area, an EIS

statement has to be filed?

Mr. ROGERS. I believe that’s right.

The CHAIRMAN. That takes time. That ought to be eliminated.

Mr. KANJORSKI. And expensive.

The CHAIRMAN. And expensive. I mean that’s just an idea.

Mr. KANJORSKI. The only provision, Mr. Chairman, that we put

in for the corporation was for the comfort level of the Congress that

the funds would properly be used. I mean we are talking about a

larger—.

The CHAIRMAN. Right now they’re so uncomfortable, some of

those agencies, they might be more comfortable—.

Mr. ROGERS. Well, we would certainly be open to Congressional

administrative oversight. But you hit on the right point, We are

taking matters into our own hands and if this funding proposal

comes through, we’re going to clean up this area significantly

quicker than the Federal or state programs.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Sherwood.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Mr. Hughes, are you familiar with the limestone

bed that was set up in Sullivan County? How is that working?

Mr. HUGHES. Right now I think it’s been about 6 months since

it’s in operation, that system is on the big Loyalsock Creek in Sullivan County.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Yes. One of the great trout streams in the northeast, Don.

166

Mr. HUGHES. I was put in by the state Bureau of Abandoned

Mine Reclamation and after 6 months’ time now it’s not enough

time that you would get the fluctuations in the water quality out

so that it would become a more steady state. However, just in the

6-months’ time that particular stream was very low in pH, probably about 4 and-a-half. It had a lot of aluminum—metal contamination to the water and some iron involved. When they put in the

limestone bed trenching system in there, it’s called a Successive Alkaline Producing System, a SAP system is what we call it, as one

method of treatment. Having, run the water through that limestone bed and come out the other end at the discharge pipe, the

pH is holding pretty steady at 6 and-a-half right now and water

quality down stream has been improved dramatically just over the

course of 6 months. The limestone with its high calcium carbonate

content allows a lot of the metals to precipitate out a lot quicker

and the pH in the water adjusts and becomes a little bit higher so

the downstream impacts of that particular stream are going to be

positively impacted in the future.

The CHAIRMAN. Will those rocks have to be removed and replaced?

Mr. SHERWOOD. That’s exactly the question I asked him when I

went to see it.

Mr. HUGHES. I think in that particular situation up there, if they

have a flushing mechanism in the place that’s at the bottom of the

bed—if they have a PVC pipe flushing system, they would manually be able to go out there and flush that every now and then to

take out any flock that may be left in the bed and they would just

have to flush through a sedimentation basin or a polishing pond to

collect the aluminum or metal precipitate so that it doesn’t get—

. The CHAIRMAN. Sediment pond is what you’re talking about.

Mr. HUGHES. Yes. A lot of these systems do have that and if the

discharge doesn’t have iron—if the iron isn’t coating the rocks,

which in some cases we have done this in the past and that’s been

some of our failures—is we’ve put limestone rock in discharges that

were heavily impacted by iron and they armored the limestone and

made it virtually ineffective—or maybe 20 to 30 percent effective

to actually produce a higher pH and adding alkaline generation to

the water. I think we’ve learned from the past not to do with that

high iron discharges. We generally—.

The CHAIRMAN. You take out the aluminum and anything else.

Mr. HUGHES. You take out the aluminum and some other trace

metals. As long as we have a flushing mechanism to get out the

precipitate.

Mr. SHERWOOD. They covered the limestone rock. It was a very

hard limestone rock, so it wouldn’t dissolve, with an inner material

that was waste from the horse manure and mushroom beds and

they used that to filter the sun to keep from destroying the rock.

The CHAIRMAN.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Thank you. I’ll direct it to, I guess, Alex and to

Dr. Klemow. Can you give us some examples of—the Committee

some examples of the successes we’ve had in the last year in some

of the projects of the GIS consortium because I think the Chairman—GIS is another word that’s out there. Tell us about the GIS.

167

Mr. ROGERS. The GIS system, Geographic Information System,

has all—takes information from many different sources and combines them in one data base. I mentioned topography, vegetation.

We do this with remote sensing and digitizing information. We’ve

then taken that information—we’ve already put the shovel into the

ground—and Ken has worked on this in the Earth Conservancy

land where we have taken acid mine drainage sites, we have the

GIS information about those sites and then we’ve invested in very

innovative technology—some of which Robert’s alluded to—to clean

up. But, Ken, you have those results on the tip of your tongue. Why

don’t you give the Chairman some of the numbers—how we’ve reduced the iron content and aluminum in the water.

Mr. KLEMOW. We have. We have two wetlands that are in place.

The first was a demonstration site and that was about one-third of

an acre and that was just to show that the wetlands can be used

to removed iron in the anthracite region. That has never been

shown before.

But right now probably the best site that we have is the second

site which is the one that’s located again in Hanover Township.

And for that one we’re actually pumping water up out of the mines

because hydrologically we just couldn’t get the wetlands down

stream—in fact, again when you talk about some of the problems

with legislation and the current rules, we have an idea for putting

the wetland actually next to an existing crater and actually we

have lessons of the army core of engineers and the Pennsylvania

Department of Environmental Protection—but we just felt that

doing the permitology on the whole thing would take maybe two to

3 years that we just didn’t have so we decided to go a slightly different location uphill and therefore we have to pump the water uphill. Basically we’re pumping 500 gallons per minute. And the

thing that is interesting is that we’re directing the water through

an aeration system—it’s never been attempted before—which forces

oxygen into the water and that gets the chemical reaction to go a

lot quicker. And basically what we do is we get the iron to chemically oxidize and so once it’s oxidized, we filter it through a bed of

plants in the wetland and the plants are very, very good at removing the iron.

So the thing that was interesting is that we didn’t really know

when we started this project—when we turned on the switch, you

know, last April or May I guess it was—would it be 5 percent successful, 50 percent, you know, 80 percent successful, and over the

past 5 months I’ve had a student take readings on a monthly basis

and we’ve been removing, as I say, somewhere between 96 to 98

percent of the iron which again accounts for about 300 pounds of

iron per day.

The CHAIRMAN. You were going to do this next to a creek? You

were going to do that but there was some question about the permit process?

Mr. KLEMOW. We were concerned about the permitology possibly

holding us up.

The CHAIRMAN. Second, is the creek contaminated now with the

iron, et cetera, et cetera?

168

Mr. KLEMOW. Yes, and the answer is because we cannot treat all

of the water coming out of the bore hole because we just don’t have

enough area.

The CHAIRMAN. It would seem to me if you could expand that

area and treat that area with your methodology we ought to be

able to expedite the permitting process. To me this makes more

sense than putting an artificial project in.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Mr. Chairman, if I may add—this is an excellent

point. When you do this comprehensively by getting an inter-agency agreement on the Federal level and on the state level, you will

be able to put these people right into the spot so you won’t go

through what we call the malaise of bureaucracy of permitting.

And instead of wasting years and thousands and thousands of dollars, these people can go right to work and solve the problem. They

have the technology to do it.

The CHAIRMAN. Can we make up a larger area to take the water

we want—.

Mr. KANJORSKI. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. What we want to do is purify the water. Or not

purify it. We want to take the best of it so the good stuff.

Mr. KLEMOW. Right. But we don’t just have the money right now

to do it. There’s no agency I know of to pay for it.

The CHAIRMAN. Tim, do you have any questions?

Mr. HOLDEN. No.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Thank you, Gentlemen.

The CHAIRMAN. I have been very, very impressed. I think that

we ought to explore this more to see if we can’t do something along

those lines to get the water clean. My interest, for your information, is primarily the water and the municipalities. And one other

question, you talked about the conservancy lands. Now, who owns

that?

Mr. KANJORSKI. Earth Conservancy.

Mr. ROGERS. It’s a nonprofit organization.

The CHAIRMAN. What are you going to do with the land if you

reclaim it? Is it just going to go wild or are you going to let it be

available for the communities?

Mr. Rogers. Well, the organization started with a very extensive

land use planning. They’re going to preserve it and I think about

10,000 acres in open space for recreational purposes. Some of it is

being used for industrial development or residential development.

Always the objective is to convey the land back depending upon

who the owner will be. So in the case of industrial development,

it’s to convey it to the local chamber of the municipality so that industrial development can occur on that section but that for the

10,000 acres that will remain open space.

Mr. KANJORSKI. They are in the process now of building a 2,000

acre multipurpose park and that will take the industrial parks, the

technical sites, both housing and the first really comprehensive industrial—.

The CHAIRMAN. And that will help support the other 10,000

acres.

Mr. KANJORSKI. You bet it will.

Mr. KLEMOW. In my essay I discuss smart reclamation at

present, we find a site, we level it and sow it with grass seed. I

169

think what we do need to do is have a better method of trying to

target what the ultimate use of the site is and then directing the

restoration effort toward whatever the ultimate site is and that is

where GIS is really going to help us.

Mr. KANJORSKI. And Earth Conservancy, Mr. Chairman, has

been an operating organization for about 6 years now so really it’s

a model taking 17,000 acres of land and doing many different

things with it to prove all the things that we’re talking about that

we want to do comprehensively on 120,000 acres. We pretty much

have a feel and an experience now of 6 years of how to do this, everything from making wetlands to reclaiming the mine lands into

industrial park areas into making recreational preserve areas. It’s

all there and it’s already been done so what we’re really talking

about is saying let us build off that model and multiply that model

six or seven times and we will be able to effectively and efficiently

reconstruct the anthracite coal fields of Eastern Pennsylvania in

their entirety within a 25 year period.

The CHAIRMAN. I’ll make a suggestion, and it’s probably out of

whack here, but you might want to consider selling some of my

sportsmen groups on this idea for wildlife rehabilitation too. I know

that some people say that’s a bad word. I hope it’s not in Pennsylvania.

Mr. KANJORSKI. No. We’re building a duck area.

The CHAIRMAN. A duck area, deer, rabbits, squirrels, whatever

you want to do, because then you get another group of—category

that’s supporting what you’re doing, I’ve noticed there’s been a

tendency especially on the Federal level to downgrade that effort

and I don’t think—that’s not only not incorrect but I think it’s a

terrible way to help what we call managed land. If you’re going to

have it, you ought to get more support because—that’s just a comment.

Mr. KLEMOW. If I may, in the western part of Pennsylvania,

there’s actually an organization called AMD and ART. They incorporate large landscape architecture techniques into mine drainage

restoration projects. They actually create what they call ‘‘places’’

where people can actually go and want to be at for recreation and

hiking and other things like that. Again, I think that’s something

we ought to be looking at in this area.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, again, thank you gentlemen. It’s been very

informative. I thank the audience, those that stuck with us for

these 3 hours. And I am going to congratulate my Members for

being on time. Mr. Sherwood, thank you for doing this. Mr. Kanjorski, thank you very much. And, Mr. Holden, thank you very

much. Pennsylvania, I want to thank you—or the Lackawanna

area, we’re in good shape so thank you very much. This Committee—the record will be open for 10 days if anybody would like

to submit any written testimony to the Committee.

[Whereupon, the committee was adjourned.]