RENO (MINEWEB) – As Congress worked on a $1.1 trillion measure to keep the U.S. government operating past midnight Thursday, two mining company land exchanges impacting Arizona and Nevada projects had been attached to the Department of Defense budget scheduled to be reviewed by the U.S. Senate, perhaps, as early as today.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, told reporters that he expected the full Senate to take up a joint fiscal year 2015 defense policy bill late today. The House had already passed the $585 billion defense authorization bill on December 4th.
More than 60 lawmakers are either retiring, lost their elections, or will assume new elected offices in January 2015.
In its present form, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) funds not only the Defense Department but also includes the largest public lands package since the Omnibus Public Land Management Act in 2009. Title 30 of the measure (the “National Resources Related General Provisions”) “would give landscapes deemed sacred by Native American tribes to a foreign-owned mining company,” complained environmental groups in letters sent to the U.S. Senate.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment Director, Myron Ebell, called the package “a backroom deal that would lock up use of hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Locking up federal land so it cannot be used to produce natural resources, such as energy, minerals, livestock and timber, has a devastating economic effect on people in the rural West.”
Four federal agencies—the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service currently control 623 million acres of land, mainly located in the West. Nearly 110 million acres of federal land is designated wilderness, where mining and other activities are prohibited.
The proposed NDAA designates 245,000 acres of land in Nevada and four other states as federal Wilderness areas, and withdraws another 289,000 acres from natural resource production, including mining exploration and development.
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