Two North Dakota lawmakers want the Department of Interior to work closer with states, theirs in particular, before releasing its final Stream Protection Rule later this year.
Republicans Rep. Kevin Cramer and Sen. John Hoeven sent a letter Friday to Janice Schneider, the assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Department of Interior, chastising the department for not working closer with state officials.
The letter says that Interior’s Office of Surface Mining has given the North Dakota Public Service Commission incomplete documents about the proposed rule. Many of the environmental reviews and environmental impact statements done by Interior deal with Appalachia and not North Dakota, the lawmakers added.
“It is clear that [the Office of Surface Mining) did not take hydrologic and geologic conditions of North Dakota into account when drafting the proposed [Stream Protection Rule],” the lawmakers wrote.
The Stream Protection Rule would strengthen the rules for coal mining near waterways and streams. It would require new broad measures that coal mining companies would be forced to adhere to in order to keep mining, such as land reclamation.
The rule would primarily affect states where coal mining is prevalent, such as the Appalachian states of West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, but Hoeven and Cramer emphasized that their state would be affected as well. The lawmakers wrote that the state’s lignite mining, or brown coal, practices would be impacted by the new rule.
The lawmakers pointed to language in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 that required the Office of Surface Mining to work closely with any state that asked for more collaboration. They said North Dakota regulators don’t believe that condition is being met by the Office of Surface Mining.
Office of Surface Mining officials offered to meet with North Dakota regulators twice, but only to talk about technical issues in the environmental impact statement and regulatory impact analysis. That’s not enough, Hoeven and Cramer said.
“To be clear, these meetings do not satisfy the directive in the report language, nor did they provide any state, including North Dakota, enough time to review the reference material on which these meetings were held,” the letter stated.
The lawmakers asked Schneider to have her team meet with North Dakota regulators to discuss the rule before it is finalized later this year and to provide all the relevant documents they require.
Schneider is scheduled to be in North Dakota this week and the lawmakers want to meet with her there, they wrote.
