Help may be on the way to Appalachia.
Congress and the Obama administration are both exploring ways to help the coal-dependent region with new economic development and diversification. The interest comes as environmental regulations and cheap natural gas hit Appalachian mines, which largely contain coal that no longer is economical to extract for power generation.
Appalachian states and lawmakers have looked to mine reclamation as an economic development tool. As such, a $30 million grant program to speed reclamation of abandoned coal mines was included in the House Republican fiscal 2016 spending bill for the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency.
A federal program to pay for improvements has been in place for nearly 40 years, but coal-mining states say payments come too slowly. In many coal-mining states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, rehabilitated strip-mining sites — where mountaintop peaks are blasted off to reach coal buried underneath — offer some of the only flat land available for industrial parks, golf courses, cattle grazing and the like.
“I can think of several shopping centers, a golf course or two, all sorts of businesses, a sports recreation center. So they’re very important,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., told the Washington Examiner of the House program proposal. “This kitty of money is essential.”
But the House wasn’t first to the punch — the White House had proposed an idea involving reclaimed mine sites as an economic tool in February as part of its Power-Plus plan to aid Appalachian coal-mining communities.
The Obama administration proposed freeing up $200 million annually of funds collected through the fees coal companies pay to the federal government for mine reclamation. Doing that, however, would require new legislation that would find resistance from a clutch of Western lawmakers opposed to changing how the funds are paid to states.
Appalachian Republicans, however, for months have downplayed Obama’s proposal when speaking with the Examiner. GOP lawmakers, after all, have railed against the White House for a raft of environmental regulations they say are sending the region’s coal-mining industry to an early grave.
“I’m not willing to accept that that’s going to be a solution to a much larger problem. I think economic development dollars … are very helpful, but it still remains to be seen if it’s just not sort of a pat on the head,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., told the Examiner.
“We had problems before, we have problems today. So I think it’s more than just someone throwing money at something. There needs to be some systemic economic development in the area,” Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Energy and Power subcommittee, told the Examiner in February regarding the Obama administration plan. “But additional funds are always needed, always welcomed. It just depends on where it is you get the money to do it.”
Because of that skepticism, states are taking matters into their own hands.
In Kentucky, state lawmakers have engaged in the Shaping Our Appalachian Region, or SOAR, initiative in which the state hosts community meetings to gather ideas for economic diversification. West Virginia last year mirrored the effort with Southern Coalfields Organizing and Revitalizing the Economy, or SCORE. Both programs aim to build a trust fund and rely on using reclaimed mine sites for development.
“I’m not giving up on the coal industry, but I don’t believe it’s going to be coming back and providing 60-65 percent of the nation’s energy anymore,” West Virginia state Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, a Democrat who started SCORE when he was the state Senate president, said in an interview last year.
Appalachian lawmakers in Congress contend more reclamation funding needs to flow to their states. The House Republican proposal would help, said Jennifer Hing, majority spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee.
“The funding is targeted to states that have the highest level of unfunded abandoned mine land sites. So presumably yes, that area is more ‘naturally conducive.’ This determination is made by the administration,” she said in an email.
But some skeptics contend mine reclamation’s economic benefits are more myth than reality.
Some say federal dollars have been abused, largely by encouraging token economic activity to avoid restoring lands to their pre-mining form as the 1977 law creating the federal reclamation program requires.
“I think that the danger is there are examples all across the landscape where it has not been done right, where it’s something that looks like an anemic golf course or an industrial park with no industry or another airport that no one flies into,” Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, told the Examiner.
A 2010 report by environmental groups Appalachian Voices and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that 11 percent of the 1.2 million acres of former strip mines in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee were being used for economic development.
Even Rogers contends reclamation hasn’t provided a significant boon, saying its economic contribution to the Bluegrass State is best characterized as a “modest success.”
But he added that might be because the limited federal dollars available for reclamation are in high demand, which deters potential applicants for the fund. He said the $30 million program the House is proposing could help satisfy interest and spark projects.
“It will be awfully good to know that there will be that pot of money to apply for if they can make the case for the ideas that are beginning to bubble up out of the SOAR conversation,” Rogers said.
