Thursday, October 13, 2011

Senators And Congressmen Introduce The Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act

U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) and U.S. Congressmen Trent Franks (AZ-02), Rob Bishop (UT-01), Jeff Flake (AZ-06), Paul Gosar (AZ-01), David Schweikert (AZ-05) and Ben Quayle (AZ-03) introduced the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011. This legislation will stop the U.S. Department of the Interior from banning mining in a vast area of Arizona, and killing jobs in the uranium mining industry. In a recent letter to Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, several members of Congress wrote in protest of the Secretary’s proposed a one million acre withdrawal of mining rights. The members stated the withdrawal has nothing to do with protecting the Grand Canyon environment but is actually ‘de facto wilderness’ for a region that conservationists previously agreed would remain accessible to the mining industry. The Interior Department’s own environmental study on the proposed withdrawal found ‘no conclusive evidence’ that modern-day mining operations in this area are harming the Grand Canyon watershed. The Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011 would uphold the historic agreement embodied by the Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 (AWA) that designated parts of the Arizona Strip as Wilderness and restored other lands to reasonable and safe uranium mining uses...more

Haven't read the bill, but it appears they are going after this specific withdrawal. This issue will continue to pop up until they address the Secretary's authority in general to withdraw this amount of acreage.

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