Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I rise today to reintroduce legislation
in a dramatically different form to reinstate two small miner's claims,
which have been taken from them because of an inequitable federal
administrative process.

Under revisions to the Federal Mining Law of 1872, 30 U.S.C. 28(f)
holders of unpatented mineral claims must pay a claim maintenance fee
originally set at $100 per claim by a deadline, set by regulation, of
September l each year. Since 2004 that fee has risen to $140 per claim.
But Congress also provided a claim maintenance fee waiver for ``small''
miners, those who hold 10 or fewer claims, so that they do not have to
submit the fee, but that they must file to renew their claims and
submit an affidavit of annual labor, work conducted on the claim, each
year, certifying that they had performed more
than $100 of work on the claim in the preceding year, 30 U.S.C.
28f(d)(1). The waiver provision further states: ``If a small miner
waiver application is determined to be defective for any reason, the
claimant shall have a period of 60 days after receipt of written
notification of the defect or defects by the Bureau of Land Management
to: A) cure such defect or defects or (B) pay the . . . claim
maintenance fee(s) due for such a period.''

Since past revisions of the law, there have been a series of
incidents where miners have argued that they submitted their
applications and affidavits of annual labor in a timely manner, but due
to clerical error by U.S. Bureau of Land Management staff, mailing
delays or for unexplained reasons, the applications or documents were
not recorded as having been received in a timely fashion. In that case
BLM has terminated the claims, deeming them null and void. While mining
claim holders have argued that the law provides them time to cure claim
defects, BLM has argued that the cure only applies when applications or
fees have been received in a timely manner. Thus, there is no
administrative remedy for miners who believe that clerical errors by
BLM or mail issues resulted in loss or the late recording of claim
extension applications and paperwork.

There have been a number of cases where Congress has been asked to
override BLM determinations and reinstate mining claims simply because
of the disputes over whether the claims had been filed in a timely
manner. Congress in 2003 reinstated such claims in a previous Alaska
case. Claims in two other incidents were reinstated following a U.S.
District Court case in the 10th Circuit first in 2009 in the case of
Miller v. United States and in a second Alaska case in 2013.

Legislation to correct the provision to prevent this problem actually
was approved by the Senate in 2007, but did not ultimately become law.

In the past three Congresses I have introduced legislation intended
to short circuit continued litigation and pleas for claim reinstatement
by clarifying the intent of Congress that miners do have to be informed
that their claims are in jeopardy of being voided and given 60 days of
notice to cure defects, including giving them time to submit their
applications and to submit affidavits of annual labor, should their
submittals not be received and processed by BLM officials on time. If
all defects are not cured within 60 days--the obvious intent of
Congress in passing the original act--then claims should be subject to
voidance. But this administration has opposed the legislation arguing
that it would be too expensive to notify all small miners who fail to
file their small miner waiver documents on time and giving them time to
solve the defect prior to the loss of their claims. It has even been
suggested that giving small miners simple due process would just
encourage miners to ignore the deadline for filing of their fee
waivers.

I clearly find the cost argument unpersuasive. Many Federal
departments and agencies, the Federal Communication Commission, as one
example, routinely sends out notices on permit and license
applications. The FCC sends out hundreds of thousands of such notices
to Americans who have small radio licenses expiring yearly, warning
them that they need to file applications for license renewal. The
Bureau of Land Management certainly should be able to afford a few
hundred stamps to perform a similar service. Given the value of claims
placed at risk and the bother, inconvenience and fear of loss of
claims, it is highly unlikely that miners would avoid filing their
waiver paperwork on time just because a notification process was
clearly in place before claims could be terminated.

But after facing the clear opposition of this administration over 6
years to resolving this inequity, today I simply file legislation to
remedy the injustices for two of my constituents who have lost their
rights, in one case to nine mineral claims on the Kenai Peninsula, near
Hope, Alaska, and in the second case to a single placer claim in the
Fortymile District of northeast Alaska. The transition language
proposed will reinstate claims for Mr. John Trautner, who has lost
title to claims that he had held from 1982 to 2004. Mr. Trautner
suffered this loss even though he had a consistent record of having
paid the annual labor assessment fee for the previous 22 years. The
local BLM office did have a time-date-stamped record that the
maintenance fee waiver certification form had been filed weeks before
the deadline, but just not a record that the affidavit of annual labor
had arrived when he dropped it at the office in Anchorage at the same
time.

In the second case, it will reinstate a claim held by Mr. and Mrs.
Vernon Thurneau, now of Wasilla, who lost their claim after mining it
continuously for 38 years in 2009, simply because of a holiday season
error. In this case the Thurneau's paid their fees on time, and turned
in their proof of labor affidavit to the Fairbanks Recorders Office in
December before the deadline. They received a time and date stamp that
they produced the information in a timely manner. But because of the
Christmas holidays they simply forgot to turn/mail in the form to the
BLM Anchorage office until after Jan. 1, missing the BLM's required
Dec. 31 deadline. Because of a holiday delay, they lost their claims
and 38 years of work.

This legislation, supported in the past by the Alaska Miners
Association, will simply reinstate the two sets of claims, claims that
have been held by the government over the past decade. In response to
complaints by the Department of the Interior that past versions of my
legislation improperly would have resulted in the patenting of the
claims by the granting of a first half final certificate in the
Trautner case, I have modified this bill simply to reinstate the
claims, but not to take steps to confirm patents. By this bill Mr.
Trautner will have to wait like many other miners for Congress to
reconsider the merits of the moratorium on patent issuance first
imposed on the Mining Law of 1872 by Congress in 1995.

It is simple justice that Mr. Trautner and the Thurneau family
receive their claims back, since Congress clearly thought it was giving
miners a guaranteed opportunity to remedy claim defects when it created
the small miner waiver provisions in 1993. Return of the claims will
cost the government nothing and likely will result in added federal
revenues, hopefully preventing this bill from facing any procedural
issues. I hope that justice will finally prevail in these cases this
Congress, even though I regret that I see no means to fix the larger
inequity in the interpretation of the small miner waiver statute for
the foreseeable future.

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