[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 78 (Wednesday, May 20, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3185-S3186]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Ms. MURKOWSKI:
  S. 1395. A bill to reinstate certain mining claims in the State of 
Alaska; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
  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

[[Page S3186]]

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.
                                 ______