DENVER – A coalition of tribes, local governments and environmental groups Tuesday petitioned the federal government to change mining rules to prevent future contamination of drinking and recreational water supplies.
In a letter to the heads of the Interior and Agriculture departments, the groups point to the recent Gold King Mine spill, in which an Environmental Protection Agency-contracted team leaked dumped an estimated 3 million gallons of mining wastewater into the Animas River on Aug. 5.
The group’s 74-page petition asks the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to change mining rules to limit the lifetime of a mine permit, impose reclamation deadlines and monitoring requirements, require consistent monitoring and limit the time a mine can remain inactive.
Groups from Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, such as San Miguel County commissioners, are involved in the petition.
A focus of the petition is on uranium mining. Environmental reviews for those mines date back more than three decades. Other abandoned mines operated under laws dating back to the 1870s, with few mandates on reclamation.
“As a county with hundreds of abandoned mines affecting two headwaters rivers of the Colorado Basin, we really place a high importance on sustainable uses of our public lands and protecting water,” said Art Goodtimes, a San Miguel County commissioner, one of the signers of the petition.