Sam Farr: “I rise in support of H.R. 2262 so we can, after 135 years, update the 1872 Mining Law. Since Ulysses S. Grant's…”

“I rise in support of H.R. 2262 so we can, after 135 years, update the 1872 Mining Law. Since Ulysses S. Grant's administration in 1872, the Mining Law has governed hardrock mining on our public lands, public lands. Those are lands which you, the taxpayers, own. For nearly 100 years, those lands have been debated in Congress about changing policies that give away public resources and leave each new generation with a larger legacy of unreclaimed lands and degraded streams. Debate has continued. It's continued while northern California's Iron Mountain spewed nearly a quarter of the copper and zinc discharged by industries to the Nation's surface waters; during the decades of efforts to control acidic, metal-laden discharges from old sulfur mines southeast of Lake Tahoe; as historic lands of the Indian Pass in the area of Southern California in the desert area faced destruction from the proposed Glamis mine; and as California cities spend millions of dollars to treat hazardous mine discharges and fight giant mining corporations in court. Like the pollution problems it creates, the 1872 Mining Law persists, but that will now change with passage of this bill, and we owe that hard work to Chairman Rahall and to my colleague Jim Costa from California.”