Compromise Cuts Dozens Of Mines Offices’ Jobs Senate-House Panel Votes To Abolish Bureau Of Mines And Shift Some Duties To Department Of Energy

Spokane’s two Bureau of Mines offices would be eliminated, with half the employees keeping their jobs, under a compromise approved Tuesday by congressional negotiators.

The joint House and Senate plan abolishes the 85-year-old Bureau of Mines, a division of the Interior Department.

But it keeps some bureau functions alive - shifting its health, safety and mineral information components to the Department of Energy.

The change means closing Spokane’s Western Field Operations Center and dramatically downsizing the current Spokane research office.

“The health and safety functions of Spokane will remain there,” said Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., who worked out the compromise with budget-cutting House members. “It does not mean a full closure.”

Nonetheless, it does mean a reduction of between one-half and one-third of the bureau’s nearly 170-person Spokane staff.

The cuts need final approval from the full House and Senate, as well as the president, before becoming law. But it is unlikely that the terms of the compromise will change - especially in light of Congress’ current budget-cutting campaign.

“To maintain each and every position that affects our district - that’s not acceptable to this budget climate,” said Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Spokane, a member of the joint negotiating team that oversees Interior Department spending.

Nethercutt called Spokane’s mining bureau cuts an appropriate balance in the quest to preserve “essential functions” while trimming the budget.

“I’m firmly convinced that we need a presence of the Bureau of Mines,” Nethercutt added. “But we have to cut back on government spending - and someone’s going to lose their jobs and have to switch to the private sector.”

The conference committee also voted Tuesday to lift a one-year moratorium on new mining operations while slightly increasing the charge paid by miners for access to minerals on federal land.

Until the moratorium, mining firms had been following an 1872 law that charges as little as $2.50 an acre for mining rights. The conference committee plan raises this price to a fair market value of the land’s surface area, but it doesn’t include the potential value of minerals beneath the ground.

Lawmakers from Washington and other western states supported lifting the mining moratorium. But some lawmakers said the new price structure “gives away” hundreds of parcels of land worth millions of dollars.

The committee’s decision comes despite opposition from President Clinton and could encounter trouble in the House, which earlier had voted to keep the mining moratorium.

Also Tuesday, negotiators agreed to give Washington state more flexibility in distributing federal money for the Jobs in Woods program, which pays youths to work in forests.

The committee also earmarked $2.5 million for construction of the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center along the Washington-Oregon border.

Conferees granted $29 million to buy new Forest Service land, but declined to earmark it for specific areas such as the Wenatchee Forest, which had been considered to receive more money under the Senate version.

After much haggling and sparring, conferees also voted to ease proposed Senate cuts to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The cuts, backed by Gorton, drew protests from American Indians and warnings of massive firings by bureaucrats.

The committee voted to give the bureau about $1.5 billion - a nearly 12 percent reduction from last year’s level, but still shy of the Senate’s proposed 15 percent cut. The House had approved budget cuts of less than 3 percent.

Included in the BIA cuts are large reductions for local tribal governments, which use the money to fund police departments, court systems and social welfare programs.

, DataTimes