Report: Red tape leaves most of $1B to reclaim mine land unspent

(The Center Square) — A federal oversight report found much to critique about the Department of Interior’s approach to cleaning up abandoned mine sites.

After eight years and $1 billion to get it moving, barely 30% of the clean-up funds for the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization program, or AMLER, have been spent, and the process has pushed some groups to give up on reclamation projects altogether.

The report from the Government Accountability Office warned of management problems in the department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSMRE, including the lack of systematic tracking for project reviews and approvals. Regional office staff do some tracking, according to the report, but in an inconsistent manner, making the information “incomplete and unreliable.”

Unclear policies have also led to repetitive work and wasted time.

“The office also has not documented internal policies and procedures related to the administration of the program, according to regional officials,” the report noted. “For example, OSMRE has not documented the roles and responsibilities of headquarters, regional, and field office staff, and headquarters staff often duplicate work that regional staff are already doing, according to these officials.”

For their part, federal officials haven’t been interested in talking about the report.

“We have nothing to offer on this,” Giovanni Rocco, a department spokesman, said in response to an interview request.

The AMLER program was established in 2016 as a pilot program. Congress funds it annually, and it provides money to a handful of states and tribes to rehabilitate abandoned mine lands with an eye toward economic growth.

Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky are the main recipients, along with Ohio, Virginia, Alabama, the Navajo Nation, and the Crow and Hopi Tribes. It is separate from the Abandoned Mine Land program.

The lack of progress within AMLER has killed some projects.

“The process is complex and requires back-and-forth collaboration,” the GAO report noted. “For example, OSMRE’s review of one project proposal from Virginia took over 1,100 days, according to officials from Virginia. Ultimately, the applicant withdrew the proposal, according to OSMRE officials. As a result, $1.6 million was tied up with that project and could not be awarded to any other projects during that period.”

The GAO noted that another state had a vetting process on a project that took over 500 pages “with little or no feedback from OSMRE.”

But other projects flew through. One project for recreational use in Ohio got OSMRE’s review and approach in fewer than 30 days.

The murky process has created a situation where states hold hundreds of millions of dollars but can’t act on them. Aside from fiscal years 2016-2018, the majority of AMLER funds have not yet been spent, though states have received funding applications for hundreds of projects.

West Virginia received 170 unique project applications but has only funded 72. For Kentucky, it’s 239 applications and 86 funded projects. Pennsylvania funds projects based on an internal list rather than outside applications but has only funded 78 projects.

The GAO report noted that some of that delay came from staff splitting time between AMLER and other grant programs, with “limited resources to administer the AMLER program.” AMLER is not a permanent program, relying on appropriations acts every year to continue it, which causes “uncertainty about dedicated AMLER funding beyond any given fiscal year.”

But the blame also falls on the Department of the Interior for sluggishly getting money out the door.

“In fiscal year 2018, funds were not available for states to apply for until almost 8 months after the beginning of the fiscal year,” the GAO report noted. “In fiscal year 2020, funding was not available for states to apply for until 4 months after the beginning of the fiscal year. Furthermore, according to one state official, in fiscal year 2023, it took 4 months after applying to receive AMLER funding. As a result, most states are more than 1 year behind in terms of applying to OSMRE.”

The administrative problems stifle improvements of residents who live near problematic abandoned mine lands. 

So, too, does the lack of clear and trackable metrics. 

The program’s mission is to not only remediate coal mine sites but spur their productive, economic use. However, the GAO report found that AMLER struggled to count the number of jobs created or the meaningfulness of its funding.

“Performance measure information on both short-term outputs and long-term outcomes for AMLER projects may be limited,” the report noted. “States and Tribes are not required to track performance information on project outcomes after the construction of the project is completed and the grant is closed.”

The GAO noted it could take years after site reclamation before a project gets fully developed and creates new businesses.

Some projects, like one at Pittsburgh airport’s innovation campus, got $500,000 through AMLER — but $32 million in funding from elsewhere, which makes “attributing the project’s outputs or outcomes directly to AMLER funds difficult.”

Of the 332 projects funded so far, almost half are related to recreation and tourism, 23% are production and commercial projects, and 21% are infrastructure projects.

The GAO recommended that the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement document what options states and tribes have for using funds that weren’t spent in a given year; provide clearer guidance; track the project approval process “in a consistent and systematic way;” and streamline the review process by documenting roles and responsibilities of OSMRE staff.