Lawmakers struck by trip to mountaintop-removal coal mines in Ky.; one says state limits are coming

Efforts to limit the mountaintop-removal strip mining of coal in Eastern Kentucky got a boost yesterday as members of the state House budget committee toured mine sites and talked to opponents of the controversial practice, who "think people in Frankfort don’t care. That may have changed Monday," writes Ronnie Ellis, state-capital reporter for Community Newspaper Holdings.

The committee chairman, Rep. Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, told Ellis that committee members were struck by what they saw and heard. “It was very moving,” Moberly said. “It’s one thing to hear it in testimony but it’s another to see it up close and the people who are directly affected by it.” (Photo by Charles Bertram, Lexington Herald-Leader)

Moberly represents a Bluegrass district that drinks from the Kentucky River, which flows from the eastern mountains and has long had much sediment from coal mining. So does Rep. Don Pasley, D-Winchester, who has twice sponsored a bill to ban the disposal of mined material in streams and watercourses, a practice necessary in almost all mountaintop-removal mining. The bill has failed to get out of a House committee dominated by coalfield legislators, but "Moberly said what lawmakers saw Monday will inspire them to pass Pasley’s bill," Ellis reports. (Read more) For more detail, on both sides of the issue, click here for a report from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

Moberly told Cassondra Kirby of the Herald-Leader's Eastern Kentucky Bureau, "I don't feel we can stop mining coal. But I think we should do everything we can to make sure the mining of coal doesn't affect the quality of life in those areas." Rep. Charlie Siler, R-Williamsburg, a coalfield lawmaker, told Kirby, "I think a compromise has to be sought in order for Kentucky to move forward in the area of energy. We need to preserve those mountains that don't need to be bothered. But we have to contend with the fact that some mountains are going to have to come down."

The tour was conducted by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a social-justice group that opposes mountaintop removal and asked the panel to visit the region during a debate on a coal-to-synthetic-fuels bill last summer. Kentucky Coal Association President Bill Caylor told Kirby that the committee should see both sides of the issue. "He said he would have liked to take legislators to the top of a reclaimed site to show them the view," Kirby reports. "He said legislators also should see the Hazard hospital, as well as several subdivisions in Perry County -- all of which have been built on flat land created by mountaintop mining." (Read more)