Nominee for top strip-mine official faces senators Thursday; some questions and ideas to consider

UPDATE: Pizarchik dodged queries from Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., about mountaintop removal, finally saying "I will be carrying out the course charted by the administration," Ken Ward reports.

A hearing tomorrow in Washington could give some clearer indication where the Obama administration is headed in its regulation of surface coal mining, which is stricter than that of the Bush administration but disappointing to foes of strip mining. Joe Pizarchik, left, a longtime environmental regulator in Pennsylvania, has been nominated to head the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement and will face the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The nation's best coal reporter, Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette, has posted on his Coal Tattoo blog a list of questions he would ask Pizarchik. The first three are ones we would ask, too:

– Would you enforce the buffer zone rule in a manner that would truly limit the size of streams buried by strip-mine valley fills? Would you read the rule to apply to the footprint of these fills, or would you continue to exempt those areas, making the rule meaningless?
– How would you define the reclamation term “approximate original contour” and would you move quickly to write a national regulation to more clearly define AOC?
– What would you do about the continued failure of the coal industry to propose post-mining development plans for the mountaintop removal sites if flattens across Appalachia?

Senators could come up with many more questions by reading the speech Kentucky Resources Council Director Tom FitzGerald, right, made at an annual meeting of OSMRE employees at Dale Hollow Lake State Park in May. Speaking before Pizarchik was nominated, FitzGerald said the agency's new director must "rehabilitate an agency in distress and restore to the administration of the 1977 law the central principles that drove its passage – a belief that mining should be a temporary use of land, and that the rights of people living downhill and downstream should be fully protected." To read the speech, click here.

Pizarchik has run into opposition from the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, a leading foe of mountaintop-removal strip mining in Central Appalachia, Ward noted in an earlier post, based on his record in Pennsylvania.