Vote on Stream Saver bill waits for full committee

A bill that would ban coal operators from filling creeks and valleys with excess waste will get a vote in the House budget committee, but not until all members are present.

Committee chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, said five or six lawmakers were absent from a late-evening hearing Wednesday that featured extensive testimony from coal operators and environmental activists.

“I don’t think people are hiding,” Moberly said. “I just want to have a vote when everybody is here.”

He acknowledged that House Bill 569 would have failed Wednesday if he took a vote, but said he isn’t sure if the outcome will be different when everyone attends a meeting Tuesday to discuss the state budget.

The “Stream Saver” bill would halt the industry's practice of pushing spoil and overburden over mountainsides and into the valleys below. Before Tuesday, when Moberly’s committee began discussing the measure, it had languished without a hearing in the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee for three years.

Coal operators argued that the controversial proposal would end Eastern Kentucky coal mining, an industry that employs nearly 18,000 statewide.

That assertion was ridiculed as hyperbole by environmentalists, who cited a 2002 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report that severe restrictions on so-called valley fills would raise the price of mining coal by about $1 per ton.

Kentucky Coal Association President Bill Caylor defended the industry’s environmental record and showed the committee several pictures of seemingly green, lush looking surface mines that have been reclaimed. However, Truman Hurt of Montgomery Creek in Perry County said reality is far different.

He lives within half a mile of many of the places shown by Caylor. “If you go up there and look, you won’t find all that they’re bragging about,” Hurt said. “It’s not very beautiful.”

- John Stamper

Comments

[Kelsey]

LET THE PEOPLE VOTE.
Kelsey.

[martin]

Let the people have more leaders like Pasley and Moberly who are willing to do what is right.