A bipartisan amendment to contentious mining legislation up for consideration in the state Assembly was announced Tuesday but was met with heated opposition from several Republican legislators.
Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, and Sen. Bob Jauch, D-Poplar, both members of the recently-disbanded Mining Jobs Committee, introduced the Wisconsin Way Mining Reform Act at a news conference Tuesday. According to Schultz and Jauch, the amendment addresses the Assembly’s version of the bill, which supporters say would streamline the mining permit process in Wisconsin.
Schultz said he sees the amendment as an amalgam of the continuation of old mining laws along with new “common sense” policies.
According to Schultz and Jauch, the amendment would attempt to provide predictability in the iron mining permit process by providing a reasonable timeline and end date.
“Using Wisconsin’s existing metallic mining laws as a starting point, this piece of common sense legislation not only provides certainty for both the mining permit applicants and the potentially impacted communities, but it does so without sacrificing our state’s treasured land ethic,” Schultz said.
Schultz said the amendment would also protect the public’s right to participate in the mining permit process and would maintain the opportunities that citizens already have by law to partake in the permit process.
The amendment would attempt to protect local taxpayers in mining areas without increasing the burden on mining companies themselves, according to Schultz.
A statement from the two senators said that under the amendment, a mining permit would require $5 million per year from the mining company for the first five years, in lieu of the company’s first five years of property tax payments.
The statement said 100 percent of the $5 million would go toward the area affected by the mine, while 70 percent would be used as direct payments to offset costs to taxpayers, 20 percent to provide for catastrophic mitigation and 10 percent to help offset transportation infrastructure costs.
When asked how the Senate would receive the proposal, Jauch was optimistic.
“This proposal keeps the eye on the issue defined by the [mining] company,” Jauch said. “It provides an end date, and it provides timelines with maximum flexibility that represents the real world.”
Schultz, however, did not answer with as much optimism, saying he would not answer hypotheticals.
Republican Assembly leaders criticized the Schultz-Jauch proposal in a joint statement following the press conference, which said any proposal including tax increases and legal red tape they said would deny Wisconsin thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.
Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, and Joint Finance Co-Chair Robin Vos, R-Burlington, also said any such proposal is a “non-starter” in the Assembly.
The authors of the statement emphasized the importance of bringing mining jobs back to Wisconsin and said they were open to working with the Senate on a compromise, but that the Schultz-Jauch proposal is based largely on a substitute amendment that was already rejected by the Assembly on the grounds that it hurt business in the state.