The short-term spending bill passed last night in the House attempts to fix a provision from this year's transportation bill that would have cost states millions of dollars intended to clean up abandoned coal mines.

In the end, states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia will likely recoup the mine reclamation funds they had been in danger of losing, but Wyoming still faces a massive shortfall. The Wyoming congressional delegation is angry.

"It has been fixed for every state except Wyoming. ... I think that's reprehensible that one state would be hung out to dry this way," Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said in a brief interview yesterday.

The transportation bill that Congress passed earlier this summer included a provision that offset other spending in the bill by capping abandoned mine cleanup payments at $15 million for states and tribes that had finished cleaning up their priority sites.

Wyoming is the only state whose payments exceed the payment cap, but lawmakers learned after passing the transportation bill that other states could lose money because of how the provision was written. Wyoming stands to lose about $700 million over the next decade; without the fix included in the spending bill, other states that still have priority cleanup sites could lose as much as $600 million, according to an analysis by the Interstate Mining Compact Commission (E&E Daily, July 13).

After the problem came to light, Lummis and other lawmakers from coal-producing states drafted legislation that would eliminate the offset provision entirely, leaving the abandoned mine land program as it was before the transportation bill became law.

Passage of the short-term spending bill likely means the end of those efforts, Lummis said. Instead, House appropriators added language to the six-month continuing resolution clarifying the intent of the initial transportation bill provision, effectively leaving Wyoming out of the deal.

Lummis said she and Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead (R), were rebuffed when they tried to press their case with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), whose coal-mining state is uncertified and has priority sites that still needed to be cleaned up.

"As soon as you solve a problem for 49 states and leave one hanging out to dry ... it makes it tough," Lummis said yesterday. "My goal was to try to keep us all together so it would be solved for everyone or no one, thereby creating a coalition of people who wanted a solution. But when the Republican leaders chose to solve it for everyone except Wyoming it, I think, pretty well hung us out to dry as an island. And so, as you can imagine, I take it deeply personally, as an affront to my state."

An Appropriations Committee spokeswoman said the language was added to the CR at the request of the Transportation Committee and had the support of Democrats and the White House.

Wyoming supporters note that the state is the nation's largest coal producer and pays the bulk of the taxes that go to abandoned mine cleanup, but critics say it used the funds for purposes other than cleaning up coal mines, justifying the $15 million cap.

CR passes House, heads to Senate

The House overwhelmingly passed the overall spending bill last night, 329-91. It is expected to pass the Senate next week, preventing a fight over a potential government shutdown at the end of the year.

The bill funds the government with $1.047 trillion for discretionary spending for fiscal 2013, which begins Oct. 1. Agencies will see a 0.6 percent funding boost compared to fiscal 2012. The CR maintains funding through March 27, although Rogers has said he would like Congress to pass full-year spending bills when it returns in November and December to replace the CR.

Energy and environment-related provisions in the CR include a rider preventing the Department of Energy from enforcing light bulb standards, which was in the fiscal 2012 spending law, a funding boost for wildfire suppression and a $100 million infusion for the controversial U.S. Enrichment Corp. uranium enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio (E&E Daily, Sept. 13).

Dems say undo transportation cuts

A trio of Democratic Senate chairmen also wrote to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) urging him to undo potential cuts to transportation contained in the CR compared to the funding levels approved in the recently passed transportation reauthorization bill.

The new spending bill would not include an inflationary adjustment that passed in MAP-21, which authorized transportation funding for the next 27 months, said Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Tim Johnson (D-S.D.).

"When Congress passed MAP-21 it made a commitment to the American people that we would invest in our nation's infrastructure at a time when our economy needs it most," Boxer said in a statement. "It is critical that Congress keeps this pledge and restores the MAP-21 funding levels so workers can be hired to repair and improve our transportation systems across the country."

The letter sent yesterday follows a similar letter earlier this week from Boxer to Boehner, in which she also said that any funding cuts must be reversed before a full-year transportation spending bill is passed.

Reporters Manuel Quinones and Jason Plautz contributed.