(WASHINGTON) - Interior Secretary Gale Norton today announced a grant of $50,000 to assist Colorado in eliminating dangerous abandoned mine sites near the town of Crestone and the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

The funds for the Crestone project are an addition to Colorado's FY 2002 Abandoned Mine Land grant, bringing the total grant for that year to $2.7 million. AML Grants have a three-year life, or "performance period". AML grants to Colorado so far for this year, FY 2004, have been $2.3 million.

The new funding will go toward the completion of the Crestone Project in Saguache County, where hazardous mine openings are located in an area stretching from approximately seven miles north of the town of Crestone, southward to the north boundary of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, a distance of fifteen miles.

This project will safeguard 30 hazardous mine openings including 13 shafts and 17 mine portals in proximity to nearby tourist attractions. Closure methods will include backfilling, native rock bulkheads, and grating. Bat populations are high in this area of Colorado, and most of the mine closures will have provisions for bat entry.

"The grant we've just awarded will give Colorado's reclamation program some of what it needs to continue working on this enormous problem," said Norton. "But nationally, we aren't yet doing the best we can do."

The Office of Surface Mining estimated last year that 32,196 Coloradoans are living less than a mile from a dangerous abandoned mine site. Colorado has about $25.3 million worth of unreclaimed high-priority

Abandoned Mine Land problems. "The Abandoned Mine Land program has made thousands of Americans living in the coalfields safer, but the job is not finished," said Norton. "Even after 25 years of extraordinary national effort, we still have almost $3 billion worth of high-priority hazards to health and safety waiting to be cleaned up. The President has proposed legislation that will let us get more Americans out of danger and do so more quickly."

The Office of Surface Mining (OSM) collects fees on current coal mining to fund reclamation of coal mine sites abandoned before 1977. However, OSM's authority to collect the fee is scheduled to expire on September 30. The Bush Administration has proposed legislation that would continue the program and accelerate the rate of reclamation for the most dangerous sites. Sen. Arlen Specter (PA) has introduced the Administration's proposal as S. 2049 and Rep. John Peterson (PA) has introduced the legislation in the House as H.R. 3778.

"By targeting more of our money and speeding up the rate at which we can remove hazards, we will be able to remove 142,000 Americans per year from danger nationwide-- or 66,000 more people every year," said Norton. "We'll be able to put our money where the problems are better protect the people of Colorado and eliminate these unnecessary dangers to life and limb decades sooner."