Mining Claim Fee Maps

[Clay Diggins]

We've added a new mapping layer to the Land Matters Mining Claim Maps. You will find the new layer under the "Claims" mapping group on every mining claim map. It's named "Mining Claim Fees Paid". The mining claim maps start without the new layer displaying so you will need click the checkbox next to the layer name to begin using this map layer.

This new map layer shows the total amount of maintenance fees paid to the BLM for each Section since annual Maintenance fees were begun in 1993. These fee totals are for annual maintenance only and do not include filing or locating fees or the costs associated with State recording fees. Mining bonds and permit expenses are not included.

Each Section that has had claims during the period from 1979-2024 are represented in green on the map. The more fees that have been paid for the section the darker the green. Some sections may have $0 in fees paid yet show several claims. These are Sections where all claims were closed before the maintenance fees began in 1993.

As you zoom in the amount of fees paid will be displayed in the section. In this example the Fees Paid are displayed between the normal active mining claims display.



To get Information at any zoom level you can select the   information tool and click on your area of interest will return a window with the number of claims and the total of fees paid in that section.

As with all our mining claim maps the current or prior existence of mining claims does not mean that the area is now open to new mining claims.

What are annual maintenance fees?

Until 1993 all Mining Claims were held by completing a minimum of $100 worth of development work per claim per year. This was known as the mining claim labor requirement. If you didn't perform work on your mining claim each year before 1993 they became invalid.

In 1993 Congress, at the request of the BLM, enabled claim owners to pay an annual fee of $100 instead of completing their annual claim development work. This brought in funds to the BLM to administer the program as well as relieving them of their responsibility to check existing mining claims for evidence of development work. No longer did the BLM need to do field work to administer mining claims.

Since 1993 the annual claim fees have risen to $165 per year for each Lode claim and $165 per 20 acres for each placer claim. Placer claim fees can be as much as $1,320 per claim.

Unlike other government programs the mining claim case administration system at the BLM is entirely supported by claim owner fees. These annual mining claim maintenance fees are paid directly to each BLM State office to offset the costs associated with administrating the mining claim case files. No public monies are used.

Here are the totals by State of mining claim fees paid for the years 1994 - 2023

• Arizona          $507,229,955
• California       $385,681,600
• Colorado       $380,865,975
• Idaho             $307,600,865
• Montana.        $224,791,660
• Nevada        $1,523,212,855
• New Mexico   $190,491,505
• Oregon            $99,909,290
• South Dakota $107,769,290
• Utah               $556,540,015
• Washington.    $53,075,435
• Wyoming       $468,886,230

Total         $4,806,054,675

Nearly 5 Billion dollars have been spent by mining claim owners to support BLM mining claim administration.

The BLM is now collecting more than 83 million dollars in mining claim maintenance fees each year.

 

 

[GotAU?]

These are interesting, and wow- Nevada sure has been collecting a lot of fees!

I prospect occasionally in an area I know there has been an ongoing valid placer and lode claim, but I notice that only the lode claim shows up and the fees paid total doesn’t appear to have any fees recorded with it.  Also, the placer used to show up on the MLM maps before BLM’s error that occurred a while back, but not anymore. Could the BLM’s recording and dropped claims issue still be plaguing their system?

[Clay Diggins]

On 3/23/2024 at 10:42 AM, GotAU? said:

These are interesting, and wow- Nevada sure has been collecting a lot of fees!

I prospect occasionally in an area I know there has been an ongoing valid placer and lode claim, but I notice that only the lode claim shows up and the fees paid total doesn’t appear to have any fees recorded with it.  Also, the placer used to show up on the MLM maps before BLM’s error that occurred a while back, but not anymore. Could the BLM’s recording and dropped claims issue still be plaguing their system?

These figures were created by the BLM itself. Usually Land Matters does analysis from their copy of the BLM MLRS database but in this case the BLM created this mapping directly from the original database.

Claims that show $0 in fees are either claims that were closed before 1994 or small miners claims that are exempt from the maintenance fee.

It could be that the claim status was changed to closed procedurally on November 17th. More likely is that the claim legal land description (LLD) is incorrectly described by the BLM. This is surprisingly common and results in the claim being unmappable. There are about 20 new mining claims located each month that have improper LLDs.

All together there are about 36,350 closed and active mining claims in the MRLS database that have unusable LLDs and can't be mapped.  In planning for the new MLRS database we pushed for some better control over these case file inputs to solve these errors and that became a part of the MLRS rollout plan. Unfortunately all those years of planning were thrown out when the MLRS was rolled out early, unannounced and incomplete on January 21, 2021. Since then claim file information input has been much worse. Often the information is incomplete to the point of being unusable. That wasn't nearly as big a problem with the old LR2000.

Land Matters can't fix this problem and obviously the BLM has no desire to deal with this but the claim owners can. I continue to strongly advise claim owners to check and correct errors like these in their BLM case files. With many changes in the database structure happening often and without notice these errors can pop up at any time. If your claim isn't on the map or a search doesn't show your claim where you expect it to be something is wrong with the case file.

There are much bigger problems looming with the MLRS. The BLM is aware of the MLRS problems but they have had no success convincing their contractors to track down the issues much less solve them. The BLM no longer has direct access to the code that runs the MLRS - that's been contracted out to Salesforce in San Francisco. I expect the MLRS will eventually fail unless the BLM contractors start taking these problems more seriously and put some real effort into fixing their code.