California Suction Dredging News

Gold miners celebrate a line-item veto that Governor Brown made in the final State Budget today.
Suction dredge mining in California has been under a temporary moratorium since 2009, when the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) began conducting an Environmental Impact Report on the practice.
In February 2011 the draft report was released, which concludes that suction dredge mining is not deleterious to fish.
But the positive outcome was not anticipated by a handful of Indian tribes and environmental extremists who don't like suction dredging, so they concocted an erroneous $1.8m deficit in the suction dredge program and proposed to Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) that he carry the 'budget cutting' language to the State Budget in a trailer bill. The bill language was written in such a way that the DFG would have been prevented from ever publishing the EIR, thus ending suction dredge mining forever in California.
Miners got word of the last-minute attempt to kill the industry and began contacting Governor Brown and the Legislators who had been supplied with the erroneous information. In three party-line votes, all Democrats voted for the 'budget cut' and all Republicans voted against it. Because the Democrats have majority in both houses, the trailer bill passed and was sent to the Governor for his signature. Fortunately, the bill died there today.
With Governor Brown's veto, the DFG can now publish the EIR findings and resume updating the dredge mining regulations.
However, in a companion attack by the same anti-mining foes, amended moratorium language was inserted in yet another trailer budget bill AB120, which, if enacted, will add five more years to the soon-expiring moratorium which began in 2009.
"It is our hope that Governor Brown will allow the original moratorium to be solved with the EIR scientific findings," states Dunn, "rather than allowing anti-mining foes to keep inventing new criteria for the DFG to chase after, and wasting taxpayers' money while doing so."
If the Governor vetoes the trailer bill language, the nearly immediate consequences to California's economy would be positive: 4,000 miners will be back to work and 15,000 inter-related jobs will be protected, adding much needed revenues to the State's coffers.
The suction dredge gold mining industry generates $23 million annually in California, and supports jobs in more than 14 sectors, including restaurants, hardware stores, gas stations and camping outfitters. "These are real mom and pop businesses that rely on miners every season," says Dunn. They, along with the miners, are hoping for a quick and positive decision by the Governor on AB120.

California is Considering an Additional 5-year Moratorium on Suction Dredging!

A trailer bill has been quietly approved by the two Budget Committees in the California legislature to impose an additional 5-year moratorium on suction dredging, which includes elimination of the last bit of funding to finish the ongoing (and nearly completed) review of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that supports our regulations. The budget has yet to be voted upon by the full legislature or governor. If passed into law, this would effectively put an end to suction dredging in California for the next 6 seasons or more.

Justification for the moratorium is based upon two arguments: The first is that the annual suction dredge permitting and enforcement program costs California more than the State receives in permit fees. But the Department of Fish & Game (DFG) recently testified in Alameda Superior Court that they take in more permit revenues from suction dredging than the cost of managing our program. So we know this is not true. And what about all of the economic activity that suction dredging generates in California? Recent estimates from DFG place that at $23 million per year before the first moratorium was imposed in 2009.

Besides, if this were really about funding, the State legislature is very experienced at increasing permit fees (this is not an encouragement). It only requires a single legislative session to accomplish that.

This is really about closing down a productive industry in California!

7 Fascinating facts about gold – and why they matter

Before we get into why they matters, and actually influence gold prices globally, here are seven interesting facts about gold.

1. There are only 165,000 metric tonnes of gold in existence above ground.

Gold is rare. If every single ounce of this gold were placed next to each other, the resulting cube of pure gold would only measure 20 metres in each direction. This includes all the gold in museums, all the gold in central bank vaults, all the gold jewelry in the world…and every other scrap of gold in existence.

2. The world’s first international gold currency was created in 564 BC.

King Croesus is credited with the issuing the first true gold coins Their uniform gold content allowed ‘Croesids’ to become widely recognised and traded. That said, they were made of electrum, a naturally occurring pale yellow alloy of gold and silver.

But the point here not their purity, but the fact that he took gold and turned it into money. And it has been money ever since.

5 Reasons Why Gold Will Rise

1. Economy How many times have you heard the phrase “not since the Great Depression” applied to today's economic climate? It's fitting, given that the United States has endured the deepest and longest economic correction since the 1930s. The U.S. manufacturing base has been shipped overseas. The few jobs being created are in the service industry or government sector. The official unemployment rate hovers near 10%, and 1 out of every 8 Americans is on food stamps. Volatility plagues the stock market. The 2008 economic implosion gutted real-estate values, sent foreclosures skyrocketing and required a nearly $1 trillion bailout of the “too big to fail” investment banks. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are under U.S. conservatorship, along with General Motors. The U.S. government has fallen into a mammoth gulch of multi-trillion-dollar deficits and unfunded liabilities, and it's not going to emerge from that hole without higher taxes and painful austerity measures. Meanwhile, debt time bombs already are exploding in some of our biggest cities and states.