WASHINGTON – Effective October 1, 2018, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will begin using an updated fee schedule to recover costs incurred in processing certain actions related to oil, gas, coal, and solid minerals activities on public land. The fee schedule is adjusted regularly based on inflation and follows procedures established under the 2005 Cost Recovery Rule. The updated schedule appears in today’s Federal Register and will be posted to the BLM website at http://www.blm.gov.
The fees cover the BLM’s costs for processing such actions as lease applications, name changes, corporate mergers, lease consolidations, and reinstatements. Under this update, seventeen of the forty-eight fees subject to annual adjustment will remain unchanged, while thirty-one will increase.
Of the thirty-one fees that are increasing, eighteen will increase by $5 each and eight will increase by $10 each. The fee for adjudicating ten or fewer mineral patent claims will increase by $50 (from $1,555 to $1,605), and the fee for adjudicating more than 10 claims will increase by $105 (from $3,110 to $3,215).
The BLM is authorized to charge cost recovery fees under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 and the 2005 Cost Recovery Rule. The Office of Management and Budget has also directed federal agencies to recover costs for their services. The 2005 Cost Recovery Rule expressly projected that the BLM would annually adjust the fee schedule to account for inflation. The BLM updates the fee schedule each year based on changes in the Implicit Price Deflator for Gross Domestic Product (IPD-GDP), as determined by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
No comments:
Post a Comment
The Baldwin City Gazette welcomes your comments, as long as they are on topic and remain respectful to others. Please no anonymous comments. Comments containing advertising will be marked as spam, this includes links.