East SBV Times

The Ray family waited nearly 30 years for a response from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) about an application for mineral patents on their California mining operation in the Mojave Desert. It wasn’t until a lawyer filed a federal lawsuit that they finally received a response.

“You had one individual who was writing Congress, writing to the president and he hit a bunch of brick walls because none of these people had any actual control over the agency on a day to day basis,” said David McDonald, an attorney with Mountain States Legal,  a public interest, non-profit law firm that represents the Ray family. “No one was listening to him but you bring in a law firm that’s willing to go to the mattresses over this and they got results.”

It was in 1991 that the Rays submitted a patent application for extracted volcanic cinder, a mineral used to make cinder blocks. They expected a decision within six months. Instead, the family was forced to close the mine.

“The 1994 California Desert Protection Act, a piece of legislation that otherwise withdrew the land from mineral entry so that anyone who didn't have a valid existing right at that time would no longer be able to mine that area could have been part of the reason but we really have no idea as to why the Bureau of Land Management took so long and that's part of the reason the Rays came to us,” McDonald told the East SBV Times.

When the BLM finally did respond to the application earlier this year, it issued a denial.

“I see this as a symptom of a larger problem," McDonald said.  "It's a growing practice across large areas of federal regulation in that, at least my theory going off of, it is that you have agencies that would really prefer to deny permits or applications but a denial is an appealable decision,” “If they just don't do anything, there's no trigger to allow for an appeal. You end up in this sort of bureaucratic purgatory where, eventually, they're waiting for you to run out of money or to give up. That's how I see this happening as the political winds shifted away from multiple uses of public lands. The delay is a way of soft-denying an application that you would rather not have to tackle with.”

The federal agency had a clear duty to either grant the family’s application or provide a reasonable explanation for why the application should not be granted, according to the lawsuit.

“We're considering options for how to deal with the decision, how exactly to challenge it, what parts of it to challenge, which ways and they'll be determining that over the next couple of weeks,” said McDonald who is based in Denver. “You can expect to see movement from the Rays in response to the BLM decision over the next few weeks.”

Until then, McDonald advises other Americans to be on the watch.

“A lot of people have a somewhat naive belief that as taxpayers the government is there to help them out, but the fact of the matter is, in a lot of cases, the government is simply not a good-faith actor,” he said. “Don't assume that the regulators have your best interests at heart. Double-check everything. Make sure you're not sleeping on your rights. Ask questions. Force them to explain their reasoning to you.”