CHEYENNE - Two Wyoming advocacy groups are taking a regional approach to mineral severance taxes to determine whether Western states are getting enough value long term for the time when the resources are gone.

The Equality State Policy Center and the Powder River Basin Resource Council are working with citizen groups in other Western states to raise public awareness about taxes on coal, oil, gas and hardrock minerals such as uranium and gold.

The effort has produced a preliminary report on mining taxes in 10 Western states by Robert Ginsburg of the Center on Work and Community Development.

"We're trying to get a more regional look at this," said Sarah Gorin, ESPC policy analyst. "Are we as a region looking hard enough at our non-renewable extractive industries and getting the value we need to make the bridge to the future?"

Wyoming, she said, is in good shape, in that the concept of mineral severance taxes has been established. The state also is putting away significant amounts of money in the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund.

The "missing piece," Gorin said, is the amount of money the state will need in 20 or so years to maintain the current state budget adjusted for inflation, and where the money will come from.

Some other countries are analyzing what they will do to create "sovereign wealth funds."

Alaska, one of the 10 states included in the study, has gone the furthest in that concept to get sufficient money from mineral production to meet long-term, rather than just short-term needs, the report said.

The report showed that hardrock mining products, including uranium, aren't being taxed as a percentage of value nearly as appropriately as other energy commodities.

Marion Loomis, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, said one of the things lacking in the report is all the other taxes paid by the mining industry.

"The state is getting 25 percent of the gross revenues from coal. The federal government gets another 15 percent," Loomis said.

"That's a tremendous amount of revenue that comes out of the coal industry. It's not quite that high for uranium and other minerals," he added.

The Legislature in the 1980s approved a tax break for the uranium industry when the price was depressed. Now the industry is paying the original 4 percent tax on production.

"I thought that was a win-win for the industry and the state and shows how the state can come in and help an industry when it's struggling," Loomis said.

He said the state is already putting aside money in the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for the time when the minerals run out. The fund has been built up to about $4 billion, he said.

He also pointed out Wyoming has had a coal industry for more than 100 years and an oil and gas industry about as old.

Both Gorin and Bob LeResche, chairman of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, said they believe Wyoming's severance tax rates could be increased without harming production or employment, with some of the proceeds used to mitigate environmental damage and some saved for the future.

Gorin noted that while the state gave uranium producers a tax break based on the price of uranium, the state has seen significant violations of land and water protection laws. She said one reason is that the state hasn't invested in enough staff to oversee activities in the field.

The Equality State Policy Center represents labor unions, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, the Wyoming Education Association, the Wyoming Association of Churches, the Wyoming Wildlife Association and the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association.

The Powder River Basin Resource Council has been an advocate for landowner rights and a critic of the coal-bed methane industry, among other causes.

Contact Joan Barron at joan.barron@trib.com or by phone at 307-632-1244.