Alaska Governor Tony Knowles has signed a bill that will amend the Alaska State Mining Law to ease the backlog of unprocessed claims.
Under Bill 175, which takes effect in late August, claims can be processed using the Global Positioning System (GPS); as a result, the number of days between staking claims and filing is reduced to 45 from 90 days. Also, the maximum claim size quadruples to 160 from 40 acres.
The GPS speeds up the filing process by eliminating paper work. When claims are processed using the system, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) can post the information electronically on a township grid and make it available to the public on the state’s web site.
Alaska has seen a five-fold increase in the number of mining claims staked annually. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, when the price of gold was in the range of US$800 per oz., about 10,000 mining claims were filed each year.
As the gold price dropped, the number of claims leveled off to between 2,000 and 3,000 annually. Today, the DNR is once again processing 10,000 each year, and this has created a backlog.
The increased activity is due mostly to tax credits and other incentives introduced by the Alaskan government to bolster the industry. The resurgence in the price of platinum, palladium and rhodium has also had an impact.
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