Appalachian groups sue after Trump rule change weakens oversight of KY coal mines
A coalition of Appalachian environmental legal firms are suing President Donald Trump’s administration over its effort to roll back federal oversight of surface mining regulators.
Appalachian Voices, the Citizens Coal Council and the Sierra Club are challenging revisions to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Ten-Day Notice Rule — the latest in a series of moves by Trump to deregulate and revive the nation’s struggling coal industry.
Critics of the rule challenging the Trump administration in federal court say it threatens to hobble a delicate balance between state and federal regulators at active coal mining sites, eliminating a check in the process that kept a watchful eye on state agencies tasked with maintaining federal rules.
Those policy revisions, made by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, took effect late last month and reinstate a reporting process for potential environmental violations.
Among the changes, the OSMRE was given permission to consult state regulators, which it oversees, before it formally puts those agencies on notice to correct problems at active coal mining operations. Residents and others requesting federal site inspections have to alert state regulators first, and a whole category of suspect violations caused by bad permitting on the part of a state agency no longer qualifies for the 10-day notice period at all.
Critics of the rule argue the revised Ten-Day Notice process lets state regulators off the hook for systemic regulatory failures. Indefinite, informal consultation between the OSMRE and state coal mining regulators shrouds the process for keeping state agencies in check, they say.
“The Ten-Day Notice process is often the only accountability tool coalfield residents have when state regulators fail to act,” said Aimee Erickson, executive director of the Citizens Coal Council. “Weakening federal oversight doesn’t strengthen states — it weakens protections for families living with mining impacts.”
Kentucky is one of 24 states with primary authority for regulating the environmental effects of coal mining within its borders. The OSMRE exercises oversight to ensure federal standards under the Suface Mining Control and Reclamation Act are met.
Federal regulators said the finalized rule prioritizes state leadership and reduces Washington’s interference.
Under the old Ten-Day Notice standard, the OSMRE gave state regulators 10 days to assess and take action on a suspected mining violation before federal regulators stepped in. There was no pre-consultation process, and residents requesting a federal inspection didn’t have to alert state agency officials first.
How have residents sought recourse from coal companies?
Residents affected by coal mining operations gone wrong have successfully used the process for decades to address violations like landslides, water pollution and the loss or contamination of drinking water supplies. The Ten-Day Notice is somewhat rare, because the OSMRE can usually work cooperatively with state regulators to either ensure a violation hasn’t occurred or stop bad actors.
The Citizens Coal Council (then the National Citizens’ Coal Project) represented a Perry County woman in the 1980s whose ex-husband granted a coal company a waiver to build a high-risk sediment pond 100 feet uphill from her house. That woman, a schoolteacher named Muriel Smith, became the sole legal occupant of the home after her divorce and complained to the Kentucky Department of Natural Resources the company was operating so near an occupied residence without her permission.
But KDNR chalked the complaint up to a property rights dispute between Smith and her ex-husband and failed to take action. She took her complaint to the OSMRE, which alerted state regulators under the rule and issued a notice of violation that forced the pond’s removal.
Later, the Kentucky Court of Appeals found the KDNR’s handing of the matter was “seriously flawed.”
“If this new rule had been in place, then the Office of Surface Mining would have treated this as a programmatic issue, and, maybe, sometime down the road, would convince the state to change their program or institute a removal process,” said Tom Fitzgerald, the lawyer who represented Smith in her lawsuit. “But during all that time, this woman would have had to live with a high-hazard water impoundment 100 feet above her property.”
Congress founded the OSMRE to put an end to states’ historic under-regulation of the coal mining industry, said Fitzgerald, now counsel to the Kentucky Resources Council.
The agency has a legal duty to act immediately if it finds imminent harm to the public or environment. It’s ironic, Fitzgerald said, that the agency’s new rule could create a scenario where it is forced to act more often because problems go unabated and turn into real emergencies.
“If you create these impediments to the use of this process, then the violations that are out there may continue unabated for an extended period of time until they ripen into an imminent harm situation in which case the Office of Surface Mining is obligated to take direct action,” he said.
This is the second time Appalachian Voices, the Citizens Coal Council and the Sierra Club have sued the Trump administration over its attempts to weaken the Ten-Day Notice process. The administration put forth a similar rule in 2020 which was later replaced by a 2024 rule by former President Joe Biden’s DOI, largely restoring the Ten-Day Notice process.
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman joined the 13 other states that sued the Biden administration that year, claiming the prior system took administrative power Congress intended to delegate to the states. The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and has been stayed until May. The Trump administration’s new rule is expected to render the complaint moot.
KDNR Commissioner Gordon Slone wrote in a June 2023 public comment to DOI that 10-day notices represent an increased “administrative burden” on states and should only be used when available information supports one. Between 2010 and 2019, Slone said his department received nearly nine 10-day notices a year.
The Trump administration’s rule is expected to reduce the number of notices OSMRE issues in response to complaints once again. The agency issued notices less than 17% of the time after the 2020 rule was implemented compared to 56% of the time after the Biden rule, according to the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.
Between 2020 and 2024, federal regulators received seven complaints for alleged violations occurring in Kentucky, according to data the Kentucky Resources Council shared with the Herald-Leader. None of them resulted in 10-day notices.
Trump has launched an aggressive campaign to reinvigorate a domestic coal industry dashed by historically low natural gas prices and toughened federal environmental regulations. In February, the president ordered the Department of Defense to sign-long-term, direct-purchase agreements with coal-fired power plants to supply military installations.
At a stop in Louisville in February, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency leaders said they would loosen regulations on air pollutants known to damage the brain, reversing Biden-era standards projected to cut down on thousands of pounds of heavy metals, carcinogens and neurotoxins released from plants in the form of soot.
The KRC joined a coalition of public health, environmental and community advocates late last month challenging the rule reversal.
