Introduction
The mining (oil, gas, precious metals, construction material, industrial metals, and coal) production and taxes explicitly related to mining in 10 states — Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota,, Utah and Wyoming was reviewed utilizing publicly available data on the internet. While there are several omissions due to an inability to access state data on-line, the information on special taxes on mine production or income including state based ad valorem (property) taxes is generally complete. The amount of ad valorem (property) taxes collected by counties which are often based on the value of minerals sold by the mining property are not provided by most state revenue departments and so are not included in these tables with the notable exception of Wyoming. Most states in the region subject mining companies to sale and use taxes (except Alaska and Montana) and corporate income taxes (except Nevada, South Dakota and Wyoming) but that information is not broken out separately for Mining Companies in general reports from state revenue departments and therefore was not available for this report. However, as will be discussed later, such taxes are not related to the actual “severance” of minerals from the land but are general business taxes and serve a very different purpose in state fiscal policy.
