Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is expected to introduce stand-alone legislation early this week that will call for the comprehensive restructuring of the embattled Minerals Management Service (MMS).

“I don’t know the specifics” of the senator’s restructuring proposal, said Bingaman spokesman Bill Wicker. “I don’t know if it will be identical” to the one proposed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who Monday renamed MMS the Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (see related story). He referred to the secretary’s decision to reform and restructure the MMS as a “good first step.”

Wicker said Bingaman’s legislation would address changes in the organizational structure of MMS, regulatory changes, penalty violations, how future lease sales would be conducted, and would lay out the parameters for permitting. The Senate energy panel will take up the bill at a hearing on Thursday. MMS is in charge of the safety inspections of offshore rigs, collecting royalties and issuing leases in the Outer Continental Shelf.

The committee Thursday also will hear testimony on legislation that would make it a felony for any employee of the MMS or its successor to knowingly accept high-value gifts from the oil and natural gas industry or any other industry covered under the term “mineral mining,” including transmission lines, pipelines and utility corridors.

The legislation (S. 3431), sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), calls for violators to be fined or imprisoned for not more than two years, or both. The bill makes an exception for small gifts, allowing an employee to accept a single unsolicited gift of $20 or less and an aggregate amount of $50 for the entire year.

It also would require MMS employees to divest any stock or any other interests that they own in a company that is involved in the business of mineral mining while they are employed at the agency. And it would bar MMS workers from having outside employment with an oil and gas company or other “mineral mining” companies while at the agency.

The legislation, “Stop Cozy Relationships with Big Oil Act of 2010,” would make it a felony for MMS employees to work for industry before two years have lapsed since leaving the agency. This is an attempt to close the revolving door between the agency and the oil and gas industry.

Moreover, “any officer, employee or agent of the Minerals Management Service (or a successor agency) that knowingly and willfully makes any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation in the conduct of activities relating to oil and gas regulation shall be fined…imprisoned [for] not more than 15 years, or both,” the measure said.

According to the bill, the filing requirements of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which was passed in the wake of Watergate, will apply to any MMS employee in a position classified at or above GS-13 of the Executive Schedule.

The committee Thursday also will hear testimony on a second bill (S. 3497), which would require leases in the future to include a peer-reviewed response plan that describes the “means and time line for containment and termination of an ongoing discharge of oil.”

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