TWO hundred mineral claim holders will be able to transfer to Western Lands leases after Walgett council agreed to buy part of a grazing lease over Sims Hill.
The land stretches from the Serbian Church up Pandora Street and over  Sims Hill to Black Prince Drive, according to Jeff Inman of the Department of Mineral Resources.
A western lease should give tenants security of  title allowing them to borrow against the value of their  camp.
Council will pay $95,000 for 250-300 acres of Mr Rod Crutchfield’s lease “Baroona” and it will be repaid from monies collected over the years from miners.
“Miners paid $54 a year towards buying the land in lease fees to the Department of Mineral Resources a report to council from general manager Vic North said.
At the present time that fund contained over $430,000 but the “department claims that its act, as it currently reads, prevents it buying land,” he wrote.
The state government was moving to change this anomaly but the required mechanisms were not yet in place.
Council should step in because “an opportunity may be lost to secure land adjoining Lightning Ridge and containing so many houses,” he said.
Once council had bought the land it should set up a trust to ensure the land could not be sold, and hand it to the State government so it could be “surveyed, registered and individual leases offered to residents,” he said.
This section of Baroona was an “essential part of the joint council-state govern-ment scheme for Lightning Ridge which will provide secure land titles to residents on the preserved opal fields, Peter Downes, chairman of the Lightning Ridge Camps on Claims committee said.
“The process of converting a grazing lease to individual leases for each house is the same as the process currently under way for permissive occupancy.”