WASHINGTON -- Facing procedural and political obstacles, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., on Tuesday withdrew legislation that would have resumed government sales of federal land to mining companies.

Gibbons earlier this week scaled back his proposal in an effort to calm critics who had charged it would trigger a fire sale of public land to developers.

He pulled the plug outright after the Senate Budget Committee and the chamber's parliamentarian concluded it ran afoul of Senate budget rules that would have required 60 votes to overcome, a high hurdle considering the intensity of opposition that arose in recent weeks.

"We felt it would be better to work with the senators and the Congress to be able to get a comprehensive mining reform bill done," Gibbons said. "Given more time, we would have been able to educate the senators what these provisions did. There was tremendous misinformation and false statements about what this did."

Gibbons said he would work next year on a comprehensive mining bill. At the same time, he is running for Nevada governor.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who had been critical of the Gibbons proposal, agreed mining reform should be addressed, a spokeswoman said.

"Senator Reid supports mining reform, he thought it is important to do and would like to work on a package," spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said. "But this was just not the right provision."

The Gibbons mining bill passed the House this fall as part of a budget reconciliation package that lawmakers are attempting to complete this week. The Senate has special rules for reconciliation bills.

In addition, an unusual coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, hunters, sportsmen, Democratic governors and a few Republican senators vowed to derail the measure. They charged it contained loopholes that would allow large tracts of federal land to be claimed by developers.

In Nevada, Clark County officials feared the measure would trump the federal law that set procedures for orderly auctions of excess federal land in Southern Nevada.

"Anytime you're talking about public lands, it becomes highly contested," said John Dobra, an associate professor of economics who heads the Natural Resources Industry Institute at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Gibbons said the proposal would have lifted an 11-year- old moratorium on patenting, or land sales to mining companies for exploration and mineral development. Mining industry officials have blamed the patenting ban for reducing mining investment in the United States.

"One of the real questions that came up was real lack of familiarity on the Senate side," said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association. "It's always a big education effort because you're having to talk to with a lot of members of Congress that don't have mining in their states."

Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., said future changes should ensure that mining companies pay royalties on the minerals they extract from public lands.

"Today multinational corporations are mining publicly-owned valuable minerals like gold and silver without paying a royalty to the owners of these lands, the American taxpayer," Rahall said in a statement.

Stephens Washington bureau chief Steve Tetreault contributed to this story.