Gravel again makes grist for borough

PALMER — Two years later, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough is still chipping away at its proposed ordinance to regulate gravel mines.

In April of 2008 the borough put a stop to mining gravel in the water table. The fear at the time was that mining in the water table could pollute nearby wells or cause them to run dry. The assembly tasked the borough planning department with sitting down with gravel industry representatives and interested community members to hammer out some kind of an ordinance everyone could live with.

The ordinance has been back before the assembly a number of times but has failed to pass muster.

Tuesday, the assembly met to go over proposed changes to the ordinance handed them through the borough’s planning commission. Two assemblymen — Ron Arvin and Mark Ewing — neither of whom were on the body when it began working on the ordinance, expressed frustration.

“This particular issue started with groundwater and it turned into talking about dust and topsoil,” Arvin said. He wondered why the ordinance had to be targeted at gravelers rather than broadened to apply to the entire borough. “If we don’t have a code to address that, why don’t we have a code to address that?”

Assemblyman Jim Colver told Arvin that those kinds of regulations have gone down in flames in the past. Borough planner Emerson Kruger pointed out the planning department is working on some ordinances that would supplant parts of the gravel ordinance. A comprehensive noise ordinance, for instance, is in the offing.

Ewing made no bones about his belief that the ordinance was aimed at hobbling the gravel business.

“Part of this is just an out-and-out assault on commercial gravel operations … one of the few resources in the borough that we can reap a benefit from,” he said.

Getting down to the meat of the amendments up for discussion, Kruger told the assembly that the magic number in the ordinance right now is 2,000.

“When they start loading more than 2,000 cubic yards into trucks and taking it somewhere else, they start having the same impacts as commercial gravel operations,” Kruger said.

So the ordinance requires a permit for 2,000 cubic yards or more. But there are exceptions to that rule. A subdivider, for instance, who needs to take down a hill to flatten out his property, can move that gravel around, even onto adjacent parcels, without needing a permit.

Colver said he’d like to see some way to administratively look at particular cases. Big commercial projects — like building a box store, for instance — might require a developer to take down a hill and rid himself of the gravel.

Kruger told him there is such a process in place in the ordinance.

As for why this ordinance is taking so long, Kruger noted that a number of the issues addressed in the ordinance came up after the borough started working on the initial plan to address groundwater and mining into the water table.

One such issue: the state of Alaska owns a number of gravel mines in the area that are out of compliance with borough codes.

“We’re not aware of any illegal operations out there that aren’t owned by the state,” Kruger said.

That’s because all of private pits applied for and were granted grandfather rights when the moratorium passed. For whatever reason the state wasn’t brought into that process and the borough is working to fix that problem.

Another bone of contention at the meeting revolved around what to do about the three cities in the borough. Kruger said that a change in the ordinance would have the borough regulating pits in the cities.

Ewing, who represents mainly Wasilla, didn’t seem too happy with that, noting that he knew of no pits in the city that were mining into the water table.

Pete Houston, who represents mainly Palmer, asked how the assembly would go about changing that.

“If we were to want to make it not apply within the cities we would have to do something outside of the planning commission recommendations?” he asked. Indeed they would, Kruger replied.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.