Gravel mining gets 2nd look

PALMER – What could have been a sweeping change to the way the borough regulates gravel mining failed to pass muster with the borough assembly.

“It would have implemented a number of extremely restrictive requirements on all of the gravel operators in the Mat-Su Borough,” Deputy Mayor Ron Arvin said of the ordinance which the assembly voted unanimously Dec. 7 to table indefinitely. Such a vote is the tool most often used at the assembly to kill a piece an ordinance.

Arvin said that his personal objections to the ordinance were legion. One example would be its reclamation requirements.

“What was difficult on that was it’s often not the property owner that’s doing the mining. Oftentimes property owners will allow one or several companies to come onto their properties and mine,” Arvin said. “How do you identify where the limits of liability are for each miner and how does that correlate to the property owner?”

None of that was spelled out in the ordinance, he said.

He said at a meeting prior to last week the assembly had made an attempt to deal with some of these issues using amendments.

“We worked through just a couple of them and it took hours,” he said.

The gravel issue has been ongoing at the borough for at least the past two years. It began as an effort to address mining in the water table and to insure against risks such operations pose to nearby wells.

The borough assembly in 2008 instituted what it said would be a temporary ban on new gravel operations digging into the water table, with the idea that the issue would be revisited with a permanent fix sometime in the future.

That effort has since grown into a working group of industry representatives, borough employees and interested community members.

Replacements for the ordinance that temporarily banned mining in the water table have been in front of the borough assembly before and have received an equally icy reception.

With the assembly’s most recent action, the borough remains with the status quo as it was imposed back in 2008.

Arvin said that although this most recent ordinance is dead, the gravel issue hasn’t gone away.

“It is an issue. Nobody wants to have their drinking water aquifer impacted,” he said. “The companies that are mining in the water table, they don’t want those impacts either.”

He said the assembly directed staff to work on an alternative ordinance.

“What the direction is that the assembly gave staff is to go back and work existing code and bring forward some changes that address mining in the water table and site restoration and reclamation,” he said. “I think everyone understands that there needs to be certain parameters that one needs to operate under given those two issues.”

The hope is that by tackling this issue with targeted changes like that the assembly can put the issue to rest, he said.

“Those are the things that we would rather address than some great big mother ship of new requirements,” Arvin said.

He said he thinks the rest of the assembly members share his thinking on this topic.

“As shown by the vote, the body just could not get its head around implementing something that restrictive,” he said.

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