Lively Houston meeting revolves around deputy mayor, gravel pits

HOUSTON — A meeting of the Houston City Council on Tuesday began with a prayer for decorum and guidance, progressed into a discussion which included threats of lawsuits and armchair hydrology, and ended with a rush on petition forms to run for office.

Just prior to the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, council member Angela Rosas gave a brief nondenominational invocation in which she said elected officials know they can't please everyone, and asked for guidance, compromise, and decorum. A casual observer might say her prayer was only partially answered.

The issue of the day was pretty simple: should the city rubber-stamp a conditional-use permit for Deputy Mayor Jerry Nelsen to extract gravel from five acres of his 40-acre parcel?

Most everyone seemed to agree that a landowner's rights should prevail, but about two dozen people showed up to question Nelsen's actions.

Charles "C.J." Sforza asked Nelsen to resign from the panel.

"There's a deep-lying conflict of interest there that goes back a number of years, which is just beginning to emerge with this permit," Sforza said before the meeting. "He's been the one who's been really hard-lining the gravel operators in town."

Asked about this claim after the meeting, Nelsen didn't deny scrutinizing other Houston gravel operations. He pleaded for fairness.

"Did you not hear me being asked to be treated like Mr. Miller? That's all I asked of the council," Nelsen said.

Mr. Miller is Gary Miller, who owns a gravel pit near Nelsen's land. Miller didn't attend the July 17 meeting, but had written letters to the Mat-Su Borough planning department and the Houston council asking that Nelsen's permit be denied.

Miller's letters claim there are plenty of gravel pits in the area, and encourage the city of Houston to sell gravel as well. At the meeting, some audience insisted that the city was obligated to sell its gravel and that the council could do that to raise city funds.

Two large public projects, the Parks Highway rehabilitation and the straightening of the Alaska Railroad track, have made it inevitable that Houston and the surrounding area are likely to see increased gravel pit activity during the next few years.

Tom Pitt, a representative from a Parks Highway project contractor, Anchorage-based Quality Asphalt, attended the meeting. Pitt said at the meeting that the company didn't buy gravel from local governments, and that Miller already had a chance to supply gravel for the highway project, but negotiations with Miller had failed.

Pitt also said that test holes on the Nelsen property showed a better-quality gravel than Miller's, and that it was also better than the gravel from a nearby pit already in operation for the project.

Pitt said Miller was worried about competition, and had told Pitt so, but that wasn't really Pitt's concern.

"We're not really a competitive factor for Gary Miller," Pitt said, "but this country was built on competition and what's fair for Gary should be fair for Jerry."

On several occasions Pitt — and nearly everyone else in the room — joined the fracas of out-of-order comments during the meeting with retorts of his own. Mayor Kim Kasper refrained from gavel-pounding but instead reined in the conversation by tapping a pen on the council dais, and reminding the audience who had the floor and who didn't.

Kasper occasionally met outbursts head-on with abrupt statements of her own. She also flexed the rules of order so that audience members were sometimes heard despite being out of order. Kasper explained more than once that Nelsen's apparent conflict of interest could be resolved legally by removing him from the council while the issue was being discussed.

"A lot of people have said this was a surprise, that they didn't know, that it's a conspiracy or whatever— this was handled the same as any other land-use permit," she said, punctuating her sentences with her tapping pen.

Nelsen was excused from voting on the matter and spoke at the meeting as a citizen, representing himself. He said a buffer of 50 trees and topsoil mounds would keep the gravel operation from public view.

He said his plan for the acreage was to level enough ground for five one-acre lots to be sold as residential property. Asked after the meeting if he thought the audience understood his plans, he said he wasn't sure.

"It's hard to say," Nelsen said. "It was available to them if they would have read it. That's all I can say."

Several people at the meeting expressed concerns about the quality of their well water, and feared that Nelsen's excavation could affect their drinking water.

Some of those people live in the flood plain of the meandering Little Susitna River. The river cuts through the heart of Houston, and some lots extend right up to its banks. One man, who left before the final vote, threatened to sue the city if his water quality went south and he found out that Nelsen's gravel operation was to blame.

He held on to that threat even when council members pointed out that neighboring wells, septic systems, the river, and even the weather could affect his well water. In the end, the council voted unanimously to grant the land-use permit, allowing Nelsen to sell gravel off his land for the next 10 years.

Houston City Clerk Suzann Ward confirmed there was a rush on petitions to run for council after the meeting, but as of press time Wednesday no one had turned in a completed petition. It takes 20 signatures from qualified Houston voters to get a name on the city's October ballot.

Nelsen told the Frontiersman a rush like that wasn't uncommon after a contentious meeting, but he also said meetings like Tuesday's were rare.

"We've seen this in the past," he said. "This is a small group of people and the seats are open to anyone who wants to run . . . but what you have to understand is that the audience was not the general consensus of the city of Houston."

As for the property, Nelson said the gravel contract included money and excavation services on site. He said his goal was to excavate five residential lots with views from a bluff, and that he preferred single-family homes. But he also said the housing market might call for apartment buildings, so he's not committed to single-family homes at this time.