Wash companies seek to expand gravel mines

Check out the people smiling biggest over the federal economic stimulus package, and chances are you'll find Bruce Chattin among them.

Chattin is a lobbyist for the Washington concrete and aggregates industry, and when he hears talk about $2 billion to be spent here on roads, bridges, highways and mass transit, what pops into his mind is "gravel."

"Anything that generates more projects is good for our industry," Chattin said recently, talking by cell phone on the way to the Legislature.

Sand and gravel, or "aggregates" as they're known in the business, are the basic building blocks of nearly all construction. A typical single-family home contains 120 tons of aggregates, from the foundation concrete to the grit on the shingles. A single mile of freeway typically contains 35,000 tons; studies for the new Highway 520 bridge over Lake Washington indicate it would take 1.5 million tons.

Thanks to the ebb and flow of glacial ice over Western Washington during the past several millennia, gravel is a resource with which the Puget Sound region is naturally blessed.

But gravel mining on the shores of the sound draws the wrath of environmentalists like almost no other activity. For adjacent landowners, few developments are more despised.

"Gravel pits are just big open wounds," said Don Russell, an opponent of a mine expansion proposal near DuPont. "It's as if somebody grabbed hold of your skin and ripped it off."

Mining companies say that despite vast gravel deposits near Puget Sound, not-in-my-backyard attitudes and misconceptions about the mining process have made new mining permits next to impossible to get.

That's created an artificial shortage, the industry says, which eventually will mean long, costly hauls by truck or importing sand and gravel from more remote mines on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

"We're not pretty," Chattin said. "We understand that. But we have to go where the rock is."

The public works project money on its way from Washington, D.C., is fueling debate over three large sand and gravel mining operations currently being proposed on the sound.

Glacier Northwest's plan to expand its Maury Island mine and replace an existing dock so outraged protesters that in January they chained their arms together inside steel pipes to block construction access, then launched flotillas of kayaks to halt pile drivers.

Pressure from industry and environmentalists has sent public policymakers flapping back and forth like windsocks.

When then-state Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland signed off on an aquatic lease for the Maury Island project in his final days in office, environmentalists accused him of selling out to big business.

Last week, Peter Goldmark, the new lands commissioner, ordered a review of the lease, an act that industry sees as political payback for the environmental and local interests who helped elect him.

On the Olympic Peninsula, more than 3,000 people have organized to fight Poulsbo-based Fred Hill Materials' plan to build a 4-mile-long gravel pipeline to a new loading terminal on Hood Canal.

Meanwhile, state legislators quietly introduced bills this month that would take away local control of that project.

And in the south sound, opponents are talking to attorneys to find ways to stop Glacier Northwest from expanding its 387-acre DuPont operation with a new 177-acre pit, 80 feet deep. If approved, the entire mine would be about the size of downtown Tacoma.

When gravel mining companies speak of a shortage of gravel, they're not talking about geology, says Dave Norman, the chief geologist at the state Department of Natural Resources.

There's plenty of gravel, Norman said. It's just that most is in places where, for either economic or environmental reasons, it isn't practical to mine.

"There are plenty of great aggregate deposits," Norman said, "but if they're 500 miles away from anything, it doesn't really matter."

The biggest and best deposits and the easiest to transport are in a roughly 25-mile-wide band along the rim of the sound.

The prehistoric deltas of the south sound are particularly blessed. Gravel from DuPont and Steilacoom, a vast reserve depleted five years ago and reborn as Chambers Bay Golf Course, set the standard for gravel in terms of quality and depth.

For more than a century, the mine's operators barged gravel from Steilacoom to construction sites throughout the south sound and as far away as Brazil.

"Steilacoom literally built Seattle," Chattin said.

But as the Puget Sound area's population and environmental awareness increased, the gravel reserves have become increasingly difficult to tap.

Washington's Growth Management Act, passed in 1990, ordered counties to identify suitable areas for gravel mining as a part of their comprehensive planning process.

Some counties have done so; others haven't. Without those designations, areas that otherwise might have been available for gravel mines are developed for other uses.

"The GMA hit the bull's-eye for intent," said Chattin, the industry lobbyist. "Unfortunately, it doesn't have any teeth."

Some counties have avoided the intent of the act by either not identifying areas for gravel mining at all or by designating areas that are miles from roads or that don't have high-quality rock, he said.

Chattin is leading the industry's efforts to get the Natural Resources Department to complete its geological mapping of the entire state, identifying suitable mining areas in all counties.

The mapping is estimated to cost about $4 million.

In this economic climate, however, with legislators slashing away at budget requests, funding for geologic mapping doesn't seem likely.

The high cost of trucking gravel is the main reason mines near the shores of the sound are so attractive to the industry. With a conveyor system and a boom reaching out over the water, barges or oceangoing ships can take on loads equivalent to hundreds of trucks.

Not only is water transport cheaper, but it's also cleaner, according to the industry. Moving gravel by barge means less fuel consumed, fewer tailpipe emissions and less wear and tear on roads by heavy truck and trailer rigs.

"The less we have to truck material, the fewer emissions we're producing," Chattin said. One barge can carry as much gravel as 186 trucks and, according to Glacier's calculations, saves 2,700 gallons of fuel on a single trip from DuPont to Seattle.

Opponents don't buy it.

"The gravel companies will always try to sell you on the idea that it's less environmentally damaging to ship by barge than truck," said John Fabian, a former astronaut who's turned his attentions to fighting Fred Hill's Hood Canal proposal.

"It's not an either/or question," Fabian said. "More barges won't do anything to replace trucks. They would only allow an expansion of the geographic marketplace."

When the vessels arrive at concrete plants, it still takes trucks to carry the gravel to building sites, Fabian said, merely shifting pollution problems farther from the source.

Fabian and other opponents of gravel mining on the sound accuse producers of complaining publicly about a shortage while actually having their eyes on the export market.

What they really want to do, Fabian says, is export Puget Sound-area gravel down the West Coast and as far as Asia, where prices are much higher.

"We do not support strip mining the Olympic Peninsula to facilitate gravel sales to Shanghai," Fabian said. "Nor do we support it to allow more of Southern California to be paved."

With an adequate supply, gravel producers have shown that long-distance transport by water can be practical. In 2007, the Polaris Minerals Corp. began shipping sand and gravel from its Orca Quarry, near Port McNeil on Vancouver Island, to San Francisco Bay and Hawaii.

Last August, Polaris spent $15 million on a receiving and distribution terminal at the Port of Long Beach, Calif., to serve the Southern California market, where prices are two to three times higher than they are here.

The loading terminal Fred Hill wants to put on Hood Canal could accommodate oceangoing vessels, but Chattin said that, given the local need, long-distance transport of gravel from Puget Sound isn't a likely prospect.

"We don't have that luxury," he said. "We're just trying to maintain our own sources of supply."

Californians pay high prices for gravel because they restricted their own gravel mining so severely, Chattin said.

"California is the poster child of what not to do," he said. "We, as a state, really have to come to terms with being self-sufficient and to meet our own needs."

As a general rule, the aggregates industry estimates that the cost of gravel doubles for every 25 miles it has to be transported. Restricting local supplies can drive construction costs up dramatically, making a big difference in large public works projects.

Glacier Northwest, which supplied the aggregate for the new Tacoma Narrows bridge from local sources, said the cost was about $2.3 million. In San Francisco, the aggregate cost would have been $3.7 million, Glacier said, and in Los Angeles, $5.5 million.

The Puget Sound gravel standoff has convinced both sides that the regulatory process needs to change.

Gravel companies complain that permitting has been made so difficult, it now typically takes at least five years to open a new mine, and can cost as much as $1 million a year.

In the 10 years Glacier Northwest has been working on permits for Maury Island, seven state and federal agencies have reviewed the project and required a long list of mitigating actions, all of which Glacier has agreed to. It has spent $10 million in the process.

The company has agreed to restrict hours to satisfy objections about noise, enclosed its loading apparatus into a tube to control dust and spillage, and designed its dock to minimize impacts on herring, orca whales and eelgrass.

None of that has appeased environmentalists and local residents. They maintain that, despite Glacier's progress through the permitting system, large-scale gravel mining operations simply don't belong in environmentally sensitive areas of Puget Sound.

State-owned tidelands and bedlands off Maury Island were designated a state Aquatic Reserve in 2004 because of their importance as fish spawning grounds and wintering bird habitat.

According to environmental scientists, Hood Canal has been so badly damaged by human activity that it's teetering on the brink of total environmental collapse.

The ecology of Puget Sound is so complex and incompletely understood, environmentalists say, that the benefit of any doubt about effects should go to the environment.

"We're living with the consequences of extractive industries - logging, fishing, mining - done at the expense of the balance with the environment," said Mike Sato, representing the group People for Puget Sound.

"Now the burden of proof falls on industry and our human activities to demonstrate that what's proposed does not only benefit the public good but also the ecosystem good.

"Using that criterion," Sato said, "something like gravel mining and shipping product from undeveloped shoreline habitats like Maury and Hood Canal clearly fail to help re-establish the balance."

Environmentalists want change because they believe the regulatory process is subverted by those with the most cash and who can afford the highest-priced scientists and attorneys.

Glacier Northwest is based in Seattle but is a subsidiary of CalPortland, which is owned by the Japanese Taiheiyo Cement Corp.

"It's a classic case of divide-and-conquer," said Don Russell, a DuPont project opponent. "They get some high-falutin' lawyers, figure out what all the permits requirements are and then shape their arguments so nobody can keep them from doing what they want to do."

Too often, opponents say, regulatory agencies miss the broad view by getting bogged down in the minutiae of poorly understood science.

"All of these government agencies only touch the elephant at certain points," Russell said. "One looks at the trunk, another one looks at a toenail, another one looks at the hair on its rear end. None of them really cooperate to get the whole picture."

Environmentalists are especially galled that the state is approving new mining permits on the sound while paying for the Puget Sound Partnership, a new agency intended to protect and restore the sound.

"They're talking about industrializing relatively pristine parts of Puget Sound and at the same time spending millions to protect the sound from industrialization," Fabian said. "It doesn't make sense."

To a certain extent, David Dicks, executive director of the Puget Sound Partnership, shares those concerns. He's taking heat from mine opponents and environmental organizations for not opposing Glacier Northwest's operation on Maury Island.

Dicks points out that the project had been in progress for nearly a decade when the partnership was created.

"We were late to the party," he said.

But even had that not been the case, Dicks said, 10 years of environmental review by numerous agencies found no fatal flaw in Glacier's plan.

"Quite frankly, with Maury Island, we couldn't have done anything anyway," Dicks said. "We may not like the result, but they (Glacier Northwest) went through the entire process. To come in at the very end and reject it, that comes down to a basic fairness question."

The process itself is where Dicks sees room for improvement. He hopes the partnership will be able to step back and look at the regulatory system from a broader perspective.

"We want to get ahead of it, so we're not always in reaction mode," he said. "We have to stand back and say, 'What are we trying to do here? Does this make sense at a broader, more basic level? Is this a good result for Puget Sound or not?'

"If this process is not adding up to a healthier Puget Sound, then we need to go in and fix the process."

As for Chattin, the change he'd like to see is having existing laws enforced. Carry out the intent of the Growth Management Act, he says, and trust the environmental review process.

"Good proposals should have the ability to proceed," he said. "We have to move forward.

"As our state grows, we need more materials, and we have to get them where they occur," he said. "We know we are not the neighbors of choice, but we're a neighbor of necessity."

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Information from: The News Tribune, http://www.thenewstribune.com