A gritty disagreement.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Delta Sand & Gravel wants government permission to expand its pit mine westerly through a 72-acre agricultural field. Homeowners on the other side of the field say the mining will wreck their neighborhood.

That sounds like the plot line for an epic land use battle featuring dueling attorneys, sparring experts, volumes of technical reports, plaintive cries for jobs, anguished pleas to save property values, and politically cornered public officials. Character assassination. Intrigue.

That's how it went a half-dozen years ago when Eugene Sand & Gravel tried to open a gravel mine on farmland along River Road north of the city - a project that the Oregon Court of Appeals eventually denied.

Now another of Eugene-Springfield's five major gravel mining companies is proposing to dig new ground, though this time adjacent to its existing pit. The first public hearing of a series aimed at approving or denying the company's plans will be Tuesday night.

The drama already has begun.

"It's not a light-on-the-land activity," said county planner Stephanie Schulz, who will shepherd the Delta proposal through the government labyrinth in the coming months, or maybe years.

Perspective

Whether the mine expansion should be allowed looks radically different to the different sides.

Stand by Kurt Eaton as he gazes through the kitchen window of his new,

$400,000 Salty Way home, a faux-1940s place with broad, welcoming porches. He sees a narrow subdivision street where his kids shoot hoops, a grassy knoll with an oak tree with a rope swing tied over a branch, then a row of scrub trees.

"See those trees right there?" Eaton points out his window past a cluster of oaks where Delta wants to put its 90-foot-deep hole. "Just past them."

But Delta Sand & Gravel executives look at it differently. Their aerial maps show the 474 acres that they've already dug into during four decades of mining.

They see a gravel company running out of good, high-grade rock. They see a company hemmed in by roads and rivers. They see a remaining 72-acre bulb of grassland to the west and the promise of an additional 12- to 15-year gravel supply.

"We'd be in a whole lot of trouble if we ran out of material to make concrete and asphalt," said Gordon Loeschen, Delta's operations manager.

The road ahead looks long and bumpy. The 72 acres is designated for agriculture in the Eugene-Springfield metro area's official long-term growth plans. Because Delta's proposed expansion lies outside the metro area's urban growth boundary and inside the official growth document's plan boundary, the company must win permission from two local governments: the Lane County Board of Commissioners and the Eugene City Council. The company's goal is to get the land designated for gravel extraction.

But first, Delta has to get a recommendation from a panel made up of Eugene and Lane County's regular planning commissions. That involves hearings, work sessions, requests for more time to examine the record, requests for additional supporting documents, criticism, rebuttal and - finally -

a vote.

The earliest the planning commission could send the project to elected officials would be the spring, one planner suspects. The company wants to start digging next summer, although executives say it'll be six or seven years before they reach the neighbors' side of the pit.

Due diligence?

Neighbors in the first phase of the Silver Acres subdivision say they were blindsided by the company's plans. Many said they heard that the gravel company wanted to dig up the field only two weeks ago, when county planners sent out notice of the proposed land use change.

Thirty of them gathered around a card table set up in the street last Sunday to examine the company proposal. They worried that noise and dust would spoil life in the neighborhood of $350,000 to $450,000 homes. They feared their property values would plummet. They met again Thursday to talk opposition strategy.

Joel Narva, an Oak Hill School mathematics teacher who lives on nearby Echo Lane, told the neighbors he already had hired an attorney because he's worried about noise. He said a principle of physics - called the inverse square law - predicts that if a sound source moves twice as close, it will be four times as loud.

Narva and other residents said the company's proposal is inaccurate. For proof, they offered copies of the company's own aerial photographs. They were taken before the Silver Acres houses were built, sold and occupied, when the land was empty.

The company's acoustics firm, hired to measure the sound impact on the surrounding community, took noise readings to the north and south - but not at the new subdivision.

In the summer, the company held a meeting to explain its proposal to nearby neighbors, but it left the subdivision off the invitation list.

"There's no way we could know how fast or how many homes were going to be built," said George Staples, Delta's risk manager and attorney.

Some of the residents from north and south of the subdivision who attended the company's presentation at the Santa Clara Community Center came away with a favorable impression of the mining plan.

"It frankly didn't seem too bad, not as bad as I imagined," said Billy Hamby, who lives in an older neighborhood south of Silver Acres.

"The way they explained it, there wouldn't be a lot of dust or noise. If they keep their word, it shouldn't be any problem."

Silver Acres neighbors said they're going to ask the joint planning commission for more time to study Delta's proposal. They said they were alerted way too late. They said the company should have warned neighbors beginning in 1999, when the company first set its expansion plan in motion by buying the field.

"When it's zoned agricultural, you assume it's zoned agricultural," neighbor Kurt Eaton said.

Delta Sand & Gravel knew the new houses were going in. Developer Rod Kempf, who grew up just north of the proposed mine site, hired Delta to put in the streets, curbs and gutters.

Also, the developer knew about the mine's planned expansion. Kempf said he learned of the plan about the time Delta bought the adjacent field. Kempf said the builders who put up the 43-unit first phase knew about the expansion plan.

Delta's Staples suggests that buyers easily could have looked at a map and seen the obvious: that the mine would expand. "They could have said, `Who owns this property?' And it would have said Delta Sand & Gravel,'' he said.

Stephanie Schulz, the county planner working on Delta's application, said that doesn't seem a realistic expectation.

Significance?

The company says it wants to be "a complete open book" and answer any question that any of the neighbors care to pose.

Delta's Staples learned in advance about last Sunday's gathering of worried neighbors, and he attended.

Wearing gray corduroy pants and a Columbia outdoors jacket, he blended right in with the neighbors - and he didn't identify himself until well into the meeting.

He said he kept mum so he could get a candid read on the neighbors' concerns.

They stood, a pensive crowd - "a lynch mob," some joked - in the middle of a Silver Acres street and worried over the dust and racket they feared the gravel pit expansion would bring.

Then, Staples stepped up, identified himself and offered to answer questions.

His strategy backfired with some of the neighbors. They reacted angrily, accusing him of gathering intelligence to help the company fend off a challenge and - when he started answering other neighbors' questions - of co-opting the meeting.

The company's land use studies found that noise, dust and groundwater drawdown could disturb neighbors next to the proposed expansion, but that the company can take steps to keep the bother to a minimum.

The company, for instance, can keep the haul roads inside the plant well watered to prevent airborne dust. This is standard mining company procedure. The company says it already spends $100,000 a year watering and sweeping to keep the dust down.

Staples said Delta would plant fir trees four deep around the perimeter of the mine expansion.

The acoustic consultants proposed an elaborate plan to prevent the pit from generating loud noises. Still, they only prescribed it for houses north and south of the subdivision.

Now, Staples said the company could apply the remedies to the Silver Acres side of the proposed pit.

The remedies include working no earlier than 7 a.m., limiting the trucks entering the pit to a dozen an hour, and keeping the front-end loader and excavator well away from each other so that their noise isn't additive.

To keep from draining the neighbors' wells, Delta proposes to build a wedge-shaped underground dam out of impermeable clay that extends down 30 feet, which is deeper than a shallow aquifer under the neighborhood.

A new road home?

Some subdivision neighbors are pledging to fight Delta Sand & Gravel to the limits of their endurance.

The leader of the group is a young executive with a prominent Lane County company. He stood in the street and rallied the neighbors, but he refused to disclose his name publicly. He said he plans to hire a land use lawyer to do the talking for him.

"They're going to have to redo the studies," he said during a call he initiated to the newspaper. "It's going to be a long, drawn-out battle. We're definitely not backing down. It's going to get big, it's going to be lengthy and it's going to be ugly."

Although Delta Sand & Gravel faces a tough challenge, it may fare better than Eugene Sand & Gravel because - in some ways - the issues aren't as big.

The Eugene Sand project was opposed vigorously by the owners of the Thistledown and Lone Pine fruit and vegetable stands. The farmers worried about the effect of dust on their soft fruit.

Conversely, the nurseryman who is farming land north of Delta's project said the pit is no problem. Clyde Beat applauds Delta's project and chides the subdivision neighbors.

"Delta is going to be the best neighbors they ever had," he said.

The earlier Eugene Sand proposal was much bigger - 575 acres, compared with Delta's 72-acre proposal.

And it was busier because it included a new on-site concrete and asphalt plant with trucks coming and going, at 920 trips a day.

Delta emphasizes that the new pit will be a replacement for its current mining, and the number of truck trips will increase by not a one.

KEY QUESTIONS

Government officials will have to pick their way through these questions to decide whether to let Delta Sand & Gravel expand its Santa Clara mining operation:

Significance: Is the gravel under the 72-acre proposed expansion field sufficiently hard and plentiful to justify overriding the state's goal of protecting farmland?

Mitigation: Can the noise, dust and groundwater disruptions associated with mining be minimized to the point of "no significance" for neighbors?

Balancing test: If the disruptions can't be minimized, what are the pros and cons of allowing the mining expansion anyway? Which are more persuasive: the pros or the cons?

Variance: If government agencies allow the expansion, should they also let the company mine in what normally would be a 150-foot setback from adjacent properties?

PUBLIC COMMENT

Eugene and Lane County's planning commissions are jointly soliciting comments on Delta Sand & Gravel's expansion plan

When and where: 7 p.m. Tuesday at Eugene Water & Electric Board, second floor, North Building, cafeteria, 500 E. Fourth Ave., Eugene

For information: 682-3656

CAPTION(S):

The Delta Sand & Gravel pit expansion is shown as the area jutting out toward existing neighbors to the left, marked by the dark line. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Joel Narva, a math teacher whose property is next to the proposed Delta Sand & Gravel expansion area, opposes the expansion because he thinks it will be too noisy. He contends that the company's proposal is inaccurate. Piles of gravel near the operations center of Delta Sand & Gravel wait for pickup. The operations portion of the gravel pit will remain in the same place. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard A load of gravel is ready for delivery at Delta Sand & Gravel in Eugene. The firm wants to expand into 72 acres of farmland.