Editorial on gravel site ignored crucial views.

Byline: MARK REED For The Register-Guard

ON DEC. 4, A MAJORITY of the Lane County Board of Commissioners voted to deny Eugene Sand & Gravel's application to mine gravel from a River Road site. This vote said that Eugene Sand did not meet the requirements of state land use law for siting a gravel mine in this area of prime farmland and family farms.

Two days later, The Register-Guard published an editorial claiming that the majority vote was based on political considerations rather than on a rational application of Oregon's land use law. Unfortunately, The Register-Guard had not reviewed the testimony from scientists that has been submitted during the commission process. The testimony shows that the commissioners were correct.

The Register-Guard relied almost entirely on the county planning staff report, which also failed to evaluate critically and fairly the scientific evidence. The county staff simply supports Eugene Sand's proposal on essentially every decision point, without justifying or explaining its decisions in light of the evidence.

In contrast to The Register-Guard, a majority of the commissioners did read deeper than the staff report, and found that: a) the thickness of the gravel is not 60 feet, as required by law; b) Eugene Sand's sampling of the gravel is not representative, as required by law; and c) highest grade (Class 1) farm soil covers 52 percent of one of the proposed mining areas, exceeding the legal limit of 35 percent.

As a scientist specializing in mineral resource geology, I have volunteered my time throughout the past 22 months to evaluate all of the drilling and other geologic data on this gravel case, and I have submitted several reports of my findings.

The drilling and other geologic data show that approximately 30 feet of high-quality, loose gravel lies beneath the topsoil at the River Road site. This top gravel layer is the cream of the deposit, suitable for making concrete. Beneath the cream there is another 23 feet of poorer quality, cemented gravel. These two upper gravel layers add up to 53 feet in thickness, not the 60-foot layer required in the law.

Beneath this 53-foot deposit there is a massive clay bed encountered in drilling throughout the site, averaging 10 to 14 feet thick. This thick clay bed forms a physical and economic barrier to mining. Beneath the clay lies another 19 feet of apparently very poor quality, strongly cemented gravel, which geologists call conglomerate. This third layer is quite likely to fail the state requirements for gravel quality.

For a very good reason, Oregon law does not provide for adding together layers of gravel separated by an extensive, thick clay bed. If the law allowed such summation, hundreds of sites with prime farm soils along the Willamette River would qualify for mining even though the thickness of economically accessible gravel is far less than the legal minimum (60 feet in Lane County).

Oregon law requires that "representative samples" of the gravel must meet Oregon Department of Transportation standards for quality, but Eugene Sand failed to take representative samples. Instead, the company mixed high-grade gravel from the upper 30 feet with the lower quality gravel from above and beneath the massive clay bed, thereby completely obscuring the true quality of the two deeper gravels. A third or a half of the gravel may actually fail the ODOT standard.

The meaning of "representative samples" is universally understood by resource geologists and is spelled out in nationally accepted standards published by highway engineering professionals. Those standards specifically require separate sampling of gravel from distinct layers. Remarkably, Eugene Sand argues that the layers are not distinct, but its own descriptions plus five expert opinions from opposition geologists establish that the layers are distinct.

The Register-Guard editorial and the Lane County staff report cite opinions from the state Department of Geology and Mineral Industries and the Department of Land Conservation and Development in support of the gravel pit proposal, but they neglected to evaluate critically the substance of those opinions. DOGAMI failed to address either of the key issues at the heart of the decision: the 60-foot thickness criterion and "representative sampling."

The DLCD, in a preposterous twist of language, defines the deep clay layer as "overburden," then declares that adding together gravel layers separated by the clay bed is permissible. In reaching this conclusion, the DLCD did not review any scientific testimony, including overwhelming expert opinion on this very point that is contrary to the DLCD conclusion. Even Eugene Sand's geologist now admits that the opponents' definition of "overburden" is the accepted one.

Finally, it might be reasonable for The Register-Guard to probe how the DLCD arrived at its baseless finding, given that the lead attorney for Eugene Sand is also the chairman of Oregon's Land Conservation and Development Commission, which oversees the DLCD.

The Lane County staff report is also out of balance on other scientific issues. The report fails to evaluate the compelling testimony by two groundwater scientists (from Oregon State University and the University of Washington) who independently concluded that Eugene Sand's plan would fail to maintain groundwater levels beneath adjacent farms, thereby depriving them of irrigation water. The staff report also fails to evaluate the testimony of a highly experienced dust expert who points out that Eugene Sand's claim for 99 percent control of dust blowing onto adjacent crops is completely unrealistic.

These are but a few of the issues on which highly qualified experts seriously dispute the claims of Eugene Sand's experts. Experts from opposing camps may disagree, but that does not mean that their arguments have equal merit. Disagreement between opposing scientists does not absolve decision makers from a responsibility to understand and judge which of the scientific claims are valid.

Serious scientific dispute on a matter of grave public interest and law, such as this proposal to destroy hundreds of acres of prime farm soils in exchange for a gravel mine, deserve a public airing facilitated by responsible, informed news media investigation, and supported by a publicly accountable evaluation by county planning staff.

Mark Reed is a professor of mineral resource geology at the University of Oregon.