Stopping the 'Stilly' From Going to the Pits

Citizen's group battles developers and Snohomish County to keep a huge gravel quarry from spoiling the Mountain Loop Highway

by Mary Ann Kae
Free Press contributor

Bruce Barnbaum is a man deeply involved with wilderness aesthetics. From his home nestled in the conifers off the Mountain Loop Highway, northeast of Everett, he leads classes and practices his craft of art photography in the tradition of Ansel Adams. He is also the current president of the Stillaguamish Citizen's Alliance (SCA), a grassroots organization that is quietly accumulating a resume of land preservation victories on a shoestring budget.

Among other efforts, SCA has worked on watershed preservation and planning issues for the Robe Canyon Historic Park and Trail.

In the last few months, however, the 500-member SCA has mobilized its resources to fight development of the state's largest gravel pit on the Mountain Loop Highway.
"We never thought it would come to something like this," declared Barnbaum, referring to SCA's appeal of the project's environmental impact statement. In the last year, this citizen protest has evolved into one of the most politically heated development conflicts in Snohomish County. "What is it about Associated Sand & Gravel that has the entire political machine of Snohomish County stumbling all over itself to get this project approved?" mused Barnbaum. The proposed quarry has become a textbook case of local politics versus county business interests and county government.
In 1992, Associated Sand & Gravel Co. (AS&G) of Everett applied to rezone 1,338 acres near Granite Falls from forestry to mineral conservation status. It also applied for a conditional use permit to begin excavating. The property, owned by the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Boston, is bounded by the Mountain Loop Highway and the South Fork of the Stillaguamish River.
The "Stilly" supports several salmon and trout species already suffering serious depletion due to development, logging, and overfishing. The Mountain Loop Highway is the most popular recreation area in Snohomish County, and enjoys additional status as a National Scenic Byway. Dozens of campgrounds and trailheads dot the two-lane highway as it curves along the Stillaguamish to Barlow Pass, at which point blacktop yields to gravel and the road bends northward along the Sauk River toward Darrington.

Pit of Discontent
Quarry opponents note that the project would open the entire Stillaguamish River valley west of the U.S. Forest Service boundary to major industrialization. They worry that toxic pollution and sedimentation from quarry operations would have severe impacts on the river. The proposed site contains 63 acres of prime wetland habitat, over half of which would be eliminated by the quarry. Another water-related concern is damage to residential wells due to tens of thousands of cubic feet of water being siphoned off daily from the local aquifer for quarry uses. Opponents fear the effects that airborne pollutants and over 600 gravel truck trips per day would have on residents, schools along the trucking route, and the estimated 500,000 hikers, fishermen, campers and tourists who visit the area annually. Recreational sites which would be most impacted because of their proximity to the quarry site include Masonic Park and the new Robe Canyon Historic Park.

Backers of the project cite Snohomish County's need for raw materials to support its burgeoning infrastructure and urban growth. They claim that the county is running out of designated mining sites and that quarries must be located as close as possible to points of use to reduce costs. AS&G says that the Hancock property is the best available under these criteria and that the site's existing use as a tree farm fits in well with reclamation plans. County government and business organizations agree, and the county is taking extraordinary steps to circumvent the planning review process and guarantee AS&G a cozy niche in the local aggregates industry.
AS&G hit its first speed bump after the County's Department of Planning & Development Services (PDS) published the project's Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which said that there would be significant unavoidable adverse impacts within every element of the environment. Over 100 letters were received during the comment period, yielding a document totaling over 1,000 pages. Despite only minimal changes to the Draft EIS, PDS issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement in February of 1995 which stated that the project would result in no significant unavoidable adverse impacts to the environment.
The Stillaguamish Citizen's Alliance, The Mountaineers, and several neighborhood groups appealed the adequacy of the final impact statement. County Hearing Examiner John Galt held 72 hours of public hearings last fall. He subsequently issued a 35-page decision which found the final statment inadequate on nine major counts. One major inadequacy is all that is required to find an EIS unacceptable.
The decision detailed numerous deficiencies and falsifications in the final impact statement, including the elimination of all significant environmental impacts without any basis of support. The final statement failed to disclose the full extent of residential developments in the area, and inaccurately described the true extent of recreational uses of the Mt. Loop Highway.
"A reader of the FEIS who was not familiar with the area would have absolutely no reason to believe that it is a major recreational resource in its own right," Galt noted. The final statement also misrepresented analyses of projected traffic patterns and understated statistical estimates of fatalities along highway routes to be used.

'Fatal flaws' in EIS
Extraction estimates varied wildly during the hearing process. The final impact statement estimated that 45 million tons of bedrock would be removed over 70 years, although project completion contours actually represented the removal of 176 million tons, which would take approximately 290 years to remove at the proposed rate of extraction. The documents also gave the impression that AS&G has substantial experience in reclaiming spent mines as commercial forests, whereas hearing testimony indicated otherwise. Based on the "fatal flaws" found in the document, Galt remanded the final statement back to the Snohomish County PDS. But rather than redoing its impact statement, Associated joined with PDS and appealed Galt's decision to the County Council. Here, the political ping-pong match began.

The County Council remanded Galt's decision back to him for reconsideration, suggesting that he had substituted his opinion for the law. The council refused Galt's request for clarification, and advised him to consult his assigned legal counsel, i.e., the county prosecutor. However, Prosecutor James Krider had actively supported Associated during the EIS hearings, and assisted PDS in their appeal process. Krider had to recuse himself due to his conflict of interest.
Citing county ordinances in a final meeting, Galt pointed out that the county council has no jurisdiction over EIS appeals, and explained that he could not approve a rezoning or conditional use permit without an adequate Final EIS. Refusing to be swayed by politics and popularity, Galt insisted on following the law. AS&G recently filed a lawsuit in Superior Court, asking a judge to order the county to rule on their permits, and the County Council has scheduled another meeting on the issue for April 10.
The explosive growth overtaking the Puget Sound area has precipitated an acute crisis of values over land use. County ordinances are being written in the wake of last year's state regulatory reforms and are being heavily influenced by the development industry-a statewide trend. AS&G would like some of this "designer legislation" applied to them, retroactively.
The president of AS&G recently said that quarrying on the Mountain Loop Highway was "consistent with the legacy of east Snohomish County, where logging and mining industries have been accepted as part of the landscape for more than a century." However, many citizens feel this "legacy" does not justify continued resource extraction in the style of the previous century, especially on the Mountain Loop Highway.
Washington residents are already living with the consequences of badly managed resource extraction and the results of poor land use planning. As we struggle with the issue of whether and how to preserve what little remains of the great natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, we should consider that our traditional concepts of growth may actually be social decline by another name.

Freelance writer Mary Ann Kae is a member of SCA.

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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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