o Previously: County Commissioner Tom Mielke abruptly ended a June 3 public hearing over expanding mining zones on Livingston Mountain and Yacolt Mountain after attendees began booing him.
o What’s new: The commissioners will return to the subject at 10 a.m. Tuesday. An attorney for neighbors has put commissioners on notice that they will try to hold the county liable for damages or reduced property value.
o What’s next: The commissioners must make a decision, but have until 2016 to do so.
An attorney representing residents opposed to expanding mining zones in their neighborhood has put Clark County on notice.
o Previously: County Commissioner Tom Mielke abruptly ended a June 3 public hearing over expanding mining zones on Livingston Mountain and Yacolt Mountain after attendees began booing him.
o What's new: The commissioners will return to the subject at 10 a.m. Tuesday. An attorney for neighbors has put commissioners on notice that they will try to hold the county liable for damages or reduced property value.
o What's next: The commissioners must make a decision, but have until 2016 to do so.
In a recent letter to county commissioners, attorney David Mann wrote that a decision to expand the county’s “surface mining overlay” — areas in which mining is a permitted use — would make the county “potentially liable to neighboring property owners for damages related to nuisance and noise, dust and decline in property values.”
While the county’s planning commission voted last year to abandon the new zones, the state Department of Natural Resources has urged the county to add them, citing studies indicating a preponderance of high-quality rock aggregate to the west and north of an existing quarry.
If the county approves amending Livingston Mountain’s surface mining overlay, the Department of Natural Resources is proposing to lease the land back to the county so it can expand mining operations there. The state and the county could stand to receive millions of dollars in royalty payments as a result of the expansion, which would tap an estimated 11 million tons of new rock, according to DNR.
The Department of Natural Resources has implied it would challenge a decision that didn’t extend mining areas, on grounds that the state’s Growth Management Act requires it. But in his letter to commissioners, Mann said that such a challenge is “unlikely to be successful.”
“While the (Growth Management Act) does mandate you take certain action, it leaves the ultimate decisions to your discretion so long as you follow the required processes and consider the relevant factors,” Mann wrote. “This is precisely the work that the Planning Commission … accomplished through their lengthy and painstaking review process.”
The state Growth Management Act requires the county to take action on the mining zones by 2016, the deadline for the county’s comprehensive plan update.
Republican Commissioner Tom Mielke said the county was in no hurry to make a decision and was following proper procedure.
“I don’t take (the letter) as a threat,” Mielke said. “We do what we do, and we get all the information we need.”
Commissioners plan to finish a hearing on the matter — more than a month after it began — at their 10 a.m. Tuesday meeting at the Public Service Center, 1300 Franklin St., Vancouver.
Mielke, who serves as the board chairman, abruptly ended a nearly four-hour evening hearing last month. He’d called off public testimony and launched into his own remarks when the audience began booing him.
At the same meeting, Mielke expressed his desire to hear more from mining interests, which had almost no representation amid the throngs of mining opponents who packed the commission chamber.
He later pushed to reconvene the hearing to a daytime July meeting in the hopes of minimizing the amount of public comment the commissioners would likely hear.
At a June 11 board time meeting, Mielke said he’d be open to listening to more comments only if he knew he was going to “hear anything different that we haven’t heard seven times before.”
Residents of areas abutting the quarries say they plan to have a presence at Tuesday’s meeting, even though it takes place during the day.
