Evening the Playing Field
PERMITTING GUIDE PRO TECTING RESER VES 42 Evening the Playing Field As most state and local governments fail to protect aggregate resources, check out this roundup of land-use planning initiatives and pursue strategic tactics in your market. by Therese Dunphy, Editor-in-Chief EDITOR'S NOTE: This article originally appeared in the August 2006 issue of Aggregates Manager . S ometimes success comes from failure. That's the premise of an emerging school of thought regarding the protection of aggregate resources for future development. For more than three decades governments have grappled with competing land-use interests, typically with aggregates resource identification and protection coming in last in a long line of other options. But as aggregate producers manage to work around permitting constraints in various mar-kets, their success may actually undermine the growing urgency to protect such reserves for future development. Despite numerous initiatives including the Colorado Front Range project, which was launched in 1973, to the zoning classifications such as Tooele County, Utah's MG-EX, which was developed in the '90s, no broad-based, government-initiated protection program has been implemented. In the '70s, people started recognizing these conflicts, says Bill Langer, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Den-ver. The state geological surveys and the USGS made efforts to demonstrate the location of the resources, residential communities, and projec-tions of development. As an example of the results, Langer points to Anne Arundel County in Maryland. Everyone would gasp and develop maps of resources, but then they'd stop there, he explains. They failed to take that next step by taking action to protect it. People could still build there, and they did. While no national initiative has been imple-mented, a number of state and local programs have been developed, with varying degrees of success. The folks that study this kind of thing have come to the conclusion that there is a real lack of consideration of aggregate resources in the planning literature, Langer says. The issues are generally ignored in terms of pro-tecting the resource. On the other hand, there tends to be a fair amount of effort designed to protect the people from the impacts of devel-oping the resource. Colorado's H.B. 1529 Colorado was one of the early, although not most successful states, to attempt resource plan-ning. In 1973, the state Legislature passed H.B. 1529, which was designed to encourage devel-opment of mineral resources based on rational and practical planning. The bill required the state geological survey to develop maps of sand and gravel resources in the populous Front Range counties and subse-Photo by Tina Grady Barbaccia