South Rim residents who oppose a gravel pit in their neighborhood got what they wanted Tuesday night.
The Tooele County Commission voted unanimously during their Tuesday night meeting to honor a development agreement that calls for the gravel pit near South Rim to be closed when the Benches at South Rim Project is completed.
But the commissioners’ support of the development agreement doesn’t guarantee that the gravel pit will be closed immediately, according to commission chairman Wade Bitner.
“There are private property rights involved here that we have to respect,” Bitner said. “After consulting with our attorneys, it is up to the owner of the development agreement to decide when the project is completed.”
The motion to honor the development agreement, read by Commissioner Myron Bateman was, “Be it resolved that Tooele County intends to honor paragraph 3a of the 2001 development agreement with L&B Development Company Inc. for the Benches at South Rim Project.”
Before offering a second to Bateman’s motion, Commissioner Shawn Milne asked that the motion be read again.
“Read that again,” Milne said. “We had several derivations we were working on as recent as this afternoon.”
Without any further discussion, following Milne’s second, the commission voted unanimously to approve the motion. The commission did not appear to hear questions from the audience following their vote.
Paragraph 3a of the 2001 development agreement with L&B Development reads, in part, “The County agrees to transfer at no cost the property identified in Exhibit E, which has been used as a county gravel pit and is now encroaching on Developer’s property. Developer will be allowed to use the pit to run material from this gravel pit for the improvement of the roads within the Project. Developer will close the pit in accordance with the specifications for closure as provided by the county.”
Back in June after South Rim residents found the development agreement, they contacted the county commission with hopes the language in the agreement meant the gravel pit would be closed soon.
“It’s pretty cut and dry,” Scott Hunter said. “Silver Avenue is done. The roads in South Rim are done. The county needs to require the pit to be closed — now.”
Several South Rim residents addressed the county commission during the public comment period at the end of their meeting Tuesday night.
Mardi Munn, South Rim resident, asked for clarification.
“Planning code says reclamation will begin in six months,” she said. “Where are we at? What does that mean with what was said tonight?”
“We are listening for public concerns, not talking, just taking notes and listening,” Bitner said.
Munn continued: “We want that [remediation] to begin immediately,” she said. “It’s long overdue.”
During an interview Wednesday, Bitner said that according to the county’s attorneys, it is not the county’s responsibility to determine when the Benches at South Rim project is completed.
“That judgment is not ours to make,” Bitner said. “It is up to the owner of the development agreement.”
Tuesday night’s vote was significant because it means that the county commission recognizes and intends to honor the language found in the development agreement, according to Bitner.
“Even before this, we started plans to identify all the gravel pits in the county and inspect them annually to make sure they are in compliance with their agreements,” he said. “The pit at South Rim will be treated like all other gravel pits.”
Some residents of South Rim have been opposing the gravel pit at South Rim for a year.
Southside Gravel, managed by Jay Harwood, purchased the gravel pit and surrounding acreage from South Rim L.C. in April 2016. Prior to selling the gravel pit to South Side, South Rim L.C. had the county redraw parcel boundaries. As a result, the gravel pit was included in two new parcels of approximately 88 acres each.
South Side Gravel purchased the two 88-acre lots with the intention of extracting gravel from the property under a conditional use permit issued for the gravel pit in 1996, according to Harwood.
While an operating plan filed with the county called for the gravel pit to be operated seven days a week from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., Harwood told the Transcript Bulletin his plans were to operate under a more restricted plan.
“We would operate on 15-acres at a time, about the same size as the current pit,” Harwood said. “Many residents of South Rim didn’t know there was a gravel pit out there and the way we would operate the pit, many of them still wouldn’t know the pit was there.”
But Harwood’s assurances did not alleviate concerns of South Rim residents who worried about the impact of noise, dust, and heavy truck traffic in their neighborhood.
After the Utah Office of Property Rights Ombudsman opined that the gravel pit’s conditional use permit was no longer valid and that as a legal non-conforming use the gravel pit could not expand beyond its current horizontal footprint, Harwood applied to have his property rezoned to allow for gravel extraction.
Before the county commission could act on the rezone request, Harwood withdrew his rezone request after the ombudsman issued a second opinion. In the second opinion, the ombudsman advised it was his opinion that under the doctrine of “diminishing assets” that gravel could be extracted from the pit up to the boundary of the parcel the pit was on at the time the pit became a non-conforming use.
Armed with maps and drawings from a local surveyor, Harwood made the case that according to the Ombudsman’s opinion, he could expand the gravel pit to the boundary of the two 88-acre parcels on which the current pit exists.
Then in June 2016 South Rim residents found a copy of the 2001 development agreement between Tooele County and L&B Development for the Benches at South Rim while looking online at property records for parcel adjacent to the gravel pit.
The development agreement, and its language about the pit’s eventual closure, had not been included in documents about the pit’s conditional use permit that South Rim residents received from the county under a public records request.