GCC Energy’s King II mine has been operating nearly a decade unpermitted and without codes. Oil & gas, land developers and property owners all have county codes to live by; coal mines don’t. Failure of citizens to comply with existing codes results in lawsuits, fines and sanctions. There are a few county regulations (section 74-91) in place now that King II should be adhering to but isn’t. Those codes govern road surfaces, grades, width and traffic volume. GCC breaks most of them with no penalty.
In the snarl of yarn that is the county’s reasoning for lack of oversight, no citations have been issued, no fines collected and no remedial actions have been enforced.
We should have codes regulating mining in a residential community. The Planning Department says codes can’t be written until a permit is granted. The codes are then not applicable because the permit was issued before codes were written. All regulations will have to be in the permit itself. GCC controls and wrote many of the conditions for operations that will be in the permit and has submitted those, essentially writing its own regulations. It’s good to be King.
The Planning Department says it won’t enforce current road rules, including traffic volume. It tells us GCC needs more time to comply. A decade isn’t enough? Now GCC Energy is requesting another continuance, delaying the permit proceedings until February. The Planning Department wanted to get it done immediately. Apparently, GCC didn’t get the memo.
After five years of delays and neglect, the county was in a hurry to get the permit through. When we advised the Planning Department the GCC-generated road impact analysis that will be their code is insufficient, considering the planned 4,400-acre expansion (quadrupling the current mine acreage), we were told there is no time to vet the GCC traffic impact study and ask for additional analysis and solutions. When we asked about the potential for doubling or tripling production and traffic, the Planning Department said they aren’t concerned about the future and the detrimental impacts of expansion.
Where is the “planning” in Planning Department? Playing Catch-22.
John Graham
Hesperus
