Protesters gather outside King Estate Winery to oppose a gravel quarry on TV Butte. Photo by Eve Weston.

Opposing the Rock Pit

Oakridge residents continue the nearly decade-long battle against the construction of a quarry on TV Butte

I have been working on opposing this rock pit for the last nine years,” Oakridge resident Kathy Pokorny says. “My daughter asked me the other day, ‘Mom, are you going to spend your whole life working on this thing?’ And I don’t think I should have to.”

The “rock pit” is a proposed gravel quarry on TV Butte, which sits less than one mile outside Oakridge city boundaries. The rural town itself has a geographic footprint of only 2.2 square miles. Oakridge sits in the shadow of TV Butte, and residents say this mine will not only harm their views, but their blossoming mountain bike tourism industry, their water and air quality, and every individual’s health. 

After the first application finally failed in 2021, Old Hazeldell Quarry started this second attempt in 2022, without minimizing the previously identified issues surrounding nearby big game habitats. Many Oakridge residents have been fighting Old Hazeldell’s efforts to turn TV Butte into a quarry for nearly a decade.

Pokorny and her husband Louis Pokorny live outside city limits, less than half a mile away from the proposed construction site. “It’s hard because you’re living in the middle of it, and we walk outside our door — doesn’t matter which door — and TV Butte is right there in front of us,” Kathy Pokorny says.

The Pokornys own one of the 16 properties within the proposed quarry’s 1,500-foot impact zone, according to the quarry’s application to the Lane County Board of County Commissioners. The property sits on protected forested lands, which must be rezoned for quarry mining operations through a vote by the county commission.

“Depending on what their operating hours are and lighting and everything else, it could be a real eyesore and disturb the peace and tranquility that we’re used to out here in rural Oakridge,” Oakridge Mayor Bryan Cutchen says.

Cutchen, along with the entire Oakridge City Council, sent a letter requesting the application be denied. Kelly Brewer, an Oakridge city councilor, says it feels like their requests have fallen on deaf ears. 

“It’s really disappointing,” Brewer says. “We’ve given them all the information that they need to make a decision to deny it and yet we’re still here.”

On Oct. 15, County Commissioners David Loveall, Ryan Ceniga and Pat Farr voted to extend the public record — allowing Old Hazeldell LLC to submit more evidence showing the site’s compliance with Oregon’s Goal 5, a statewide planning document governing the protection and use of natural resources. 

One of Old Hazeldell LLC’s members is real estate investment company Crown Properties, which the Oregon Secretary of State Corporations Division lists as managed by Ed King III. King III is the co-founder and co-CEO of King Estate Winery.

Crown Properties purchased 28.85 acres of the land for the mine from the city of Oakridge in 2011 for $123,000. The quarry’s operations will take up 107 acres, of which 46 will be mined, according to the application.

Bill Kloos, the land use attorney representing Old Hazeldell, says he’s not authorized to respond to Eugene Weekly’s request for comment, but during the Oct. 15 public hearing, he requested the public record be extended so the applicant could remedy issues about big game. At the same time he said that there was no more need for public input. “One public hearing is enough,” he said at the time. 

Kloos said this application is “exactly the same application that’s been before this board” almost 10 years ago — when Old Hazeldell made its first attempt to turn TV Butte into a quarry. “Planning staff has changed. Public works staff has changed. The board has changed, which means this board may see compliance with standards where the former board did not,” he said.

In 2016, the Lane County Commissioners (then majority conservative) tentatively voted 4-1 to approve Old Hazeldell’s 2015 application, voting again in 2018. This decision was appealed to Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals, which remanded the decision back to the (then majority liberal) county commission; the commissioners denied that application 3-2 in 2021. 

Lane County Land Management Division Senior Planner Taylor Carsley says staff identified several deficiencies in the most recent application — notably with the same issue that stopped the last effort in 2015, a nearby big game habitat — and requested that Old Hazeldell remedy them.

In a big game management plan submitted during the extended public record on Nov. 4, Old Hazeldell asserted it would provide an in-kind nearby habitat for the nearby elk and deer in compliance with Goal 5. Old Hazeldell consulted with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and with Wetlands and Wildlife LLC, a Eugene-based environmental regulation compliance consulting firm.

On Nov. 25 ODFW Regional Habitat Biologist Joseph Stack submitted a letter in response to the management plan. “While the Big Game Management Plan represents a step in the right direction, it still contains several flaws identified by ODFW staff during the initial draft review in June 2023,” Stack writes. “The plan does not adequately address or identify potential impacts.”

Carsley agrees. “Staff consider the proposed big game management plan to be incomplete, inadequate to minimize significant conflicts to major big game habitat, ambiguous, and unenforceable,” he writes in a Nov. 25 memorandum sent to the Lane County Board of Commissioners.

Oakridge doesn’t want to lose any nearby Elk habitat, Cutchen says, and it doesn’t want to lose any potential business either.

While he says that mountain biking has been a bridge to get past that loss, Oakridge is still looking to bring in new industry. “You don’t want to turn away business, but not without a good reason anyway, which is why we’ve kind of given this a lot of thought and discussion publicly,” he says. “There is an unemployment problem in Oakridge.”

Oakridge City Administrator James Cleavenger says that no industry will want to share the road with 86 gravel trucks driving back and forth daily — and anything technical is a nonstarter due to the nonstop explosions.

“If I’m looking at a piece of property in the industrial park to start a business, I don’t want blasting going on six days a week,” Cleavenger says. “If you’re doing something technical and then — boom! — it’s not conducive to that.”

The environmental quality in Oakridge would decline significantly, says Michelle Emmons, former president of the Oakridge Westfir Area Chamber of Commerce and interim executive director at Willamette Riverkeeper.

“The problem with the crusher is that it’s 25 to 30 feet away from the edge of the toxic landfill that’s located up there,” Emmons says. “Now we’re dealing with wildfires and a fucking quarry — that if it gets built — my property value is going to go way down,” she says. “My property isn’t even going to sell. My lifelong investment will go down the toilet.”

Fellow homeowner Louis Pokorny says, “Like my wife says, our daughters went, ‘Are you gonna do this the rest of your life?’” To learn more about the project, the applicant or to read evidence submitted during public record go to LaneCountyOR.gov/Hazeldell.