The Glacier Mine Story
No story about our Gold Beach Community is complete without looking back on the Glacier Mine Story: It is a story that spanned over 15 years, and demonstrates what a small band of concerned, involved citizens and a dedicated Washington State Senator accomplished through direct social action. The Glacier Mine site is our Gold Beach neighbor, adjacent to us on the SW side, it was a 200+ acre gravel mine, laced with arsenic, idle for 20+ years and about to reopen it's full gravel mining operations in 2010.
Vashon Beachcomber, November 17, 2010
Content excerpts courtesy of Daniel Jack Chasan / December 30, 2010 for Crosscut Magazine
"It's official: Instead of spewing 10,000-ton loads of gravel from a long steel pier into waiting tug-boats and barges, the gravel mine site on the east coast of Maury Island will become a 235-acre King County Park. The papers have been signed.
Representatives of King County and CalPortland, which owned the site, closed the deal on December 30, 2010. CalPortland, which has absorbed the gravel mine's longtime owner, Glacier Northwest, is — like Glacier — owned by Tokyo-based Taiheiyo Cement. The county got the keys to the property gate.
“It's surreal,” Amy Carey, president of Preserve Our Islands, told the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber. “It is surreal,” agrees Washington StateSenator Sharon Nelson, the founder and
first president of Preserve Our Island (POI), who had been fighting the mine since the
presidency of Bill Clinton.
Sharon Nelson, a long-time resident of our Gold Beach Community, got involved 13 years ago when she and her husband attended a meeting of the Vashon Community Council and learned that Maury Island might provide the fill for Sea Tac Airport's third runway, then still a gleam in the Port of Seattle's eye. The Nelsons thought the community council should form a committee to study the potential threat. If you want a committee, the council president told them, you form it. So Nelson became the chair of an ad hoc community council committee to study what was then called the Lone Star site.
Massive amounts of gravel had been mined on the site from 1968 to 1978, for Sea Tac Airport runways and State freeway construction, and the pier and conveyor had fallen into disrepair. Initial plans by Glacier NWcalled for mining up to 7.5 million tons of gravel a year, and loading huge barges 24/7. It would become the largest open pit gravel mining operation in the United States!
Would you want a monster gravel mine operating 24/7 anywhere near your home?
This came dangerously close to becoming our Island and Gold Beach reality!!!
The journey was detailed by reporter Leslie Brown in the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber:
By Leslie Brown • November 10, 2010 8:41 pm
Sharon Nelson, then a Washington State senator who had been battling Glacier Northwest’s expansion plans on Maury Island for more than a decade, teared up shortly before a news conference Wednesday announcing King County’s anticipated purchase of the 236-acre mine site. “It’s a new day,” she said, brushing away tears. “It’s a dream come true.”
Indeed, against the backdrop of a slate-blue Puget Sound, King County Executive Dow Constantine stood before a phalanx of television cameras, public officials, environmentalists and others and issued an announcement that only a year ago would have seemed out of the question: The county and Glacier Northwest’s parent company CalPortland have signed an agreement outlining the terms of the property’s sale.
After months of closed-door negotiations, CalPortland has agreed to sell the site on the flanks of Maury Island for $36 million — the bulk of it to come from state and county coffers earmarked for habitat protection or conservation acquisition.
“This day has been a long time in coming,” Constantine said at the news conference, held at a small overlook in West Seattle perched above the Sound.
Pointing to the bulkhead lining the cobble beach next to the overlook, he noted the impact such beach-hardening has had on fragile nearshore environments. With this purchase, he said, “The longest remaining piece of undeveloped Puget Sound shoreline in King County will be protected.” “We have reached a historic agreement,” he added.
Under the terms of the deal, the $36 million purchase price would come from three sources: $14.5 million already set aside in the state budget from the Asarco smelter settlement, money Nelson helped to secure during the last legislative session; $19.1 million from the county’s Conservation Futures fund, which can only be used to purchase open space; and $2.4 million from an extension of the county’s existing lease to CalPortland.
The expansive parcel, once in public hands, would (and did) become a King County park. Protected would be about a mile of shoreline and more than 200 acres of madrone forests just south of the 320-acre Maury Island Regional Marine Park. The two parks combined represent the largest public holding of protected marine shoreline in all of Puget Sound.”
Others at the news conference said the purchase represents the region’s growing commitment to the health and restoration of Puget Sound, an imperiled body of water that many in the conservation world believe is threatened by pollution, invasive species, development, climate change and run-off.
Martha Kongsgaard, a West Seattle resident who chairs the Puget Sound Partnership’s leadership council, praised those “who had the vision and tenacity to stay at the table.”
“The opportunity to protect such a wide swath of intact shoreline is a rarity,” she said, “and it’s a significant opportunity clearly aligned with the science-based priorities for restoring this valuable ecosystem that we as a community have agreed upon.”
Wednesday’s announcement reflects a remarkable turn-around in the fate of the Maury mine site. More than a decade ago, Glacier Northwest announced plans to build a 305-foot, state-of-the-art pier — key to the corporation’s plans to dramatically increase its excavation of gravel and ship it off the Island by way of tug boats and barges that would ply Puget Sound seven days a week.
During the course of the bitter fight that followed, Glacier Northwest won one legal skirmish after another, despite ongoing efforts to block the project by the Vashon-based Preserve Our Islands, a grassroots organization that Gold Beach resident Sharon Nelson founded and is now led by Islander Amy Carey. By December 2008, Glacier had secured all the permits it needed and quickly began construction, stopping only when a state-mandated fish window for in-water construction closed.
The construction also triggered greater activism on Vashon! Several Islanders took to the water, using kayaks to surround the barge that held the construction crane in an attempt to block the project. Others protested in mass gatherings on the beach, efforts that drew increasing media attention.
Preserve Our Island (POI) founded by our Gold Beach community neighbor Senator Sharon Nelson, along with now president of POI Amy Carey, spearheaded this amazing turnout and display of community activism. The efforts resulted in local and national news coverage, including helicopter TV fly overs to broadcast the grass roots community effort and fight for our amazing and irreplaceable natural resource, Gold Beach.
Photos courtesy of Vashon Beachcomber, Steve Gering, Mike Sudduth and
POI Preserve Our Island.
Puget Sound is a local, national and global treasure.
We need to always treat it as such.
A special thank you to our former State Senator and neighbor Sharon Nelson, for her dog-on-a-bone tenacity from the beginning to the end of this Story: The Story of the fight for the quality of life in our Gold Beach Community, for Vashon Island and the fight to preserve of our State's irreplaceable and most awesome Puget Sound waters and the diverse wildlife that it supports. Thank you Sharon, for Preserving Our Island!
By Steve Gering
26012 Gold Beach Dr.
Gold Beach Community Club
State Senator Sharon Nelson (D-Maury Island) along with King County Executive Dow Constantine prepare to speak at press conference