Illegal  Asphalt Plant in Rogue Valley Stopped – Numerous Appeals Later

2016

In 2016, after an appeal made by the Mountain View Paving Company, the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) upheld a 2015 victory that Crag secured on behalf of  Rogue Advocates.  

Crag client, Rogue Advocates, and local residents had spent over four years fighting to stop the operation of the Mountain View Paving asphalt batch plant in a residential zone and within the floodway of Bear Creek, a tributary to the Rogue River. After a long fight, the Mountain View Paving Company was forced to move their  asphalt plant away from Bear Creek and the nearby community.

The plant had been operating without land use permits since 2001.  When challenged, the plant operator argued that, since there had been a ‘concrete’ plant on the site prior to any land use laws, it was simply a continuation of the historic plant and should be ‘grandfathered’ in.  The County agreed. However, it was shown that there had never been an asphalt plant on the site, but only concrete operations. These had ceased operations prior to the 1980’s, when the area was rezoned for residential purposes, which precluded high impact industrial uses like an asphalt plant.  Established in 1982, the neighboring Mountain View Estates community had been exposed to the dust and fumes generated by the plant since 2001, but had experienced a significant increase in impacts around 2013. 

From 2013 through 2016, Crag supported approximately 10 separate LUBA appeals and legal challenges. These included a Clean Air Act citizen suit and a state court enforcement action.  This was all in an effort to uphold the state and local land use laws involving the facility.  

Essentially, these were the core issues of this very complex case:

• Jackson County had allowed the plant to operate without land use permits for years.
• Jackson County repeatedly tried to get the operation approved and was not following state and local land use laws in doing so.
• The land use laws prohibited this harmful use in a residential zone
• The asphalt operation was located in the floodplain of a tributary to the Rogue River.
• The plant’s operations at the site violated its permit under the Clean Air Act.

In 2015, after multiple successful challenges to the County’s prior decisions, Crag finally secured a favorable decision from the Jackson County Hearings Officer.  The new opinion found that the asphalt plant couldn’t be approved as a grandfathered use because its use had been changed over the years and it  posed greater adverse effects to the surrounding community than before. In 2016, the owner of the asphalt plant finally moved it to another location, one with zoning that allows this type of industrial use.