What is the price of gravel?
There’s a simple monetary cost: the price in dollars and cents, per ton. There are various grades of gravel, and some are more suitable than others for, say, the maintenance of gravel roads.
And there’s a cost per hour for delivery, which can sometimes run more than the cost of the material. I understand that Archuleta County contractors have been trucking much of their gravel from Durango, and that our local paving company, Strohecker Asphalt & Paving, also buys gravel from Durango. That’s a one-hundred-twenty-mile round trip.
Then there’s the environmental cost, which includes aesthetic and health considerations. What damage is done by the extraction and delivery of the gravel? Especially, perhaps, what’s the damage done to my own gravel road by large trucks carrying up to 24 tons of gravel to some distant destination?
Is there a price we pay in lowered property values?
And we don’t want to forget the legal costs. What’s the price paid by a property owner or a business owner, to generate the studies and file the paperwork required by a state or county mining application?
What is the price, in legal fees, when a property owner is sued by their next-door neighbor?
At a recent Archuleta Board of County Commissioners work session, County Planning Manager John Shepard had suggested that the Commissioners’ meeting room will not accommodate the number of people who will want to attend the public hearing for the Two Rivers Gravel Pit proposal.
“Also, with the volume of public input we’ve received, this room will not be sufficient,” Mr. Shepard said.
Commissioner Clifford Lucero responded: “We need to hold the meeting at the Extension Building. This is going to be like the Walmart meeting. Same thing.”
Those comments indicate to me that the County expects more than 40 people to show up for the hearing, tentatively scheduled for this coming July. That’s a huge turnout, compared to typical land use hearings.
I assume that most of expected participants will be people who live on, and drive on, gravel roads. I doubt that any of them are opposed to the spreading of gravel on our gravel roads, considering the alternative, which is uncontrolled clay dust and mud. But they might prefer that the gravel be mined in Durango or Arboles, and trucked to Pagosa Springs at great expense, rather than see it mined 12 miles south of town and then trucked through residential neighborhoods.
The application for the Two Rivers Gravel Pit is nearly complete, as I learned during a conversation yesterday with John Gilleland, the owner of C&J Gravel Products in Durango. One of the final steps in fleshing out the application has been completion of a traffic study, looking at the roads his company would use to distribute Two Rivers gravel to destinations around Archuleta County.
Mr. Gilleland told me that Archuleta County buys about $150,000 worth of gravel per year, at $9 a ton. I guess that’s a fairly small amount of gravel, compared to the industry as a whole? Mr. Gilleland says he would be able to supply high-quality gravel to the County, at a lower cost, from the Two Rivers Gravel Pit — if the operation gets approved.
“It’s actually going to be a pretty small operation, and I don’t see that changing for quite a few years. My point is, this was a tough decision for me, to really go after this or not, because it’s going to take a long time to pay off the investment that’s been made to try and open [the new pit.]
“So for me to put a proposal together, based on the traffic impact study, I’m basically — and the County doesn’t give you any guidelines on this; they are saying, ‘C&J Gravel, what do you propose?’ — so I have to look at [the study] and say, ‘Here is our impact…’ And this [traffic study] will become available for everyone to look at…
“And in general terms, I look at it and I say, ‘I have this many trucks; it’s going to impact the roads this much, and this is how much gravel it’s going to take to basically mitigate what my trucks have done, to keep the roads improved.
“That’s not going to be enough, for land owners and neighbors… So what I have to propose is mitigation that says, ‘Because we are here and using the roads, I’m willing to not only mitigate our impact, but I’m willing to contribute to the County, to the welfare of the County and the road system here, by doing what I can do, as an operator, and help with that.
“I think for anybody who really looks at this, the economics are staggering, as far as the benefits to Archuleta County. As far as what they will be able to do with their maintenance budget, and what they’ll be able to do to help improve the roads. Because they will either be able to save so much money, or they will be able to buy so much more gravel, because of the reduced cost.”
Mr. Gilleland quoted some numbers. C&J Gravel provided high-quality gravel for last year’s runway improvements at Stevens Field airport, under a $674,000 contract.
“$370,000 of that amount was trucking costs, to get the gravel from Durango to Pagosa. The trucking is a huge factor.”
Obviously, if we had a gravel source located 12 miles from the center of town, the cost of every construction project could conceivably be reduced.
“Archuleta County had to pay $9 a ton for gravel this year. That’s what the bid was. And if you look back, in years past, it’s always right around that price. Nine dollars.
“What I will be proposing to the County is almost half that price. So they will either be able to buy twice as much gravel — or, if they only need that much gravel, then they’ll have money left over to do something else.”
So we have some numbers, as quoted by John Gilleland of C&J Gravel. Pretty simple numbers, really.
Then, as I mentioned, we have the price extracted by lawsuits. The monetary cost, and the emotional cost.