Fracking falls under industrial development rules, planning board says
Discussion about a new industrial development ordinance is just getting going in the Jackson County Planning Board, but the board didn’t waste any time in taking a unanimous vote asserting that fracking — a controversial form of fossil fuel extraction recently legalized in North Carolina — falls under county regulations for mining.
“Our attorney and others have determined it [the definition] does include hydraulic fracturing [fracking],” County Planner Gerald Green told the board. “I recommend as we continue with this we add hydraulic fracturing in there so there’s no question.”
“I think us adding in that terminology makes it current,” agreed Scott Baker, board vice-chair.
A unanimous vote — member David Brooks abstained — placed fracking among the list of uses that qualify as mining, meaning that any hydraulic fracturing operations that showed up in the county would be subject to regulations in the industrial development ordinance.
“We have now addressed fracking in our industrial development ordinance,” said Sarah Thompson, board chair. “But we will go further.”
The industrial development ordinance rewrite landed on the planning board’s to-do list when the newly elected board of county commissioners decided they wanted rules to regulate fracking’s impact on Jackson County — if the industry ever decided to develop there. A section in the state law that lifted North Carolina’s moratorium on fracking complicated that wish, as the legislation stipulates that local rules can’t impose regulations greater than those written on the state level.
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However, commissioners believe that zoning rules regulating where such operations can occur do jive with state legislation. The county now has an agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council to help it write an ordinance that can stand up in court.
The board didn’t vote on any other aspects of the IDO last week but discussed the possibility of requiring that mining and industrial developments conduct an environmental assessment to identify any issues the development might bring with it, such as impacts to groundwater, endangered species or noise level.
When conducted on federal land, environmental assessments trigger the much more rigorous environmental impact statement if a problem is identified. Board members said they would not want to require that onerous of a next step.
“We’re not going to make them do a finding of significant impact and do a full impact analysis, but we can require them, if there is an identified impact, [to say] what are they going to do to mitigate that impact,” Green said.
The environmental assessment, if required, would likely go to the county planning department and then to the planning board to review.
Member Clark Lipkin said the environmental assessment requirement sounds reasonable but questioned whether the planning board might be accumulating too much responsibility. Its members are volunteers, and multiple ordinances the board has recently passed or is working on could require that the board review documents or give oversight where they hadn’t needed to before.
“That’s a good point,” Green said, adding, “We might want to recommend to the commissioners at some point in the future that they set up an environmental review board.”
Regulating junkyards
The board also spent plenty of time talking about the side of the ordinance regulating junkyards. Junkyard regulations haven’t been well enforced in the past, they said, which means that any changes would have to be coupled with knowledge that the people charged with enforcing them are willing and able to do so.
“I think it needs to be very clear who has the responsibility for doing what,” Board Member Tom Rodgers said. “Put the tail on the donkey and say who’s going to do what and how, and another thing say how big is the hammer you’ve got. You can expect violations.”
Board members also said they’ll look at writing regulations for private junkyards — properties with a large amount of defunct vehicles whose parts aren’t being sold commercially. That language could get thorny. What is the threshold to qualify as a private junkyard? Is it judged by the number of cars, or by density, or by age? And what role should aesthetics play in the regulations?
“It’s not easy [to address aesthetics], but we’ve done it in the steep slope ordinance,” Thompson said. “I don’t think we can not do it for junky yards but do it for fancy houses.”
But from an enforcement perspective, Green cautioned, “I don’t want to have to determine if it’s pretty or not. I want to determine if there were four or more vehicles or if it’s in the road.”
The nitty-gritty of the ordinance will likely take a while to figure out. But for now, Donna Dupree of the Jackson County Coalition Against Fracking is just happy to see that the board is taking an environmentally-focused tack with the revisions.
“It does a pretty good job of trying to protect people where they live or where they work,” she told the planning board of the current ordinance. “There is no mention of the environment, and our environment is pretty durn important here.”
