A Craven County-based sand and limestone mining company seeks to modify its state permit to more than double its acreage, and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Energy, Mineral and Land Resources has set a public hearing on the proposal for May 27.

The applicant, R.J.’s Bushhogging Inc. with a registered address of 1185 Winn Circle, in Vanceboro, and registered agent, Robin McDaniel, is looking to add 58.8 acres to its permitted area, with 50.08 acres to be mined. The area is in a flood hazard area, already a point of frustration for its neighbors, who have filed with the county planning department a petition opposing the expansion.

“The quarry currently operates close to our homes and has already caused a range of problems for residents, roads, children, animals, and Wildlife,” according to the neighborhood petition, which cites dust that affects public health and property and “lasting effects such as noise, traffic, fragmented wildlife habitat, water pollution and water that fills excavated areas. Further expansion would bring excavation activity even closer, increasing the disruption to our daily lives.”

The operation known as Willis Neck Mine is near Swift Creek, a tributary of the Neuse River. The applicant says the change to its permit will not involve mine dewatering nor will it require changes to its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System outfall permit. NPDES is a program under the Clean Water Act and regulates point-source discharges of pollutants to waters of the United States with enforcement at the state level.

R.J’s Bushhogging’s 2026 modification application for mining permit 25-75 also includes “smaller areas,” tracts of 8.78 acres, 2.79 acres and 1.89 acres, on the west side of Winn Circle, intended for shallow sand mining.

“Therefore, these areas will not be dewatered,” according to McDaniel’s application cover letter.  

The hearing will be held at 6 p.m. in the Craven County Community College Auditorium at 800 College Court in New Bern. Those who wish to speak during the hearing can sign up to do so starting at 5:30 p.m. 

Public comments are to be limited to the following seven denial criteria listed under the Mining Act of 1971:

1. That any rule or regulation would be violated by the proposed operation.
2. That the operation will have unduly adverse effects on potable groundwater supplies, wildlife, or fresh water, estuarine, or marine fisheries.
3. That the operation will violate regulated standards of air quality, surface water quality, or groundwater quality.
4. That the operation will constitute a direct and substantial physical hazard to public health and safety or to a neighboring dwelling house, school, church, hospital, commercial or industrial building, public road or other public property, excluding matters relating to use of a public road.
5. That the operation will have a significantly adverse effect on the purposes of a publicly owned park, forest or recreation area.
6. That previous experience with similar operations indicates a substantial possibility that the operation will result in substantial deposits of sediment in stream beds or lakes, landslides, or acid water pollution.
7. That the applicant hasn’t violated any rule or regulation that resulted in a permit revocation of a permit, forfeiture of part or all of a bond or other security, conviction of a misdemeanor under the Mining Act, or any other court order, final assessment of a civil penalty or failure to pay the required application processing fee.

The public can submit comments in writing to Assistant State Mining Engineer Kelly Jonas, Division of Energy, Mineral, and Land Resources, Department of Environmental Quality, 1612 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-1612.

Comments may also be sent via email to ncminingprogram@deq.nc.gov with the subject line “Willis Neck Mine.”   

For more information on the permit, visit the DEQ website.. 

The N.C. Division of Water Resources has released for public comment a revised discharge permit for a quarry operation in Vanceboro.

Martin Marietta Material Inc.’s revised wastewater discharge permit for it’s Vanceboro quarry requires a biological integrity assessment once every two years through sampling for benthos, or small aquatic organisms that live in water.

The permit also includes a monthly monitoring requirement for pH, total suspended solids and turbidity in the discharge, or effluent, from the mine.

Permit revisions were made after the permit the division issued last February to the company was rescinded based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “end-result” requirements imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in permits were not allowed under the Clean Water Act.

Mining activity has not occurred at the Vanceboro site since the original permit was issued in 2013, according to a N.C. Department of Environmental Quality release.

The proposed permit would regulate 12 million gallons per day of mine dewatering and stormwater from two outfalls to unnamed tributaries of Blounts Creek. The creek is classified as a Class C, Swamp, Nutrient Sensitive Waterbody in the Tar-Pamlico River Basin.

The first benthic sampling would occur after the discharge begins between Feb. 1 and March 15, according to the release.

Public comments on the revised permit will be accepted through Oct. 29 by email to publiccomments@deq.nc.gov with the subject line “NC0089168 Vanceboro Quarry,” and by mail to Wastewater Permitting (NC0089168), 1617 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, N.C. 27699-1617.

Details about the permit and a technical fact sheet are available at online DWR Vanceboro Quarry permit file.

New Hanover County beaches could again mine sand from nearby inlets to nourish their oceanfront shores under a proposed law recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The bill would exempt a handful of federal coastal storm risk management projects on the East Coast from a rule that prohibits local governments from tapping sand sources they have historically used within the Coastal Barrier Resources System.

The proposed law would apply only to projects that have been pumping sand from borrow sources within the federally protected system for more than 15 years. Those include Masonboro Island at Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach Inlet at Carolina Beach, an inlet in South Carolina and one in New Jersey.

H.R. 524, introduced by Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., in January 2023, would also return the use of federal funds for projects that use sand within a Coastal Barrier Resources Act, or CBRA, unit to nourish adjacent beaches outside of the system.

“This legislation allows these beaches to continue to use their historic borrow sites for protection from storm damage, maintain their natural ecosystems, and protect our local economy,” Rouzer stated in a press release following the House’s April 11 passage of the bill.

The bill is now with the Senate environment and public works committee.

Proponents of the bill argue that allowing projects that had for years used sand within the system to nourish nearby beaches reduces costs and ecological impacts.

“It’s an opportunity to recycle sand. It’s an opportunity to reduce potential environmental impacts. And, it’s an opportunity to reduce federal and local expenditures,” said New Hanover County Shore Protection Coordinator Layton Bedsole. “I think Wilmington had been in compliance 20 years before CBRA was written and we haven’t encouraged development in sensitive coastal locations like inlet shoulders. That’s a major tenant in CBRA.”

Congress passed CBRA, pronounced “cobra,” in 1982 to discourage building on relatively undeveloped, storm-prone barrier islands by cutting off federal funding and financial assistance, including federal flood insurance. The act was also established to minimize damage to fish, wildlife and other resources associated with coastal barrier islands.

Last May, Matthew Strickler, deputy assistant secretary for the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Parks, expressed the current administration’s objections to H.R. 524 in his testimony before the House natural resources committee.

Using federal funds to move sand dredged within the system to an area outside of it “is considered counter to CBRA’s purposes,” he said referring to the Coastal Barrier Resource System, or CBRS.

“While some of the sand taken from CBRS units for beach renourishment activities may return to the unit over time, the overall impacts of dredging in these areas protected by CBRA are detrimental to coastal species and their habitats,” Strickler said.

But proponents of the bill argue that years of monitoring these inlets prove otherwise.

“We’re in a situation where Mother Nature brings sand down our beach into an engineered borrow site and then we recycle it back up on the beach in the next three or four years. That’s ideal. We’re recycling rather than mining. We’ve got consistency that works for us that we can work with,” Bedsole said.

December 2023: Sand nourishment to begin in Wrightsville Beach

Wrightsville Beach was using the rich, beach-quality sand routinely pumped from Banks Channel and placing that material on its ocean shore for roughly two decades before CBRA was enacted.

In the mid-1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers permanently allowed the town to use Masonboro Inlet as a sand borrow source, shielding the town from ongoing debates over the interpretation of the law as it pertains to whether sand within a CBRS unit may be dredged and placed onto a beach outside of a CBRA zone.

By 2019, then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt determined that federal funds could be used to pay for dredging sand with CBRS units and placing that sand on beaches outside of those zones for shoreline-stabilization projects.

A year later, the National Audubon Society challenged Bernhardt’s interpretation in a lawsuit filed against the former secretary, the interior department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The organization argued the interpretation “vastly expands potential sand mining projects” within areas protected in the system.

The Biden administration overturned the rule in 2021 and Audubon agreed to drop its lawsuit.

The new interpretation forced beach towns that had historically used sand from CBRA zones to look offshore.

Facing exponentially higher costs and an offshore borrow site scattered with old tires broken free from an artificial reef, the town was given an emergency exception by the Corps to get sand from the inlet. That project, which pumped roughly 1.04 million cubic yards of sand onto Wrightsville’s beach, wrapped in mid-March.

The cost to use sand dredged from the inlets is substantially lower than pumping sand from an offshore borrow site.

The last time Carolina Beach tapped the inlet borrow site for sand to place on its ocean shoreline the bid tab was $5 a yard.

“The current project came from the offshore borrow area, as it has, was $11 and some change a yard,” Bedsole said. “It just costs more to go offshore.”

Bids are expected to go out this spring for Carolina and Kure beaches’ nourishment projects, which as of now will use sand from an offshore borrow site.

How that sand might affect the channel Carolina Beach used for years as a sand source has raised concerns among beach town officials.

“We have pulled sand out of that inlet for pretty much my entire life,” said Carolina Beach Mayor Lynn Barbee. “We know what the environmental impacts are. They’re very minimal. We haven’t seen any sort of erosion because of taking that out of there. We haven’t seen any impacts to wildlife, ever, so it’s hard to see what the harm is. What we’ve been doing in the inlet is the borrow pit fills up and we pump that sand out every three years onto the beach and then it drifts back in and fills up and we pump it back out. That seems intuitively better than going out offshore and basically running a sand mine underwater and disturbing what was natural out there.”

Another issue, he said, is how sand pumped onto the beach from the offshore site may affect the inlet, one heavily used by boaters and offers the fastest route for first responders to get into the water.

Barbee said the town has seen “unprecedented” shoaling in Carolina Beach Inlet since it began using the offshore borrow site.

“We have really struggled to keep that open,” he said. “We’ve seen the cost to keep the inlet open go up. If in fact our theory is correct, where else would that sand have come from if it wasn’t introduced from the offshore borrow pit. You’re introducing a new sand source into the traditional system. Certainly, anecdotally, we didn’t have this problem, we do something different, now we do have the problem. It doesn’t seem like it’s a huge leap.”

Barbee said the hope is that the bill will become law before the next project begins.

“If not, we have three more years of these elevated costs, and then we’re just putting more and more sand in the system, and the worry is that when does it become too much?” he said.

Southport hasn’t put out a “For Sale” sign, but that has not deterred offers for a large tract of city-owned land.

The 441-acre tract has captured the attention of a private business and a state agency, which are eyeing the land for very different reasons.

Commercial construction firm The Polote Corp. has approached the city with a proposal to buy or lease no less than about 50 acres of the land near Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, or MOTSU.

The Savannah, Georgia-based business wants to do on the land what it did 15 years ago – mine clay-like material and transport it next door to build up earthen berms buffering ammunition and explosive areas within the ammunition port. The berms have naturally eroded over time.

Circling back around from talks with city staff in 2020, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission recently informed Southport’s planning and zoning board the agency received funding late last year to help purchase the property.

An Oct. 10 letter from a commission official to the board indicates the commission wants to continue with a funding plan if Southport is still interested in selling, “with the hope of protecting the property’s significant conservation value in perpetuity.”

Polote Corp. Senior Vice President Lloyd Ludlow explained during the Southport Board of Aldermen’s Oct. 13 meeting that the land’s proximity to the Army installation makes it particularly desirable. The next closest areas that contain material suitable for berm-building are a little more than 40 miles away.

“That would mean that the transport of this very, very large amount of dirt through very heavy trucks and other machinery,” would occur on Southport’s roadways, said Ray DiGuiseppe, a Southport-based attorney representing The Polote Corp.

Polote would not need to access public roads to move earth mined from the city’s land to the ammunition port, Ludlow said.

The firm could also mine the land to provide material for Boiling Spring Lakes’ dam restoration project, one that entails repairing a series of dams in the town that were damaged during Hurricane Florence in 2018. Boiling Spring Lakes is a city about 9 miles northwest of Southport.

Polote would need about 50 acres to mine an estimated 800,000 cubic yards needed for MOTSU’s five-phase, five-year project, Ludlow said.

The acreage the company will need may not be contiguous, depending on exactly where the suitable material is and the fact that the city’s property contains a population of endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers.

Ludlow said Polote would mark trees with woodpecker nests to ensure those trees would not be cut down and mine only the best soil, digging down to a depth of no more than 10 to 15 feet. Mined areas would be turned into lakes.

“It’s not like strip mining,” he said at the Oct. 13 meeting. “We’re not going after rock or anything else. We’re just looking for that soil and that’s it.”

Ludlow said how much land Polote would either buy or lease remains “very negotiable.”

“We know what we need,” he said. “We do not need all of it. It’s not a one size fits all.”

Polote is offering $4,000 per acre. If the city were to agree to lease the land with exclusive rights to Polote, the company would negotiate price per cubic yard.

The federal government has placed restrictive uses on the land because of its proximity to MOTSU, the nation’s largest ammunition port spanning more than 16,000 acres off the banks of the Cape Fear River.

Development of the property is prohibited.

Ben Solomon, assistant chief and land acquisition manager of the Wildlife Resources Commission’s Land and Water Access Division, said in an email the land, which is adjacent to the state’s Green Swamp Game Land, serves as an important buffer and includes a host of habitat benefits.

“MOTSU contains a population of red-cockaded woodpecker and is habitat for up to 90 species of amphibians and reptiles, 44 of which are state listed and/or Wildlife Action Plan priority species,” he said.

In December 2021, the commission was awarded a $441,000 grant to purchase the land.

“The final funding goal has not yet been determined and will be evaluated once an appraisal is ordered,” Solomon said.

He said the agency and city have not discussed the sale of at least some portion of the tract and that the commission is considering how it wants to proceed with negotiations with the city.

The city has to retain at least 20 acres of the tract as a site to place yard debris following storms, Southport City Clerk Dorothy Dutton said.

During its Oct. 20 meeting, the Southport Planning and Zoning Board approved a recommendation to allow Polote access to the property to conduct research and tests on the land. The recommendation has to be signed off by the city manager.

The city has hired an interim city manager set to begin the job Tuesday.

MOTSU’s berms

Sunny Point’s eroded berms will be replenished over the course of five years.

The multi-million-dollar project is scheduled to get underway next year and is anticipated to be completed by 2028, according to Jed Cayton, a public affairs specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District.

The initial phase of the project requires about 33,500 cubic yards of material, he said in an email responding to questions.

Natural erosion has reduced the berms to various heights, Cayton said.

The berms will be restored in compliance with the Department of Defense’s explosive safety regulation, which requires that the entire width of a berm’s crest be at least one foot above the line of sight.

Leaders of an organization focused on protecting waterways in the White Oak River Basin say the information in the permitting public notice for Martin Marietta’s proposed 100-acre expansion plan for its limestone aggregate quarry in Maysville raises questions and may not convey the full extent of the environmental damage that could result.

Coastal Carolina Riverwatch announced Tuesday that it had submitted comments to the Army Corps of Engineers in response to the public notice issued in February for the proposed Belgrade Quarry expansion. Martin Marietta Materials Inc. seeks Army authorization to discharge fill material into 8.96 acres of wetlands and 899 feet of stream as part of the project. Plans include an approximately 8-acre expansion site north of the existing mine pit and a roughly 92-acre area south of the existing mine pit referred to as the “Bender Pit.”

The period for public comment on the proposed expansion ended March 26.

“Our overall goal is to protect the biological integrity of the watershed and to protect our waters as they exist naturally,” Coastal Carolina Riverwatch Executive Director Lisa Rider said earlier this week.

Rider and Waterkeeper Rebecca Drohan told Coastal Review that the information in the Corps’ public notice was vague, raising questions of sufficiency. They said more information is needed about how the expansion, including a new area referred to in the application as the Bender Pit and the associated construction of a new road and road crossings, would affect the surrounding hydrology and wetlands.

The organization said the proposed Bender Pit would be a new pit, not an expansion of the existing mine pit farther north. The Bender Pit expansion site is surrounded by jurisdictional wetlands, the organization said in its submitted comments. Those wetlands provide important function such as flood control, pollution filtration, erosion control and wildlife habitat.

“Our coastal environment is one that can be resilient, but it’s very fragile, as well,” Drohan said. “Anytime that there’s proposed changes that may affect those functions, we’re definitely concerned.”

Martin Marietta East Division President in the company’s Raleigh office did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The quarry first opened off U.S. 17 and Belgrade-Swansboro Road in 1938 as Superior Stone, a Martin Marietta predecessor, and has been active as currently configured since 1988. The company said it needs to expand the operation from its current 1,605 acres “to cost-effectively mine construction grade aggregate reserves at the existing Belgrade Quarry facility.”