The Ridge at Fox Run

Dellacroce Gravel Pit Editorial

Gazette Likes Approval Decision

This is an editorial from the August 30, 1999 issue of The Gazette

OUR VIEW: Property's priority

Gravel pit is the price of progress - and a good test of individual rights

Not many folks are crazy about living near an operating quarry, so the concerns of some residents north of Colorado Springs about the quarry in their midst, and about
its plans to expand, are understandable. Yet, El Paso County commissioners had little choice but to vote to allow the expansion of the Dellacroce family's gravel-mining operation on its ranch near Baptist Road.

It is, after all, the family's land.

Commissioners offered other reasons for their vote, too. Notably, the local economy, and particularly the construction of roads, homes and commercial buildings in our
community's northern reaches, are so reliant on the gravel pit.

"We all use the benefits of mining," Commissioner Jeri Howells aptly observed. "We all agree (the pit) is not particularly pretty. But we would not be living in homes or
driving the streets if it weren't part of our community."

That's the plain reality, and that reasoning applies as well to the other oft-bemoaned "scars" that mark some other portions of the foothills overlooking metropolitan
Colorado Springs. Those quarries, too, (the biggest showing the benefit of long-standing revegetation efforts) served up aggregate for generations of home and road building.

An even more fundamental consideration must come into play here, though. And that is the inalienable right of those like the Dellacroce family to put their land, which
they've mined for some 50 years, to its best and highest use in the marketplace. As Raymond Dellacroce told commissioners, "My father worked on this ranch during
the Depression for $10 a month." They can do better now.

In the time since the family acquired the parcel, they've been acknowledged by state mining regulators for the care they've taken in their treatment of it. The plan
approved by commissioners Thursday would extend the pit's operating life 24 years and would permit the six-acre site to expand to 72 acres in phases. The family
pledged not to mine more than eight acres at a time and to reclaim the land with native grasses and wildflowers.

None of which is likely to soothe all the neighbors in nearby subdivisions, some of whom said they at least would like even more efforts to obscure the gravel operation
from public view.

Again, those concerns are understandable, and to a significant degree they can and should be addressed by precisely the kind of neighborly understanding the
Dellacroces seem to have shown. Make no mistake, though, in the end individual rights are at issue here.

Which underscores the flaw in the thinking of one opponent who declared, "The Front Range is a precious thing. Why should we tear it up?"

The Front Range of the Rockies is indeed beautiful, and we all should be grateful to property owners who take great care with their land's natural beauty. But the rest
of us must resist the urge to make those decisions for them.