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The following was published in 1980 by Hope for the Dunes in their fight to stop destruction of the dunes near Bridgman at the South Bridgman sand mine. Little has changed since then. Information Sheet Michigan has no sand dune protection and management but merely a law (P. A. 222 of 1976) posing with those words for its title. Four years after its passage the Act has not stopped dune mining anywhere in the state; dune destruction continues everywhere on a business-as-usual basis. There are only three categories of permit applications. Obviously mining continues in the first of these where a permit to mine has been issued by the Dept. of Natural Resources. A second is the situation where the application is either under active review or in abeyance in the DNR. Mining proceeds without need for a permit during the decision making process which may take many, many months. The third and in many ways the worst of the three categories is the DNR's issuance of a denial as at Manley Bros.' Gulliver-Peters site in the Grande Mere area. Under the Attorney General's opinion that mining can continue pending completion of the appeals process there is almost daily dune destruction while a procedure that may take years works its way through the courts. This situation where a DNR denial has issued is the greatest anomaly possible under P.A. 222 because the ultimate effect of the denial is so perplexing, By the time that appeals have been completed the site may have been substantially or completely impacted by mining. After years of such litigation a miner may have lost its case while having succeeded in removing the dunes. The state and any third-party intervenor would then have only a worthless victory spelled out on very costly paper by the appellate court of final jurisdiction. Also representing the third category is the DNR denial of a mining permit to Martin Marietta Corp. for its Bridgman South site at the base of Mt. Edward, a very tall dune prominence rising 225 feet above nearby Lake Michigan. Because the site is within the Bridgman limits the substantive and procedural requirements of the city ordinance on mining will have to be satisfied. Until those requirements are met no mining is allowed on this site per Circuit Court order. This is the only location in Michigan where dune mining is stopped and P.A. 222 had nothing to do with that decision. Although only those two denials have been issued to date a look into the future indicates that no additional denials are likely to come from the DNR. As permits are sought for dune mining further north along Lake Michigan there would seem to be few, if any, substantial reasons available to support denials. Many dune areas there have already been impacted by mining, which tends to minimize the significance of the remaining dune on the site. Anywhere sparser populations would be affected, any opposition to mining will be harder to organize. The unique factors found in the Grande Mere area cited in the Manley Bros.' denial certainly won't be duplicated further north. Likewise, the unique diversity of flora that appears to peak in the Bridgman South site faded to nothing of significance north of Van Buren County. The best brief description of the diversity of plant forms can be found in the testimony of two eminent botanists given at a February 1980 contested case hearing concerning the DNR permit denial for the Bridgman South site. As excerpts from the testimony of Dr. James Wells of Cranbrook Institute of Science are statements that: " ... unless you have spent a number of years out in the field looking at these things, you may not think that it's such a big phenomena to see three species on the rare, endangered and threatened list in one locality not a whole lot bigger than this room." " ... up to 60 or 65 species in a 20 meter plot is really noteworthy, remarkable and amazing. I can't word it in really strong enough terms. I was not prepared to see what I found. " "The rare and endangered group is represented here better than any other place I kow. It probably is unique in the world ... I would doubt that this is duplicated elsewhere." Speaking of the diversity of plant species on the Bridgman South site Dr. Warren H. Wagner, Professor of Natural Resources at the U. of Michigan, said: " ... you will find an intensification and increasing complexity of the dunes ecosystem that reaches its ultimate at this point ... I have yet to hear of anyplace that comes anywhere near the north end of Warren Dunes and the Mt. Edward area. That's still the apex of the diversity." "I defy anyone to repeat this combination of species and the combination of physical and historical factors that made it. If somebody can show me that that forest type exists someplace else I would be very happy, but I don't think that it does. No other place in the world has this particular forest. It stands alone." The two DNR denials are largely the result of substantial citizen involvement which, be cause it is expensive and very time-consuming, doesn't develop unless there are special reasons. The Grande Mere Assn. and friends of the Dunes are watchdog groups at the Gulliver Peters site and Hope for the Dunes serves the same function at Martin Marietta's Bridgman South site but funds to find expert assistance and to fund legal intervention may be hard to accumulate - in no way comparable to the ready availability of mining companies' personnel and money for presentation of the miners' positions. Citizen involvement of the sort seen in these 2 permit denials is therefore not likely to be duplicated in the future and without it the prospect of additional DNR denials is not realistic. Correlative to unlikely additional DNR denials is an unlikely DNR desire to deny future dune mining permit applications because implementation and application of P.A. 222 has been found by the DNR to be very exhausting. Costs beyond the wildest DNR expectations have been a heavy drain on DNR budgets since 1977. A lot of money has been spent on a state law that may very well end its period of application without having accomplished any real purpose. The visible effects of mining in the dunes are long-term with a return to conditions on adjacent undisturbed land estimated by botanists as requiring a thousand years, In addition, there are subtle effects from mining that extend some distance into adjoining vegetation due to changed lighting and wind speeds in the forest openings. Although their environmental impact statements speak of re-vegetation following mining, the miners refer to tree types that are alien to the dunes and they equivocate on what amount and manner of planting will actually be done. The DNR has aided the miners on this point by having taken the position that nothing more than dune grass planting is feasible, that requiring particular tree planting and replacement of the 25 to 50 percent expected to die in the first few years is too big a burden on the miners and too expensive for the DNR to police. I-94 in Berrien County is the corridor between the rest of the state of Michigan and that large portion of the U.S. lying to the west and south of the state. With tourism being Michigan's second largest "industry" serious consideration should be given to possible adverse effects of dune destruction on tourism revenues. It doesn't seem to make sense to display a scarred skyline to the many travelers getting their first view of Michigan on entering the state via I-94. The mining industry is obviously not concerned with aesthetics whereas Hope for the Dunes is concerned that sandminig in the dunes will be clearly seen as graffiti on Michigan's landscape. At Bridgman South this graffiti will consist of 2200 feet of flattened, stripped duneland along and immediately adjacent to the I-94 right-of-way excavated to a depth of 15 feet below the I-94 elevations. Looking into the desolation and destruction of that mining will be no problem for traffic on I-94 and the same effects will be easily visible from points along a half-mile or more of Red Arrow Highway in Bridgman. The economic effects of mining in the dunes are statistically definable. Figures from a survey done in 1975 by the Michigan Travel Bureau show that tourism directly generated 2,967 jobs in Berrien County and indirectly generated about 1,400 additional jobs that year for a total of 4,367 jobs. In contrast, figure s from Martin Marietta say that in Berrien County in 1975 mining including gravel mining provided 155 jobs. Tourism that year brought $85,498,762 to Berrien County which generated $23,631,858 in personal income . In 1973 total tax revenues from sand and gravel sales in all of Michigan were $1,403,998 but at Warren Dunes State Park there were 1,322,651 visitors who spent approximately $42,325,000. Sales tax on that amount would have been $1,693,000 or $298,000 more than the total tax revenues from both gravel and sand mining in the entire state. Of the 60 state parks in Michigan only 7 contain sand dunes along the lake shore but those few parks attract 25 percent of the total state parks attendance according to 1978 figures which indicates that Michigan's dunes do hold special interest for Michigan residents and for outsiders coming here as tourists. It is a mere ploy of the miners to seriously submit and support residential development plans for the Gulliver Peters and the Bridgman South mining sites. Each is only a scheme because neither can predict housing needs so far into the future with 25 years of mining foreseen by Martin Marietta at Bridgman South. Neither company has ever done residential land development and neither plans to be responsible for development of these two sites. Manley Bros. only leases rights to mine at Gulliver-Peters but with or without title to the land these two plans, in relation to reality, could just as well have been for mile-high office buildings on each site ala Frank Lloyd Wright's suggestion in the 1950's - the likely demand for either such proposed residential development or such office space being equally absurd. There are expressions of concern about infringement of private property rights if dune mining is not permitted generally by those who don't realize that such rights are not absolute. A person living on a one-acre lot in a city can not keep a horse on his property because the law realizes that the person's neighbor might not have a similar love for horses. In some communities that same person might not even be able to store his house trailer on his lot. Even as to the highly personal use of the automobile there are restrictions. A person owning a Corvette that has a top speed of 140 mph finds that he can legally drive it only 55 mph on an interstate highway that he knows was design-safe at a minimum of 70 mph because that was the legal speed for years. No longer can a chemical manufacturer dump his wastes anyway and any place he chooses although he may have done so only a few years ago. The point of all this is to show that property rights of many kinds are no longer absolutes and the sand mining industry should stop acting as though mining rights should automatically and immediately be recognized. There is evidence that there are alternatives to dune destruction as seen in Sargent Sand Company's years of dredging sand from Saginaw Bay and in its inland operations through many years in Wexford County where the company has recently vastly multiplied its known reserves of sand. The presence of good quality sand offshore in Lake Michigan is documented in some detail in the DNR's generic environmental impact statement on sand dune mining. It's certain that the sand mining and steel casting industries won't fold when the last available dune is destroyed so present day mining in the unique Michigan dunes is merely an expediency by both industries to delay serious consideration of alternatives.
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