Two months ago an amazing thing happened in McHenry County. A farmer who was having a pond dug offered to pay the excavator in kind–he could keep the gravel he was removing. But once gravel-sorting equipment appeared on the property, a neighbor called the county zoning office to complain.
In some ways, sand and gravel mining is to northeastern Illinois what coal mining is to far southern Illinois: an economic mainstay, sometimes an environmental headache, and always a fertile source of local dispute. The gravel is here because during the last glacier’s final retreat, some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, the icy mass lingered like some hesitant guest backing out the door in the eastern townships of McHenry and Kane counties, shedding boulders, rocks, gravel, and sand, sometimes to a depth of 400 feet.
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Peeters’s home on Lily Lake Road, on the eastern edge of McHenry County, is within a stone’s throw of two gravel pits–not that he paid them much attention when he and his family moved there in 1975. “I liked the area. The gently rolling hills and moraines were as close a substitute to mountains as I could find within driving distance of my work in the city.” In some ways Peeters is a typical suburbanite: he and his wife, Cheri, bought land on which to build; he drives daily to a Chicago job. On the other hand, they constructed the home themselves, and his job is not in a Loop office: he designs and repairs machinery in a near-west-side chemical plant.
While the Peeters family went on cultivating their garden and tending their livestock, gravel was becoming a political issue in McHenry County. In 1979, after several public hearings and much press coverage, the county board enacted a zoning ordinance that put new restrictions on “earth extraction industries.” In addition to requiring a conditional-use permit, for the first time the law required pit operators to file reclamation plans–primarily to flatten and revegetate the often steep and barren slopes of a mined-out pit–and post bonds to guarantee that those plans be executed. (These regulations did not apply to the half dozen or so largest pits in the county, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals, nor did they apply to pits within incorporated areas.) The law gave existing pits a year to file their permits and plans.
Peeters’s mountaineering friend Gorby volunteered to see the group through the county hearing on the Rocky Road expansion. The neighbors took time off from work to attend it, only to find that it had been postponed without notice. “Jack said, ‘Don’t be so naive. They’ll try to burn you out. Get these people organized and stop acting hysterical.’”
Once again Gorby advised the group on strategy. “I suggested that they not ask about permits all over the county. The [notoriously understaffed] zoning department could reasonably claim that it was unduly burdensome to look through all their files. Narrow it down and make a Freedom of Information Act request for the three Lily Lake Road pits as a test. If they’re OK, we could assume the whole county was. If not . . . ”
