Build Up, Not Out

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Photo By Jean Takekawa/USFWS

 

Black Lake Quarry Rezone: How Decades of Safeguards Were Set Aside in an Instant

 

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The Thurston County Board of County Commissioners voted 4-1 on December 16, 2025, to approve a controversial rezone of 250 acres next to fragile salmon rearing grounds at the Black River National Wildlife Refuge. Commissioner Emily Clouse was the only one to vote for protection of the National Wildlife Refuge.

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You can watch the commissioners start deliberating at 3:02:30: December 16, 2025 - Thurston County Board of County Commissioners Regular Meeting. You can watch the public comment starting at 23:04.

 

The four who voted against protecting the National Wildlife Refuge didn’t address the elephant in the room: the mine owner's existing reclamation plan under pre-existing zoning required him to plant 700 shrubs and trees per acre when he finished mining, and that requirement is now gone due to the Board's vote. Instead, he'll only have to make the land suitable for warehouses and parking lots.

 

By law, reclamation after the mining ends is tied to the zoning. The nature of the reclamation matches the nature of the zoning. It restores it to natural habitat if the zoning includes natural habitat. It restores it to a few bushes if the zoning is warehouses and parking lots. Thus, the zoning determines the future of the national wildlife refuge—future as in seven generations, not future as in 10 years.

 

The four commissioners also were silent regarding the fact that their vote enriches the mine owner at the public’s expense. They also did not address the fact that the vote will result in degradation of treaty-protected salmon runs.

 

​Two weeks before the vote, something went very wrong when the Board met on December 2 to decide whether to include the rezone in the Comprehensive Plan update package that was to be voted on during the December 16 meeting.

 

At that December 2 agenda-setting meeting, the Board considered whether to rezone the 250-acre Black Lake Quarry from Rural Residential (RR 1/20)—which means one home per 20 acres—to Rural Resource Industrial (RRI)--which means warehouses and parking lots containing many potentially polluting industries.

 

RRI zoning allows a wide range of pollution-intensive uses — including meat processing, cannabis extraction, and industrial food manufacturing — all of which generate wastewater, nutrients, chemicals, and runoff that are fundamentally incompatible with sensitive wetlands and salmon habitat. 

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​​Beginning around 3:08:35 in the recording of the December 2 meeting, commissioners asked questions and immediately began receiving incorrect and incomplete information from staff—information that directly contradicted state law and the evidence presented to the Planning Commission on September 3 (see approximately 32:19 in that recording).

 

What the Board was not told is that the rezone would save the mine owner millions of dollars by ending his obligation to restore natural habitat once mining is complete. Nor were commissioners told that the rezone would reduce public and environmental oversight by significantly watering down the Special Use Permit (SUP) process that currently governs any intensification of mining.

 

Under RR 1/20 zoning, expanded mining requires a highly discretionary Special Use Permit with robust public process and environmental review. By contrast, in an RRI zone, mining remains subject to an SUP, but the review standard shifts from whether the use is appropriate at all to how it will operate — making approval far easier and reducing meaningful oversight. The rezone doesn’t eliminate permits, but it turns a hard-to-get permit with real scrutiny into a routine approval with far fewer safeguards.

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Yet on December 2, staff repeatedly told the Board the opposite. Commissioners were told that the rezone would increase environmental protections, not reduce them. They were also told that reclamation under current zoning would never restore habitat—a claim that directly contradicts state law and the mine’s own DNR-approved reclamation plan.​

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Relying on this inaccurate set of facts—and without the benefit of the full Planning Commission record—the Board voted to advance the rezone. If finalized, that decision would dismantle long-standing environmental commitments made to protect Black Lake, the Black River Unit, and the surrounding watershed.

 

On December 16, this decision became permanent despite many members of the public urging the Board to pause and take a closer look. They asked the Board to remove the rezone from the Comprehensive Plan package and place it on the regular docket for future consideration. Doing so would have given commissioners time to review the complete record directly before making an irreversible decision.

 

Their failure to pause resulted in major breakdowns in communication. For example, commissioners seemed not to realize on December 16th that they were simultaneously voting to remove one of their main justifications for the rezone. ​

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Commissioner Menser stated that his support for the rezone was based largely on a belief that Thurston County has insufficient Rural Resource Industrial land, citing the 2023 Industrial Lands Study (ILS). However, that rationale depended on RRI being highly constrained by locational and performance requirements in the development code (such as proximity to I-5 interchanges or rail access), which the ILS identified as limiting where RRI uses could realistically occur.

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Those same locational constraints on RRI lands disappeared when the Board voted to approve the rezone, because the Comprehensive Plan package also included an amendment that removed the locational constraint language from the development code.

 

As a result, the scarcity rationale that the Board relied upon to justify the rezone no longer applied. Below are the changes the Board made to the development code that now make RRI uses far easier to locate countywide.

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🔎 Why this matters

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The Black Lake Quarry (fka Quality Rock Mine) sits beside the Black River National Wildlife Refuge, which feeds into Black Lake. It's one of the last intact riparian wetland systems in the Puget Sound region. Because of this, dozens of community members and organizations have been fighting to protect the refuge and its crucial salmon habitat from the mine's damaging effects:

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• Futurewise litigated to secure protective zoning, including 1/20

• South Sound Bird Alliance litigated for years to block industrial plants at the mine

• The late Sue Danver worked for over 20 years to ensure the mine’s impacts were properly reviewed

 

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This history reflects a shared expectation: that when mining ends, the land will be restored to natural habitat.

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Photo By/Credit Ryan Munes/USFWS

 

⚠️ What went wrong on December 2

 

At the Board’s agenda-setting meeting, commissioners advanced the rezone based on statements that:

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• did not match the mine’s official DNR reclamation plan,

• contradicted the Planning Commission’s September 3rd briefing on what a reclaimed mine looks like,

• contradicted Washington’s reclamation law, which requires restoring mined land to a stable, vegetated condition suitable for future habitat and public use (WAC 332-18-010(4)); and

• conflicted with findings in the Industrial Lands Study that show Thurston County already has enough industrial land.

 

Another major point of confusion on December 2 was the claim that Black Lake Quarry is “not regulated” under Thurston County’s environmental laws because it is an old mine, and that rezoning would newly subject it to those protections (scroll to 3:17:22 in the December 2nd agenda setting meeting).

 

This is factually incorrect. The mine’s operating permit was updated in recent years, which means it is subject to today’s environmental requirements, including critical aquifer recharge protections. And even if the permit were older, Washington law does not exempt legacy mines from environmental regulation; they must comply with current law whenever impacts occur or when any permit is modified.

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Rezoning does not increase environmental oversight. While a Special Use Permit may still be required, rezoning to RRI fundamentally weakens it — shifting the review from whether expanded mining is appropriate at all to how it will operate, reducing public notice, narrowing environmental and hydrologic review, and limiting the County’s ability to require or enforce meaningful mitigation.

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Another misconception raised on December 2 was that approving the rezone would stop the mine from digging deeper into the aquifer. It will not. Mining continues under either zoning.

 

The real change is oversight: under current RR 1/20 zoning, expanded mining requires a highly discretionary Special Use Permit with robust environmental review and public process; under RRI zoning, mining remains subject to a Special Use Permit, but the review is substantially narrower and easier to obtain, greatly reducing meaningful oversight.

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Rezoning doesn’t stop mining — it weakens oversight.

 

The rezone does not reduce aquifer risk — it increases it by weakening the County’s ability to review, condition, or limit further extraction in a Critical Aquifer Recharge Area.

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Staff also asserted on December 2 that the rezone would result in “better conservation outcomes.” The record shows the opposite. Under current RR 1/20 zoning, the mine must eventually be reclaimed to a natural, vegetated condition consistent with rural land use.

 

By contrast, rezoning to RRI eliminates that restoration path entirely and replaces it with a type of reclamation that simply makes the land ready for long-term industrial development. Locking in an industrial end state beside a National Wildlife Refuge is not a conservation outcome.

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Additionally, the County is also changing the development code so that the industrial use here could be meat processing at some point in the future. Meat and poultry processing facilities are the largest industrial point source of nitrogen pollution discharged to waterways, according to 2015 EPA data.

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There was also a suggestion on December 2 that the Planning Commission’s September 3 analysis no longer applies because the applicant removed 24 acres from the request. But those 24 acres are not buildable anyway because they are critical areas in the wetland. This removal did nothing to alter the fundamental issues identified by the Planning Commission. The rezone still turns approximately 250 acres to industrial use beside a National Wildlife Refuge — the impacts remain the same.

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Now that the Board adopted the Comprehensive Plan on December 16, this deeply flawed rezone has become permanent. The land will never again be restored to natural habitat or public use. Instead, when mining ends, the site will transition to warehouses and parking lots — directly beside one of the last intact riparian wetland systems in the Puget Sound region.

 

This shift saves the mine owner millions. It costs the public far more.

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Adding unneeded industrial land next to a national wildlife refuge cannot be justified.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo By/Credit William O. Vogel

 

Several years ago, (as summarized at paragraph 31 here) the prior owner of this mine applied for a Special Use Permit (SUP) to greatly expand the mine. The Hearing Examiner initially granted the permit, but local residents appealed—and the then-Board rightly reversed that decision.

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The then-Board found a hydraulic connection between the groundwater on site and the water-quality-impaired Black River, an important tributary to the Chehalis River. After that, the mine owner kept trying to get a permit to expand and eventually succeeded. So the mine is now much larger (hundreds of acres). But we all assumed that after mining was done, the site would be restored and the harm stopped.

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That expectation is now gone.

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That's because four of the five commissioners voted to approve the rezone. Commissioner Emily Clouse — the only “no” vote — asked that it be placed on the regular docket instead of being finalized now. On December 2, she also questioned why staff statements differed so sharply from the scientific evidence provided by community experts (scroll to 3:24:51 in the December 2nd agenda setting meeting).

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Staff responded on December 2 by asserting that the county hydrogeologist said the rezone would benefit the aquifer. When Commissioner Clouse asked for the documentation supporting that assertion, staff did not provide any and instead asked her to supply the constituent information so they could “look into that.”