Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors moves to consolidate its control over mining authority

The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors has begun the process to create a Pittsylvania mining ordinance and will gather on July 1 to supposedly hear from residents. But according to one source, the meeting is neither a public hearing nor does Pittsylvania County have a mining ordinance to begin with, something that other reports have misstated.

For the sake of this story, however, I’d like to focus on the board’s attempt to consolidate its control over mining authority.

As the issue of uranium mining has continuously sprouted its ugly head in the commonwealth, it has come to the board’s attention that it has no authority over whether or not a large-scale mining operation can be brought to a conservation or agricultural district. As a publicly elected body, this lack of authority is all the more striking.

Instead of a democratically elected body making important decisions like these, the Pittsylvania Planning Commission and the Board of Zoning Appeals issue special-use permits for mining. Neither of these bodies are directly elected by the citizens of Pittsylvania.

Assistant county administrator for planning and development in Pittsylvania County, Greg Sides, posed a few important questions that the board of supervisors will want to consider as another round of uranium mining considerations looms in the not-too-distant future. Sides advised the board to consider the following questions: should Pittsylvania County require mining to take place only with a special-use permit in the industrial district/heavy industry area? Is uranium ore compatible in a conservation or agricultural district?

Sides also noted that the Pittsylvania zoning ordinance doesn’t give mining a definition and asked whether or not mining should be defined in the ordinance.

What should be obvious to any reasonable observer is that uranium mining nor milling is an “agricultural,” and definitely not a “conservation,” form of digging up the earth.  

As such, the most logical move would be to follow Pittsylvania Board Chairman Marshall Ecker’s idea and zone mining as heavy industry, instead of in the agricultural district. To claim that uranium mining, for example, is agricultural in nature is like claiming that a hydrogen bomb blast is a cure for cancer. The claims don’t make sense, in other words.

While the democratically elected board of supervisors seeks to sow up its control over the mining process in its county, we can all rest assured that our friends at Virginia Uranium Inc. are already pursuing different paths to achieve its goal of lifting Virginia’s moratorium on uranium mining. Who cares what the citizens of Pittsylvania want!

Virginian’s will soon get to see another confrontation between cold-hearted capitalism and democratic decision-making as it plays out in Pittsylvania County. And, of course, there are also the lives of thousands of Virginians and a landscape still untarnished by radioactive tailings to consider.