Bastop’s first APO
Community Advisory Council Now Forming!
Your help is needed to help give local residents and organizations a formal voice in the aggregate mining issues affecting their quality of life. The goals of the Community Advisory Council (CAC) are to:
Improve communication between mining companies, governments, and communities
Address impacts of mining, such as water usage, traffic, noise, blasting, dust, and land rehabilitation
Build trust and accountability around operations that may exist for decades
This innovative approach has succeeded in three other Texas cities (Kerrville, Georgetown, Garden Ridge). With your help, Bastrop can do the same to ensure its residents, history (Utley is a Freedom Colony), farms and natural beauty are respected and protected.
To get involved, please contact: hconnett@mac.com
Bastrop Needs an APO Community Advisory Council Now!
In most states, miners follow basic guidelines (also known as best practices) that include letting neighbors know how their work will impact the area around them. Plans must be discussed and shared before soil is extracted. Not in Texas. Miners do not notify neighbors before tons of prime farmland, often near vital riverways, are extracted, nor are they required to monitor or pay for damages caused, nor clean up the mess left behind. These costs -repairing roads, installing air monitors, reclamation and more — are left to you the taxpayer.
Currently, a tremendous amount of time, energy and money is wasted by this lack of transparency or public process. Texans typically discover miners have arrived when they are suddenly awakened by the roar of industry and hundreds of gravel trucks clogging their county roads. And because the few simple rules that do exist are not enforced — like installing turning lanes to accommodate multi-ton trucks — people are needlessly injured and die. Not just neighbors, but the drivers who are contracted to drive these dangerous loads. Ultimately, neighbors must resort to filing expensive and repeated lawsuits to ensure basic protections. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Given the sudden proliferation of mining companies along the Colorado River above and below Bastrop, we need what Kerr County already has:
APO Community Advisory Council
Please contact all of your elected officials and others to establish this for Bastrop
