Sand dune mining in Michigan would be outlawed by 2006 under legislation proposed Wednesday.
Environmentalists support the measure introduced last week by state Rep. Julie Dennis (D-Muskegon) and state Sen. Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Hills).
“These dunes are a natural wonder that . . . we need to protect,” Dennis told The Muskegon Chronicle. The head of at least one west Michigan sand-mining operation said he opposed the bill, and it has garnered no Republican co-sponsors in the GOP-controlled House and Senate.
“I’m certainly opposed to it and will do whatever I can to prevent it,” said Robert Chandonnet, president of Nugent Sand Co. Inc. in Norton Shores. Besides phasing out mining of all 280,000 acres of Michigan’s Great Lakes coastal dunes, the proposed bill would immediately add 12,000 acres to the 70,000 acres designated as “critical dunes.”
The proposed ban on sand dune mining “doesn’t strike me as being consistent with the Legislature’s intent over the past decade,” Ken Silfven, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Quality, told the Chronicle. “The Legislature’s intent was to provide tight regulations on sand mining, which we provide.”
But the Sand Dune Protection and Management Act, adopted in 1976, contains loopholes that have allowed mining companies to destroy irreplaceable dunes, Dennis said.
