Hiker at "Warning" sign
In 2007 and 2008, the Soddy Gorge segment of the Cumberland Trail State Park was hauled off a dump truck load at a time. Not only was the trail being destroyed, but the gorge that the State Park owns was being devastated and forever changed. Furthermore, the rock miners were not required to to reclaim the land.
The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) filed a suit in the Hamilton County Chancery Court to stop the rock removal. The court opinion and order was issued on April 4, 2007. The order did not stop the rock removal on State Park land but provided limited protection for the trail. The State appealed the case. Since April of 2007, the rock removal operation has changed. Surface rock removal is now taking place deep within the gorge about 75 feet from the creek, another much improved road goes to the bottom of the gorge and cuts across the trail, and several thousand tons of rock have been removed forever changing the character of the gorge and it is being demolished.
In November 2007, the CTC General Manager asked the CTC Board to help stop the rock removal. The Board contacted the top lawyer at TDEC. TCEC was contacting non-profit groups and encouraging them to sign on to an Amicus Curiae Brief and had identified a lawyer to write the Brief. The Board took responsibility for legal activities to stop rock removal.
In December, 2007, the CTC ExCom unanimously passed the following motion. The CTC will sign on to an Amicus Curiae Brief after a positive review of the final language by a lawyer chosen by CTC. Furthermore, the CTC is willing to pay additional expenses for the preparation of the brief up to a $50,000 limit. By the end of the month, a group of non-profit groups had agreed to support the Brief and the CTC was the lead group. The legal team consisted of a lawyer from Nashville and two lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center.
In April, 2008, The Amicus Curiae Brief was filed with the Court of Appeals. It was supported by 15 groups:
In June, 2008,The case was heard by the Court of Appeals.
The lead paragraph from the story by Pam Sohn in the Chattanooga Times Free Press was:
Members of environmental groups said they were encouraged Wednesday by the questions and comments from the three Tennessee Appeals Court judges now charged with deciding the future of rock mining in East Tennessee.
Total cost to CTC was less than $5,000.
Our lawyers were: Greg Buppert from Nashville and Sarah Francisco with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
On July 31, 2008, the Appeals Court gave their opinion. An excerpt from Pam Soan's report on August 1.
A rock mining lawsuit that pitted a mineral rights owner again a state park got new life Thursday when the Tennessee Court of Appeals vacated a 2007 ruling that allowed mountain stone rock mining to continue along the Cumberland Trail.
The case has been sent back to Hamilton County courts.
State officials and members of environmental groups praised the appeals court's decision.
"Wonderful!" said Don Barger, senior director of the Southeast Regional Office of National Parks, who also joined the TDEC in a friends-of-the-court filing.
"It's an important decision and it speaks to the basic inconsistencies of severed mineral rights. Basically the court is saying that a mineral rights owner's deed cannot be read to deprive the surface owner of their rights," said Mr. Barger, adding that he has not yet reviewed the entire ruling.
While the appeals court decision, written by Judge Charles D. Susano Jr., one of the three justices hearing the case, did not rule on whether mountain stone or "sandstone" is a mineral, it did make clear that the destructive surface mining method used cannot violate the surface owner's rights.
"The case law, while somewhat muddled on the question of how to define "mineral," is clear on this different but related point: general mineral reservations in a deed will not be construed so broadly as to include extraction methods that destroy the surface rights conveyed in the same deed," the ruling states. "If a grantor wishes to retain the right to obtain minerals through destructive surface extraction, he must explicitly reserve that right within the deed; a general mineral reservation will not suffice."
The ruling could have a broad impact as many landowners in the Cumberland Plateau and East Tennessee mountain region do not own the mineral rights to their property.
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