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C. All mining activities must comply with Section 25(r), Excavation and Fill, Appendix A, Zoning, of the County Code. d. All mining sites shall have direct access to a collector or arterial roadway; access from a roadway of lessor functional classification may be approved by the public works director upon a finding that no significant adverse impact will affect residential units on a subject road. e. The site must not be located within one thousand (1,000) feet of any platted subdivision that is not serviced by public water. The project meets all special exception requirements except for criterion "e". The Reece subdivision, and the Kings Lake subdivision, are within 1,000 feet of the mining site. The 1,000 foot separation distance from subdivisions not on public water is designed to protect local residents on wells from the adverse impact on the groundwater tables that sand mines can have. While in the opinion of the applicant's engineer, the sand mine construction will not affect the groundwater of any local residence, there is no provision in the ordinance which would let an engineer or a ground water hydrologist certify that fact and get conditional approval.* Thus, the application does not meet an applicable criterion and cannot be approved. It should be noted that if less than 5,000 cubic yards of fill is to be removed from the site the applicant could construct the lake via a land development permit. Excess fill could be temporarily stockpiled in cleared undeveloped areas of the subdivision and used for building pads as residential construction proceeds. The existing mining regulations do not prevent the lake from being constructed, but do prevent the issuance of a mining permit for the removal of over 5,000 cubic yards of fill from the site in any given calendar year. In keeping with the County Attorney's previous opinions, based upon section 25.3 of the Zoning Code, all special exception criteria must be met or the application must be denied. (*Note: An ordinance amendment facilitating this concept was proposed by staff last year and recommended for approval by the Planning and Zoning Commission, but was subsequently denied by the Board of County Commissioners. The Board's decision thus reaffirmed the importance of this criterion as it now exists in the code.) RECOMMENDATION: Based upon the analysis performed, staff recommends that the Board of County Commissioners deny the applicant's request for special exception approval for a sand mine, due to the failure to satisfy the criterion requiring a 1,000 foot separation distance from any platted subdivision not serviced by public water. 25 P00� i PAGUYIJ MAY 119Able