Missoula developer Ken Allen bought 100 grassy acres north of Lolo in the fall of 2000, planning to subdivide the one-time ranch into about 70 residential lots.

After the Missoula County Commission rebuffed the plan, Allen hatched a new idea: put a temporary gravel pit on the property. Later, he reclaimed the pit as a lake and surround it with houses and condos.

But Allen’s plan never got past the words “gravel pit.”

Once the clean, well-behaved and generally ignored member of Montana’s mining family, gravel pits are now igniting controversy around the state. In recent months, controversies have flared near Helena, Missoula, in the Flathead Valley and Bozeman.

“There’s a process in place that really doesn’t work for either side,” said state Rep. Jill Cohenour, a Democrat from East Helena, where neighbors this spring faced off with a local gravel company about a proposed 400-acre pit near their homes. “It doesn’t work for the company and it doesn’t work for the citizens.”

The issue is more complex than the classic stand-off between a company and its neighbors. It also points to an explosion of mostly unplanned urban growth in areas untouched by zoning, and to laws passed decades ago that now fail to address the complications of putting a gravel pit near a neighborhood.

Adding to the mess, the state office that reviews permits for gravel pits is short-staffed, under-funded and struggling to reconcile competing laws.

The issue promises to be one of the main environmental debates at the 2009 Legislature, where representatives from many sides have pledged to take their ideas for fixing the mess.

Gravel companies and neighbors have turned to courts and county commissioners to resolve their disagreements, but all agree that judges and emergency zoning won’t fix the problem.

Companies often find themselves in impossible situations, said Cary Hagreberg, executive director of the Montana Contractors Association, which represents gravel companies and other construction-related industries. They need gravel to pave roads, often under the threat of fines from the state Highway Department if they miss deadlines. But they can’t dig for gravel because the permit is tied up over legitimate concerns from neighbors about the crushing operation moving in next door.

Citizens, too, are frustrated, Cohenour said, because the current system doesn’t include clear ways for them to learn about would-be pits and influence conditions on permits to protect their water, safety and quality of life.

Pushing gravel permits farther and farther away from cities is not a solution, Hagreberg said. Gravel is only found in certain places, and sometimes those places are near houses. Plus, trucking gravel and asphalt from the boonies where it won’t bother anybody is prohibitively expensive and environmentally unsound.

In the case of Allen’s ill-fated pit near Lolo, the company that wanted to mine gravel from his proposed pit to resurface a nearby highway ended up trucking the material from another site 10 miles away.

That commute cost the company an additional $95,000 for diesel fuel and released an additional 444,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Technically, gravel pits are called “open cut mines.” Montana’s open cut mining laws were written 35 years ago and deal primarily with two things, said Richard Opper, director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which oversees the program.

First, the law requires reclaiming old pits so they’re not a perennial eyesore. And, second, it lays out time limits for when companies must be given a permit if they follow all the rules a maximum of 60 days.

The law does not require regulators to study the environmental effects of the mine, to put conditions on permits requiring companies to mitigate the dust and noise that might bother neighbors, or to seek any input from the public about the permit.

Basically, Opper said, if you follow the rules, you get a permit.

Another law, the Montana Environmental Policy Act, or MEPA, lays out a host of requirements for any activity that disturbs the environment, including gravel pits. That law does require public notification, environmental studies and it empowers state regulator to put conditions on permits.

Opper’s employees have traditionally followed both laws when it comes to permitting new open cut mines. But given the 60-day timeframe on gravel permits, Opper said, it’s difficult to complete all the requirements of MEPA and not run afoul of the Open Cut Mining Act. Throw in any amount of controversy, and the 60-day maximum time frame is basically out the window.

“Those two laws are really in direct conflict when it comes to deadlines,” Opper said.

In recent lawsuits, judges have ruled that breaking the Open Cut Mining Act’s time limits is illegal. By law, those companies are owed permits.

Such rulings have also raised questions whether MEPA requirements apply to gravel pits. Opper believes they don’t.

“We’ve heard from judges that have ruled in these cases that the specific (open cut mining) law trumps MEPA,” he said. “If we can’t do an adequate environmental assessment and have public input in the time frames outlined in the Open Cut Mining Act, the judges have said we have to issue the permits anyway. We don’t like being in that position.”

Opper said he prefers to give neighbors a voice and to anticipate the effects of a gravel operation before giving out a permit. He views that as part of DEQ’s mission.

As a practical matter, there are few serious environmental concerns associated with gravel pits, he said. Sometimes, they might be proposed too close to a river or they might impact groundwater.

But compared to coal mines — or the combined effects of lots of septic systems and drain fields — gravel pits are “relatively benign,” Opper said.

Most of the opposition comes from people opposed to noise, dust and traffic things that can usually be dealt with.

Even if the laws were clear, DEQ might still be hard-pressed to follow them. Between 2000 and 2006, the number of open cut mining permits issued almost doubled, from 59 to 111. The number of employees in the agency’s Open Cut Mining Bureau stayed the same: four people.

Montana now has 1,800 gravel pits; each is subject to inspection by the department. But with an annual budget just shy of $500,000, that leaves about $275 to inspect each pit yearly to say nothing of the cost of cranking permits for new ones. To make matters worse, many gravel pit operators aren’t even paying into a trust fund that funds most of the bureau’s budget.

A June report by the Legislative Auditor’s Office said 94 percent of the gravel operators they examined were not paying into the fund — and that DEQ wasn’t cooperating with the Department of Revenue to help identify gravel companies required to pay the fees.

The state’s lack of resources and hazy laws are part of what killed Allen’s proposed Lolo-area gravel pit — and ended up costing the company, Knife River of Missoula, a gravel company, almost $100,000, causing them to lose money on the project.

Missoula County Commission Chairwoman Jean Curtiss said Knife River proposed digging Allen’s lake and using the gravel to repave a stretch of Highway 93, the main thoroughfare through the heavily developed Bitterroot Valley. There’s already a gravel pit right across the highway, Curtiss said, but some neighbors didn’t like the idea of the grassy field being converted into a potential industrial site, if only temporarily.

Knife River didn’t want to use Allen’s field for a long-term gravel pit, said David Zinke, the company’s Missoula manager. He envisioned using it whenever a paving project came along in the area, sparing the company from trucking fill material from its much larger operation west of town.

But there is only one kind of open pit mining permit in Montana, one that allows everything from mining to crushing.

Last December, neighbors appealed to the county to emergency zone Allen’s lot as “residential,” a designation that would have made the gravel pit illegal. The commission denied their request, Curtiss said, because they didn’t think the situation was really an emergency and they believed the DEQ would study the pit and force Knife River to operate as neighborly as possible.

Months went by and Knife River still didn’t have their permit, in violation of the law. With time ticking away before the project was set to begin, the company sued DEQ.

Citizens again asked the commission to zone the property. This time, faced with the likelihood that a judge would force DEQ to grant the permit with no environmental study or mitigation requirements, the commission unanimously voted to zone Allen’s field and other nearby parcels residential. That time, Curtiss said, the situation really was an emergency.

“I understand their concerns,” she said of the neighbors. “If there’s going to be an asphalt plant there for the next 20 years”

That was the end of Allen’s lake.

The case is still pending in court. Curtiss said the move was not entirely about the pit. The county is in the process of zoning the Lolo region through its growth policy. The emergency zoning is good for a year and in the meantime, Curtiss said, the county plans to move forward with zoning the entire area.

Zoning, said Lewis and Clark County Commissioner Ed Tinsley, is a big part of the solution.

“You need zoning to protect all interests, all sides,” he said, including protecting undeveloped gravel deposits, the right of businesses to operate and the desires of people living near them.

Tinsley has been through controversies about both zoning and gravel.

Cohenour said the Legislature needs to make it easier for counties to zone, and she’s hoping the recent controversies over gravel pits will take some of the unfounded sting out of zoning for some people who have previously avoided it.

“The whole thing with zoning is it creates stability,” she said, and it involves everyone in the community planning how and where their community will grow.

Both she and Tinsley said they hope industries that have traditionally opposed zoning, including the gravel companies, will support the idea.

Hagreberg said Montana’s contractors also embrace zoning as part of the solution. In the 2007 Legislature, the association supported a bill that would have required fast-growing counties to identify gravel deposits and zone those lands accordingly.

“It would put future homeowners on notice,” he said. “You are moving into an area that is identified for future gravel production. That doesn’t mandate that it would be used for gravel.”

Curtiss said lawmakers might also consider creating a new kind of gravel permit. In the case of her county, part of the concern of neighbors and local officials was the fact that Knife River was applying for a permit that would allow all kinds of gravel-related activity, even though the company didn’t seek to use the site as a full-scale gravel operation. Maybe if there was a permit that only allowed for limited, temporary uses neighbors wouldn’t be as concerned.

But the big problem, according to all involved, is the conflicting laws and the short-funded state regulators.

Hagreberg said his organization continues to support increased fees on gravel producers to pay for more Open Cut Mining Bureau staff. Opper agrees.

“Our goal isn’t to grow the program and acquire as many (employees) as we can,” he said. “But I’d rather have more (employees) than miss a deadline.”

He also said something needs to be done to clear up the confusion between MEPA and the Open Cut Mining Act. Either MEPA needs to explicitly cover gravel operations, he said, or the law on gravel could be expanded to include mandatory analysis and give the department the leeway to put conditions on permits.

Curtiss said that alone might have changed the outcome of the would-be Lolo pit. Many local officials weren’t against the idea of a temporary gravel operation, she said, but they were very much against the idea of a full-blown gravel pit with virtually no environmental study, at all.

Hagreberg also suggested some kind of “two-track” gravel permitting. Gravel pits that generate little to no controversy might be handled by different staff than those who devote themselves to the study and consideration required of more controversial pits.

“We should fast-track those applications and allow people to get on with their business,” he said.

As for Allen, he, too, said he supports the idea of zoning, so long as all points of view are reflected in the final plans. And he still wants to dig his lake. He appealed the counties emergency zoning in late June to Missoula District court.

The case is still pending.