In mid-winter, there are five goats, two horses, one dog and a flock of semi-productive laying hens on the Jocko Valley homestead owned by Jennifer Knoetgen and Micah Bogage. It’s also the headquarters of Mountain Meat Shares, a local meat subscription service Knoetgen’s been running since 2017.
They’ve recently heaped a couple new projects on top of the pile—legal ones. The pair and their neighbors are fighting a nearby gravel pit and asphalt plant approved last April by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
The industrial development was proposed in 2022, the same year Knoetgen and Bogage were celebrating two decades of building their rural homestead just north of Arlee on the Flathead Reservation.
“It felt like a momentous time,” Knoetgen remembered while sipping a steaming mug of tea in her warm kitchen. “And then suddenly it felt darkened.”
That spring, the pair received a letter from Riverside Contracting, giving notice of its application for an opencut mining permit on a 157-acre property off White Coyote Road, about a half-mile south of their home and just east of the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas.
The darkness they felt was the prospect of the many ways their daily lives and environment could change, like incessant noise—the project could legally operate 24/7 and includes a gravel-crushing operation—large truck traffic on their narrow dirt road, air and water and light pollution, impacts on wildlife and more.
Missoula-based Riverside Contracting, meanwhile, sees the prospect of a mine and asphalt plant to supply, among other things, federally funded road construction projects up and down nearby Highway 93 over the next several years.
Knoetgen, Bogage and neighbors quickly organized to fight the development, launching the nonprofit Friends of the Jocko. After the Department of Environmental Quality OK’d the gravel pit last spring, the group filed an administrative appeal, a process that allows the group to make its case before the agency’s Board of Environmental Review, a quasi-judicial body appointed by the governor.
Then, in June, the group sued the agency in Lake County District Court, challenging the DEQ’s environmental assessment, which determined the project wouldn’t have significant impacts. The group’s attorney, Daniel Brister, said it was “rubber-stamped very quickly.”
As legal deadlines come and go—simultaneous expert disclosures were due Jan. 26—and attorneys prepare for hearings and final motions penciled in for April, the group’s members find themselves in the latter half of “hurry up and wait.”
“For the average person, it’s like watching paint dry,” said Jim Coefield, who for 14 years has lived on a piece of property that also sits within a half-mile of the Riverside Contracting’s proposed gravel pit. He’s president of Friends of the Jocko and the only plaintiff named in the lawsuit.
“There’s not a large place for the public to plug in right now,” Coefield said. “That’s why it goes quiet.”
Meanwhile, the neighbors watch the potential pit site like hawks. Riverside could legally start construction at any time. “People are laser-focused on that area,” Coefield said. “The second they start to do anything, we have to get back to the courts immediately.” That would be to seek a temporary restraining order and ultimately a preliminary injunction to stop the work—which is what a Missoula County judge issued last August to temporarily block a gravel pit a few miles north of Clearwater Junction off Highway 83.
The dynamic has members of Friends of the Jocko reconciling their sense of urgency with the protracted appeal process before the Board of Environmental Review.
“You can sit there and spin your wheels for years,” said Anne Hedges, director of policy and legislative affairs at the Montana Environmental Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group that prioritizes clean air and water.
As those wheels spin, industry has only gotten more traction. In 2021, the Montana Legislature amended the state’s opencut mining laws to limit avenues for public participation during the DEQ’s permit application process.
The changes reduced the number of people a company must notify about a proposal, and the timeframe for doing so. It requires notice be given only to occupied dwellings within a half-mile of the project and a public meeting only if 51% of those neighbors request it in a 30-day period.
In the Jocko Valley, the public process largely left out the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, even though tribal trust lands sit within that half-mile radius. In a letter to the DEQ, Tribal Council listed its concerns—including noise and air pollution—and requested a public meeting. When the DEQ declined, the Tribal Council, in October 2022, held its own public meeting.
Hedges called these limitations on public participation “heartbreaking.”
The MEIC has attempted to repair some of the damage done by the legislature’s opencut mining law rewrite. Last session, the group supported HB 581, sponsored by Rep. Laurie Bishop, which would have reinserted some of the language tossed in 2021, specifically around public participation and ways the DEQ can protect people living near these sites.
The bill failed, and the list of controversial gravel pit projects only grows. Hedges rattled off sites across the state: the Elbow Lake project north of Clearwater Junction in the Seeley Swan Valley, the Black Gravel pit in Gallatin Gateway, the DSL pit near Ennis, the Fire Pit near Libby.
But it’s difficult to quantify the extent to which the amended opencut mining law has paved the way for more gravel pits. Hedges has certainly tried. For years, she said, she sought records from the DEQ including how many permits exist and which have expired. A year and a half ago, a legislator finally provided her some information, which she offered to share with me, lamenting that it’s already outdated.
Hedges said getting information on coal mining permits is simpler. But with opencut operations, the under-staffed department working on tight deadlines just can’t make it all accessible in time for the public to use it effectively. “The system is super, super broken,” she said.
Back on the Flathead Reservation, Friends of the Jocko is focused on raising awareness—and money. Legal fees have totaled more than $50,000 so far, Coefield estimates, and the costs will keep climbing as the fight drags on.
The group has done outreach at homecoming and Fourth of July parades in Missoula and Arlee. It’s launched a GoFundMe campaign and tabled at public events, like the peace festival at the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas. And it presented at a community meeting held by CSKT in December.
Part of the group’s slow work of fighting the gravel pit is maintaining the members’ energy and drive. After all, for these neighbors, this whole effort is extracurricular.
Knoetgen, who jumped into a leadership role at the outset, has encouraged others to step up. Keeping everyone involved was, at times, “a herding cats kind of feeling,” she said.
For Coefield, the kind of work this effort requires is right up his alley, following a career that dovetailed technical communication with environmental issues. He was encouraged by last year’s decision in the Held v. Montana youth climate case, in which he sees parallels to the work of keeping a gravel pit out of the Jocko Valley. Underlying both are big questions.
“We’re all exploring: What is the depth of our right to a clean and healthy environment? To participation? To know about government options? To privacy?” Coefield said.
Coefield waxed on about the many things he values about where he lives: the clean air, the dark nights, the nearby grizzly migration corridor. And the hundreds of Canada geese that had—just the day before we spoke—clucked by in their expansive V, unfolding over his home, the potential gravel pit and asphalt plant, and an existing gravel pit just a mile away: a nearly 20-acre site on Oxford Lane, operated by the Lake County Road Department, directly east of Arlee Public Schools’ athletic field.
He can hear the constant beeping of trucks from his home. “That’s just a reminder of what we all stand to lose here,” Coefield said.
