Legal fight over RDU’s authority to lease land for quarry ends at Supreme Court
The legal battle over whether Raleigh-Durham International Airport had the right to unilaterally lease land for a private quarry has quietly come to an end.
The N.C. Supreme Court declined to take up an appeal by opponents of the quarry, letting stand a Court of Appeals decision from December. The appeals court ruled that the airport’s governing board, the Airport Authority, had the power to lease 105 acres of land to the Wake Stone Corp. for the proposed quarry and did not violate the state’s open meetings law when it approved the lease at a special meeting in March 2019.
The meeting had been announced two days earlier, and the terms of the lease were not disclosed to the public until the meeting started. Authority members didn’t ask any questions or make any comments before voting, without dissent, to approve the 25-year lease.
Quarry opponents argued that the Airport Authority could not make that decision on its own. The Umstead Coalition, Triangle Off-Road Cyclists and three individuals sued in Wake County Superior Court claiming that the four local governments that own the airport — the cities of Raleigh and Durham and Wake and Durham counties — needed to sign off on the lease.
They also argued that RDU should have provided more notice for the meeting and given the public a chance to weigh in.
But Wake County Superior Court Judge Graham Shirley II ruled that the airport’s charter, which was approved by the General Assembly, and several other provisions of state law allowed the Airport Authority to lease the property without consulting the local governments. Shirley also ruled that nothing in the airport’s charter requires it to seek public feedback before leasing property and that two days notice for a special meeting was sufficient under state law.
The State Court of Appeals agreed, and on Friday the Supreme Court let that ruling stand.
‘New revenue sources are critical’
The Airport Authority hailed the Supreme Court’s decision. In a statement, chairman Patrick Hannah said Wake Stone is expected to pay $24 million to RDU over the 25-year life of the lease.
“As RDU recovers from the pandemic-related decline in passenger traffic, and as our region continues to grow, new revenue sources are critical to helping fund future airport expansion projects,” Hannah wrote.
Most of those payments will come in the form of royalties tied to net sales of stone from the open pit mine. Wake Stone is still awaiting the mining permit it needs from the state Department of Environmental Quality.
So far, the Airport Authority has received $80,000 in pre-mining payments from the company, as required by the lease, but it has spent about $470,000 on legal fees related to the project, according to RDU.
The mine would be adjacent to Wake Stone’s existing Triangle Quarry, between Interstate 40 and Umstead State Park. Stone from the new pit would be trucked across a bridge the company would build over Crabtree Creek to the existing quarry site off North Harrison Avenue, where it would be crushed, cleaned and shipped out.
RDU acquired the site in the 1970s for a planned runway that was never built. The wooded land, known as the Odd Fellows property, is adjacent to Umstead, and quarry opponents would like to see it preserved and added to the park.
In 2017, the Airport Authority turned down an offer from The Conservation Fund, a national environmental organization, to buy the 105 acres for $6.46 million. A year earlier, the airport’s 25-year master plan, called Vision 2040, had identified the future use of the property as “industrial/quarry.”
This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 10:44 AM.
