Greg Buppert

KNOXVILLE — 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.

The judges are hearing arguments in an appeal to an April 2007 ruling by Hamilton County Chancellor Frank Brown that allowed a Florida-based mineral-rights owner to continue strip mining Tennessee mountain stone from a Soddy-Daisy area section of the Cumberland Trail State Park. The state filed an injunction against the mineral-rights owner to stop the mining.

“I do think the defendant mining company was asked some very pointed questions that get right to the heart of the issue,” said Greg Buppert, a Nashville attorney representing 14 conservation groups and the Southern Environmental Law Center, all of whom filed a “friends of the court” brief to support the state’s position.

The mineral-rights owner, Elmer C. Hill of the Lahiere/Hill Partnership of Destin, Fla., and his attorneys have said that sandstone is a mineral and they are within their rights to mine in the park.

The state owns the land in the 300-mile-long linear park and the Cumberland Trail itself, but not the mineral rights beneath it.

During the hearing, the judges asked questions about damage caused by the mining to Chattanooga attorney Rick Hitchcock, who represented Mr. Hill and the Lahiere/Hill Partnership.

The attorney contended the mining doesn’t destroy the land and that the miner’s water-runoff permits require reclamation of the damaged land.

Mr. Hitchcock argued that the state was trying to “take” the mineral rights from Lahiere/Hill. He said the partnership rejected a $562,000 rights purchase offer from the state for mineral rights that appraisers valued at $3.2 million.

But while he was making this argument, Presiding Appeals Judge Herschel P. Franks cut him off.

“I don’t think that argument holds any water, sir,” the judge said.

The lawsuit began about 16 months ago in Hamilton County when contractors working for Lahiere/Hill tore up about 70 to 100 yards of the Cumberland Trail while digging out sandstone — some 40 to 60 tons a day.

State officials sought a stop-work injunction and Judge Brown issued a limited order requiring the miners to work no closer than 25 feet to the Cumberland Trail itself. He did, however, allow the mining to continue.

In the appeals hearing Wednesday, the state’s attorney, Elizabeth McCarter with the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, argued that previous legal rulings have not included stone in the clauses of mineral-rights deeds. Most of the documents were written generations ago to convey rights to coal, iron, oil, gas and other minerals, she said.

She said the only way to mine stone from the park land and other property is to destroy the surface.

Mr. Hitchcock countered that the mining did not “completely destroy” the land’s surface.

“Complete destruction would be like a quarry — where there is no surface left,” Mr. Hitchcock said. “This mining disturbs the surface.”

Mr. Buppert told judges their decision would affect public and private landowners over 460,000 East Tennessee acres in 11 Cumberland Plateau counties.