Texas is growing, and with that growth comes an ever-increasing demand for construction materials. Sand, gravel, and crushed stone—collectively known as aggregate—are essential to building the roads, bridges, and infrastructure that sustain our booming population. However, the rapid expansion of Aggregate Production Operations (APOs) has sparked intense debate about their impact on public health, the environment, and local communities.
This is especially true in Williamson County, which has seen more growth in APO permits than any other county in Texas. The Central Texas region has been blessed with the resources that help fuel new growth, but those blessings also come with the side effects of their extraction.
The Problem: A Regulatory Framework That Fails Communities
The current permitting system for APOs in Texas is riddled with inconsistencies and loopholes that fail to protect residents from noise pollution, air quality degradation, groundwater disruption, and road deterioration. Unlike other industrial operations, APOs operate under a patchwork of regulations that allow them to bypass meaningful oversight. This has led to unchecked expansion near residential neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals, resulting in serious concerns about public health and quality of life.
One of the most glaring deficiencies is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s (TCEQ) standard permit process, which prioritizes expediency over thorough evaluation. Put in place as part of a deregulation effort in 2005, these standard permits allow minimal public input and do not require ongoing air quality monitoring. This means that communities living near these sites often lack real-time data to prove the harm they are experiencing.
Key Issues and the Need for Reform
1. Air Quality and Health Risks
Dust from APOs contains fine particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), which can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing respiratory issues, heart disease, and other serious health conditions. While the TCEQ operates regional air monitoring stations, they are not designed to assess pollution at the community level. Reforms should mandate on-site air quality monitoring to ensure compliance with National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).
2. Noise and Light Pollution
The constant operation of rock crushers, heavy machinery, and transport trucks generates excessive noise, disturbing nearby residents. Though the industry often touts how they are “heavily regulated” on this issue, those regulations only deal with workplace safety, and many of the techniques used prevent hearing damage on nearby workers simply end up bouncing loud noises into the surrounding community, rather than blocking it completely.
Additionally, APOs regularly use explosives to break apart rock formations, which can shake nearby homes and potentially damage building foundations if not managed properly.
APOs also often use high-intensity lighting, which contributes to skyglow and disrupts sleep patterns. New regulations should enforce decibel limits at property lines and require shielded, downward-directed lighting to minimize light pollution.
3. Road Safety and Infrastructure Damage
APOs rely on heavy commercial trucks to transport materials, causing severe wear and tear on state and local roads, which are not typically designed to handle a constant stream of fully loaded commercial vehicles. Every mile one of these trucks drives does $0.26 worth of damage to the roads, while only contributing about $0.05 in gas taxes to their repair.
When these APOs open, they must prove that it is safe for trucks to pull out onto the road in order to obtain a permit from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). However, if the traffic situation changes, and the road sees a large increase in traffic, which almost always happens in fast growth areas, TxDOT doesn’t have the authority to change their driveway permit.
As a result, APOs in populated areas can have hundreds of fully loaded trucks full of rocks and gravel pulling out of their facility at a 90-degree angle with no way to get up to speed before getting on the road. These driveways turn these trucks into sudden roadblocks on 60mph+ roads loaded with traffic, making them a major road hazard that TxDOT is powerless to do anything about.
4. Water Usage
APOs require significant volumes of water to produce their products. APO quarry mines require about 50 gal/ton of aggregate processed. Water is required for dust control on quarry roads and at product crushing/sizing/storage sites. Although sand mining operations may have access to surface water for these purposes, virtually all crushed stone and dimension stone operations utilize ground water for operational dust control.
According to the Texas Aggregate and Concrete Association (TACA), the APO industry in Texas produced 380 million tons of product in 2024, which works out to 19 billion gallons of water used, mostly from groundwater sources, equal to about 190,000 homes. APOs who operate on best practices can greatly reduce their water usage by recapturing their used water into retention ponds and recirculating it for further use, but irresponsible APOs can easily drain an aquifer dry at little to no cost due to loopholes in some of Texas’s water laws.
When Williamson County is facing drought and severe water restrictions on home usage, APOs face no such restrictions. Under current law, the only recourse available to the people of Williamson County to hold APOs to best practices on water use is appealing to the good will of the managers of the facilities, hoping they choose to do the right thing. That must change.
4. Inadequate Setback Requirements
Current laws requires that an APO set up their rock crushing equipment at least ¼ mile away from homes, schools, and hospitals. This requirement does not give enough distance to prevent dust, light, and noise pollution from affecting the surrounding community. Updating these standards to ½ mile would provide a critical buffer for public health and safety.
5. Lack of Reclamation Plans
Unlike other mining operations, when an APO shuts down, they are not required to do any amount of work to make sure the abandoned site is not a danger to public safety. Instituting mandatory reclamation plans, backed by financial surety bonds, would ensure that former quarry sites are at cleared of all industrial equipment, explosives, and environmental hazards, and that the large pits left behind from the removal of the rock are blocked off to prevent accidental falls.
The Path Forward: Legislative Solutions
Over the past eight years of working on this issue with Texans from every corner of the state, several key recommendations have emerged to fix these issues:
Mandating on-site air quality monitoring to provide real-time data on particulate matter emissions.
Establishing enforceable noise and light pollution limits that protect residential areas.
Requiring APOs to have full acceleration and deceleration lanes to provide a safe traffic flow for the entire life of the facility.
Requiring responsible water usage with well covered retention ponds and recirculation processes to minimize groundwater depletion.
Expanding setback requirements to ensure a safer distance between industrial operations and communities.
Implementing mandatory reclamation plans to restore land after mining activities end.
Though these reforms may seem like common sense, every legislative effort toward these reforms in the last twenty years has been defeated by the power that the APO lobby wields in the Texas Capitol. A great deal of money and influence goes toward making sure that no APO can be required to make even the slightest change to their operation, no matter how much disruption they may cause to the surrounding community.
But that amount of money is tiny when compared to how much money APOs receive from the State of Texas through contracts to supply building materials for roads and other public construction projects. The State of Texas is the largest customer for APOs, and it’s time we started demanding more for our tax dollars.
This session, I filed HB 1018. Instead of taking the same path of trying to regulate the industry directly, HB 1018 would create a Best Practices Certification Program for APOs, based on the practices used by APOs across the state that have shown they can produce a high-quality product at a fair price without harming the surrounding community. Contractors who don’t get their raw materials from Best Practices Certified APOs would be put to the back of the line when considering potential bids for building roads and other government contracts for construction.
The 89th Texas Legislature has a unique opportunity to address these concerns through targeted reforms. The recent level of turnover, and a renewed focus on the health and safety of Texans provides a fresh start for these issues, but only if your representatives at every level hear from you that these issues need to be addressed.
Despite repeated efforts in the House of Representatives, this issue has yet to even be considered in the Texas Senate. Williamson County has two excellent Senators who are willing to listen, but if they don’t hear from you on this issue, can we blame them if they decide it isn’t a priority? The same is true for the other Representatives in Williamson County, and for the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, as well. If we want action to be taken on these issues it requires us all to use our voices to let them know this issue matters to Williamson County.
Conclusion
Texas' economic growth should not come at the expense of its residents’ well-being. The aggregate industry is vital to infrastructure development, but its expansion must be managed responsibly.
I am a firm supporter of property rights, but my rights to use my property as I see fit don’t allow me to reach over to my neighbor’s property and cause them harm. The state's current permitting process does not adequately protect communities from the negative impacts of APOs, and without significant reform, Texans will continue to bear the cost of regulatory shortcomings.
By strengthening oversight and accountability, Texas can create a balanced approach that supports economic growth while safeguarding public health and environmental integrity.