Feb. 15--Check out the people smiling biggest over the federal economic stimulus package, and chances are you'll find Bruce Chattin among them.

Chattin is a lobbyist for the Washington concrete and aggregates industry, and when he hears talk about $2 billion to be spent here on roads, bridges, highways and mass transit, what pops into his mind is "Gravel."

"Anything that generates more projects is good for our industry," Chattin said recently, talking by cell phone on the way to the Legislature.

Sand and gravel, or "aggregates" as they're known in the business, are the basic building blocks of nearly all construction. A typical single-family home contains 120 tons of aggregates, from the foundation concrete to the grit on the shingles. A single mile of freeway typically contains 35,000 tons; studies for the new Highway 520 bridge over Lake Washington indicate it would take 1.5 million tons.

Thanks to the ebb and flow of glacial ice over Western Washington during the past several millennia, gravel is a resource with which the Puget Sound region is naturally blessed.

But gravel mining on the shores of the Sound draws the wrath of environmentalists like almost no other activity. For adjacent landowners, few developments are more despised.

"Gravel pits are just big open wounds," said Don Russell, an opponent of a mine expansion proposal near DuPont. "It's as if somebody grabbed hold of your skin and ripped it off."

Mining companies say that despite vast gravel deposits near Puget Sound, not-in-my-backyard attitudes and misconceptions about the mining process have made new mining permits next to impossible to get.

That's created an artificial shortage, the industry says, which eventually will mean long, costly hauls by truck or importing sand and gravel from more remote mines on Vancouver Island, B.C.

"We're not pretty," Chattin said. "We understand that. But we have to go where the rock is."

THREE PROPOSALS

The public works project money on its way from Washington, D.C., is fueling debate over three large sand and gravel mining operations currently being proposed on the Sound.

Glacier Northwest's plan to expand its Maury Island mine and replace an existing dock so outraged protesters that in January they chained their arms together inside steel pipes to block construction access, then launched flotillas of kayaks to halt pile drivers.

Pressure from industry and environmentalists has sent public policymakers flapping back and forth like windsocks.

When then-state Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland signed off on an aquatic lease for the Maury Island project in his final days in office, environmentalists accused him of selling out to big business.

On Monday, Peter Goldmark, the new lands commissioner, ordered a review of the lease, an act that industry sees as political payback for the environmental and local interests who helped elect him.

On the Olympic Peninsula, more than 3,000 people have organized to fight Poulsbo-based Fred Hill Materials' plan to build a 4-mile-long gravel pipeline to a new loading terminal on Hood Canal.

Meanwhile, state legislators quietly introduced bills this month that would take away local control of that project.

And in the South Sound, opponents are talking to attorneys to find ways to stop Glacier Northwest from expanding its 387-acre DuPont operation with a new 177-acre pit, 80 feet deep. If approved, the entire mine would be about the size of downtown Tacoma.

A SHORTAGE?

When gravel mining companies speak of a shortage of gravel, they're not talking about geology, says Dave Norman, the chief geologist at the state Department of Natural Resources.

There's plenty of gravel, Norman said. It's just that most is in places where, for either economic or environmental reasons, it isn't practical to mine.

"There are plenty of great aggregate deposits," Norman said, "but if they're 500 miles away from anything, it doesn't really matter."

The biggest and best deposits -- and the easiest to transport -- are in a roughly 25-mile-wide band along the rim of the Sound.

The prehistoric deltas of the South Sound are particularly blessed. Gravel from DuPont and Steilacoom, a vast reserve depleted five years ago and reborn as Chambers Bay Golf Course, set the standard for gravel in terms of quality and depth.

For more than a century, the mine's operators barged gravel from Steilacoom to construction sites throughout the South Sound and as far away as Brazil.

"Steilacoom literally built Seattle," Chattin said.

But as the Puget Sound area's population and environmental awareness increased, the gravel reserves have become increasingly difficult to tap.