RANKIN INLET - Rankin Inlet entered into a quarry administration agreement last month that allows the hamlet to collect permit fees from contractors hauling gravel in and around the municipality.

Up until now, contractors were able to haul gravel without permits.

"What's happened in the past is contractors have just gone and got gravel without getting a quarry permit from anybody," SAO Paul Waye said.

"The hamlet has never had the authority to administer the quarries so we haven't."

Waye said there are still some logistical decisions to be made about the approval process. It needs to be determined whether administration, the hamlet council or community and government services will have the authority to approve permits.

"As far as getting into the agreement with community and government services to manage the quarries, that's finalized," he said.

Shawn Maley, assistant deputy minister of community and government services said the agreement allows the hamlet of Rankin Inlet to charge a fee for gravel.

"By signing one it allows the municipality to charge a royalty on a per metre of gravel basis," Maley said. "It can't be exorbitant. The Commissioners Land Act doesn't allow a profit to be made, but it does recognize real costs."

Waye said now that the decision has been made, permits have been issued to both M&T and Inukshuk Construction at the normal rate of $2 per cubic metre.

"The standard template that is in the commissioners land administration act sits around two bucks a cubic metre, which is what I've charged them," he said.

The fees are put towards maintenance costs such as quarry administration, road maintenance, site development and a reclamation fund, according to Waye.

Fifty cents of the $2 rate is put toward each item.

The reclamation fund is used to help restore a quarry site back to its natural state. Waye said he was concerned because no money has ever been set aside to restore the quarries around Rankin Inlet.

"There are two quarries in particular that are historical quarries that are big gashes on the landscape and no one has collected any reclamation funds to reclaim these sites," he said.

"They're close to exhausted right now so no one has the money set aside to reclaim them to their natural state so that was the issue I was worried about."

Waye said he was worried that the hamlet would have to pay to restore the quarries if no reclamation fund was set up.

"Going down the road, future quarries would be our responsibility to reclaim and if we let contractors extract gravel without them paying for the reclamation up front on a royalty basis then we wouldn't have any money to do the reclamation afterward and we would have to take it out of our own funds," he said.

Maley said contractors in small communities usually take care of incremental costs associated with quarries.

However, as communities grow and more contractors arrive, formal agreements become necessary.

"Historically, there's only one contractor in town so they pretty much do those things anyway. They take care of the road, find their own gravel so forth and so on," he said.

"As municipalities are becoming more aware of it and as more contractors are coming into the communities, like Rankin, there's obviously more of a pressing need to start formalizing what they've historically done in an informal way."