Specail Meeting called by Gaston Country Board of Commissioners, page-3

My guess is that the existing commissioners will pass a temporary moratorium because they are more interested at the moment in appeasing the small number of noisy people and making it go away as an election issue. My understanding is they can't do anything about the rezoning until the mining permit is approved so a temporary moratorium will make the issue go away until then. It's smart politics from the commissioners - they can kick the can down the road a bit and appease a noisy minority until the mining permit is issued. Then the "real fight" begins - at which point PLL will have detailed exactly what they are planning to do and how many jobs it will create. The noisy anti-mining people will still be there but at the moment they have the upper hand because PLLs plans aren't clear - in the absence of that info they can run a scare campaign. I've seen it in my area with residential rezoning. The noisy minority had people up in arms about the lack of schooling, the sewer would overflow, we would run out of water and power (in metro Sydney!). In the end the council went ahead anyway because it needed to happen for the wider good (and upon critical analysis the issues raised weren't problems at all)