In 2001 a local company, O’Neil Sand and Gravel LLC purchased 139 acres of forested R-40 land abutting Green Mountain Union High School (GMUHS) at the south edge of Chester village, and applied for permits to operate a gravel extraction operation on an 18-acre site of that plot. Town and state authorities both granted permits, without knowledge or input of all the landowners across the valley, who awoke one day to sounds of heavy machinery shattering the bucolic setting. Their protests over noise and dust were to no avail, as a six-year permit was already in place.
Within a few years of heavy processing, the operation began to run out of readily available material. O’Neil LLC then asked the GMUHS school board if it could extract gravel on the school premises which abut the existing gravel pit. Such land use requires approval of the voters of the school union’s three towns: Chester, Andover and Cavendish. That idea sat dormant for a few years, but was resurrected in late 2005. Without public hearings, a proposal to authorize the school board to enter into a contract to extract gravel on school grounds was passed by the voters in February 2006.
Citizens then organized and formed a non-profit they named Action for Chester’s Tomorrow (ACT). They collected signatures to force re-vote and did a lot of public education. As a result, in June 2006 the proposal to mine gravel on school grounds was soundly defeated.
Meanwhile, a greater threat to peace, health and prosperity was posed by O’Neil LLC’s new proposal for a quarry, with bedrock blasting and unlimited drilling and crushing to extract and process 100,000 cubic yards of aggregate per year for ten years, on that same plot of land adjoining GMUHS. The plan is to transform a simple gravel pit into a major rock quarry that would blast apart bedrock and pulverize boulders into gravel and other products.
The proposal sailed through town review, despite the fact that quarrying is not an allowed use in the R-40. Realizing the shaky legal ground of its town permit, the applicant and its allies simply petitioned to change zoning to legitimize their plan. (See section called THE RE-VOTE ON RE-ZONING).
In summer 2006 the quarry proposal began its way through the Vermont state Act 250 environmental review process. The first threshold decision of the Act 250 review concerned whether O’Neil LLC should be allowed to amend its existing permit for the gravel extraction, and develop a full-blown quarry operation on the same 139-acre plot of land. The 2001 permit, whose terms O’Neil LLC had accepted, prohibited blasting and strictly limited rock crushing.
The question for the District II Environmental Commission was basically: is the O’Neil LLC’s right to seek permit amendments stronger than the rights of neighbors and other citizens for finality in the original permit – to know that after six years of permitted gravel extraction a whole new industrial development would not be permitted on the same site.
On December 19, 2006, the District II Environmental Commission sided with the citizens group and denied the request of O’Neil LLC. The written ruling may not be released for some weeks, but the oral statements of Commissioners indicated that the original permit conditions were binding on the whole property for the full life of the original permit. This would include the years needed to restore the site after extraction was completed, as called for in that original permit.
O’Neil LLC has 30 days from the release of the written statement of the District II Environmental Commission in which to appeal the decision to the state’s Environmental Court.
Read the District II Enviornmental Commission denial of the O'Neil Sand & Gravel, LLC application for an amended permit issued on February 2, 2007. Go to their website and you will find the Permit Denial PDF in the list of documents: http://www.anr.state.vt.us/site/cfm/act250/detail.cfm?ID=22693
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
• This campaign cost a lot of money so if you can contribute, please send a check to ACT, PO Box 76, Chester, Vermont 05143
• Visit the web site of the Mad River Neighborhood Association for more information about the impacts of quarries on neighboring communities and the surrounding environment: www.mrnavt.org
• Visit the web site of the Vermonters for a Clean Environment: www.vtce.org
