EDDINGTON, Maine — After the planning board unveiled proposed new rules for future mineral extraction operations, the project manager for a Hampden-based earthwork contractor voiced objections.
“It’s on the planning board’s shoulders to either toss this ordinance because there will be no rock excavating right now [under the proposed plans]… or to change that back to what is understood and regulated throughout our industry in the state of Maine,” Janet Hughes of Hughes Bros. Inc. said Tuesday night at the first of two public hearings on the draft 32-page addendum to the land use code.
Hughes told the planning board that they should rewrite a significant portion of the draft quarry regulations.
Hughes Bros. is pursuing a ledge quarry project on Fox Hill.
Ralph McLeod of Holden, whose son and family live on Fox Hill, told the board to hold its ground.
“Don’t let someone whose best interest is to defeat this ordinance to persuade you at all,” he told the board and the 30 others who attended the hearing.
The second meeting is 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Eddington Elementary School. The public hearings are being held to get comment from residents about the proposed changes, which add a 1,000-foot setback between residences and quarries and establish rules for groundwater, noise, dust and air pollution, blasting and stockpiling.
“We put this together from other ordinances from around the state,” Gretchen Heldmann, a planning board member, said after the meeting. “We looked at at least 10 different towns.”
During the public hearing, some residents asked that the setback be increased to a mile, which is the setback for wind farms.
“The farther you get them away from the residents, the fewer complaints you’re going to have,” resident Ray Wood said.
The planning board has been working to draft plans for nearly a year after residents approved a quarry moratorium in April 2014 that was extended by another 180 days in September.
An application by Hughes for a 5-acre quarry, which possibly could grow to 20 acres, was put on hold after the moratorium. Janet Hughes said the new ordinance, if approved as written, again will postpone the project and may prevent it altogether.
“The ordinance I see isn’t easy. It’s stringent,” she said. “It’s going to take time and money.”
She went to the podium three times to suggest changes, saying at one point that the proposed sound levels were so low, “you’ve written blasting out of your ordinance.”
“As a civil engineer I feel if I don’t understand it … the general public is not going to get it,” Hughes said.
McLeod was one of three who voiced approval of the rules to town planners.
“You have done a very, very good job crafting this,” he said. “I urge you to stick to your guns.”
Heldmann says the town just got information from the state Department of Environmental Protection that will be added to the draft. Some of those changes are “regarding some of the items [Hughes] addressed,” she said. “I feel like we’re tweaking it at this point.”
After Thursday’s meeting, planners will rework the draft before it is presented to the town’s selectmen, who will host their own public hearing before a March special town meeting on the rules.