OMYA'S PRESENTATION

MR. MITCHELL: Well, thank you, Mr. moderator and thank you all from Danby for

inviting OMYA here to tell you about our plans for a quarry on Otis Road. I am John Mitchell

and I lived in Danby from 1988 to 1998. I still own property on Otis Road, only then it was

called Blood Street. I'd like to take a few minutes to give you some history about our company

and to tell you what we do. And then I'll introduce to you our new North American chief

executive who will speak about quarry specifics and answer your questions. I came to Vermont

to be the president of the Vermont Marble Company, a company that was incorporated here in

November 1894. Because of the marble belt that runs from Canada to Massachusetts, lots of

marble companies were quarrying marble from as early as the 1760s up until the time Redfield

Proctor put together the Vermont Marble Company in the 1870s. It was owned by his

descendants until 1979 when his family asked a family-owned company from Switzerland to

purchase its company because it was about to go bankrupt. The Swiss company established a

Vermont company called Pleuss-Staufer Industries to look after its North American activities

including Vermont Marble. From the early 1900s until the second World War Vermont Marble

was the largest marble company in the world producing building blocks for thousands of

government, corporate and religious buildings. Stone from here in Danby was quarried as early as

the 1830s on Dorset Mountain and has been quarried continuously from that location since 1904.

After World War II, the market began to change and marble buildings were no longer wanted.

Glass and aluminum ones took their place. In 1940 the White Pigment Company which Vermont

Marble eventually purchased started to grind marble as a whiting and as a filler. Some marble,

like the marble on Dorset Mountain, is good for buildings and not good for grinding. And other

marble, like that found in Middlebury and the Jobe Phillips Quarry in Danby, is good for

grinding, but not for buildings. The reason is that building marble must be not fractured or

broken, and grinding marble can be broken up, but it most be free of impurities. In the early

1900s we found that we could no longer earn a profit selling building stone while at the same time

the market demand for ground up marble was growing rapidly. In 1992 we changed the name of

Vermont Marble Company to OMYA Incorporated to recognize the change in the market's

requirements and I then became the president of Pleuss-Staufer Industries, not OMYA, but it

doesn't matter much. We did not save the jobs for the folks in Proctor who finished the building

stone, however we did search the world for a company, which we found in Italy, to save the jobs

of the 20 or so people who live here and work in the Danby Imperial Quarry. The biggest reason

for the growth in OMYA's ground products is their widespread use in everyday things.

Basically OMYA makes two products. Wet calcium carbonate and dry calcium carbonate. We

grind up purified calcium carbonate to tiny bits the size of a millionth of a meter. Much smaller

than a human hair. Then we sell the wet product mostly to paper makers as a substitute for

chopped down trees and as a coating to receive the ink used to print on the paper. Since

introducing this product in the 1960s, the number of trees cut down for paper making has

declined by a significant amount. The dry products go into all sorts of stuff. They go into cereal

to help build strong bones for kids. They go into calcium supplements to prevent osteoporosis

in older folks. It goes into plastics to reduce the amount of petroleum used. It goes into buffered

aspirin to smooth stomach pain. It goes into plaster board tape compound which is holding up

our sign on that end. Putty which is holding up our sign on this end. And cleanser which

everybody is familiar with from their homes. It also goes into the paint on our walls and

separates chewing gum, and it goes into antacid tablets to prevent the heart burn you might

get from listening to this speech. It goes into carpet backing, floor tile, ceiling tile and the list

goes on and on and on and on. Life without these products would be pretty dull. As a result of

OMYA's making its products here, a lot of economic activity takes place in Vermont, especially

in Rutland County. Last year we paid 2 million dollars in property taxes to 25 towns. $65,000

right here in Danby. We spent over -- we paid over 300 employees more than 15 million dollars

in payroll. We spent another 69 million dollars in Vermont for stuff; railroad fees, construction,

fuel, transportation, clothing, eyeglasses and dozens of other things too numerous to list. And

since most of our customers are not in Vermont, virtually all the cash we collect from our

customers is new cash introduced into the economy, not recycled cash passed from one person to

another. And this helps keep our economy strong. We need another quarry to meet the demands

of our customers and to blend the stone we use to feed our plant with other stone so we can

efficiently use our resources. Danby and Vermont Marble have been partners in prosperity for

nearly 100 years and we want to work with our neighbors to continue that partnership. So at

this time let me introduce you to Mr. Jim Reddy. For nine years Jim was president of our

operations in California and Arizona. He is the chief executive of our North American

operations. He's an engineer and he brings to Vermont a wealth of knowledge about our products

and about the environment.

MR. REDDY: Thanks, John. Everybody hear me okay. Yes? Okay. I want to thank

you for letting us have this opportunity to talk to you and try to explain what it is we're doing

and what we're all about. I'm going to try and talk, do a little bit of a brief introduction and then I

know we have a lot of questions coming up so we'll get into more details later. First, a simple

what are we trying to do? We have a quarry in Danby that we would like to open called the Jobe

Phillips Quarry. It's approximately it will be a 23-acre quarry in the middle of a 33-acre area.

We expect the quarry to last for 50 years and we'll be extracting approximately 300 -- up to

300,000 tons a year from this quarry. The reason we want to go into this quarry, as John said, is

the quality. This is an excellent deposit. It's extremely high purity. It's extremely high

brightness. Our customers are becoming more and more demanding in the world. This is the kind

of deposit that we need to be opening up. John talked a little bit about what it's used for. I'd like

to give you a bit of detail, a little more on a couple of the products that it's used for. It's simple

to say it's used in everything. We have a saying at work actually that if it isn't made out of

wood, there's calcium carbonate in it. And it's almost true. Some of the things are pretty

interesting if you think about them. It's in paper, it's in this paper that I got my notes on tonight.

In low-cost paper like news print there's no calcium carbonate in it. In high quality papers like

you find in National Geographic -- any of you subscribe to that? National Geographic paper is

40 percent calcium carbonate. In Europe some of the highest quality papers are 50 percent

calcium carbonate. On the world average for all paper that's made throughout the world including

news print, that has no calcium carbonate in it, 15 percent of paper is now made out of carbonate

and not trees. What we're proposing here is to open a quarry of approximately 33 acres. Over

the next 50 years just in the area of trees alone for the use of paper literally tens of thousands of

acres of trees will not be chopped down to make paper. Another advantage of making paper

with calcium carbonate, paper used to be made with an acid process. The acid process is why

papers turn yellow. In fact, news print that doesn't use calcium carbonate if you don't pick it up

real quick in the morning, it turns yellow in the sun. That's because it's an acid based paper.

Nothing against newspaper, but that's the fact. We don't make paper in the acid process

anymore and, in fact, I understand what used to be a -- or there was a problem with chlorine

bleaching of paper like nearby here in Lake Champlain. As part of the calcium carbonate process

we don't use acid base any more and because of the high purity and the high brightness of the

calcium carbonate, we don't have to chlorine bleach anymore. No more dioxins in the

environment for any mill that converts. John also pointed out that it's used in the food and

pharmaceutical products, and we have a couple of samples up here on the table. Many of you

may not have realized it, but we're mining calcium carbonate. If you take a look at the label on

some of your food products that you eat. I mean, up in the little box where you have the

environmental thing up there, it will say, Calcium; X percent of your minimum daily requirement.

Look down at the bottom where it says the ingredients. The ingredient isn't calcium. The

ingredient is calcium carbonate. That's the stuff that comes out of here. Paint, the paint that is

on the wall is full of calcium carbonate. Some of you may recall. In fact, I just bought a house in

Vermont so I know about the signing of the disclosure deal on lead in the paint on a house. Paint

used to have lead in it. Kids would, you know, eat the paint. Kids will stick anything in their

mouths. Dust would come off the wall and they'd get the paint in it. We don't put lead in paint

anymore. We had to find something more environmentally beneficial or less problem so now we

put calcium carbonate in it. That's what's in all, I presume, I hope that's what's in the walls in

this building. Come to think of that. In addition, paint has been reformulated in the last few

years to reduce what's called "VOCs." Any of you familiar with that? Volatile organic

compounds. That means you have to get rid of the resins that are in it, water-based paint.

Because of the reduction in the VOCs, the only way you can do that is with calcium carbonate.

You can't do that the way they used to make paint. In paint now with the low VOCs it's hard to

imagine, but in a one-gallon can of paint that's as much as ten pounds. That's the highest.

Usually there's about five or six pounds. But it's as much as ten pounds of calcium carbonate is

in a one-gallon can of paint. As a result, the environment is much better for it because we don't

have all those VOCs going out. As John said, it's in plastic. Electrical conduit is one of the better

examples. That's the gray stuff that you buy at the local hardware store that the electrical wires

go into. That's 45 percent calcium carbonate. Pressure pipe isn't as much. Pressure pipe is five

to seven percent. On the average it's about 20 percent. What that means is we need 20 percent

less oil, 20 percent less petroleum products to make PVC because we're replacing it with calcium

carbonate. And to be honest, that's one of the main reasons that calcium carbonate is in there is

to reduce the production of PVC because the people that are making these products have a hard

time with the environment with their emissions. They're replacing it with calcium carbonate.

Works for all of us. Helps save the environment. There's a lot of your automobile has plastic in

it. They replaced steel in the automobile with plastic. You may not like the plastic so much, but

one advantage is with calcium carbonate you can make the plastic stiffer and more -- it matches

up with the steel, better colors and therefore we reduce the weight of the automobile. That's one

reason why cars used to get 12 miles a gallon, now they're getting 25, 30 miles a gallon. They

reduce the weight of the car. With plastics cars get much better gas mileage. The environmental

balance of calcium carbonate is very good. Just a sideline use for it, calcium carbonate is the stuff

that they use to put in lakes and ponds where you put on your farm to reduce the effect of acid

rain or on the farm to reduce the acid soil. Calcium carbonate is pretty good. About the only

thing it reacts with, in fact, is acid. Other than that, that's why it goes into everything. It's

environmentally neutral. It doesn't react with anything. It reacts with acid. So we actually

found a use for it. That's why it's your antacid tablet. Get some stomach acid, you get all

churned up, take some calcium carbonate. That's what you're eating when you take Tums,

Rolaids, Maalox.

What are we doing at the quarry? It's going to be a standard operation like our other

operations in Vermont. It will run from 7:00 in the morning to 6 at night at most six days a week.

Plan on schedule is five days a week, but, you know, weather happens, things happen sometimes

you can't operate a couple of days during the week so we're allowing for the possibility of that.

We want to have an operation on Saturday on occasion. It's going to be a standard operation

where you drill and blast. The drilling and blasting will occur from 10:00 in the morning until

4:00 at night two or three times a week. Neighbors will be notified before every blast. Drill and

blast it, then you put it in a crusher and crush it up into a smaller size that can be transported.

Of course, that's one of the issues I'm sure I'll get some questions about tonight. What we do is

somehow we will transport it from the quarry to our plant up in Florence. That's as simple as

about what we want to do. So the process that we're in is something called "Act 250" which I'm

sure all of you are very familiar with. Earlier, just to go back in history a little bit, make sure we

get everything straight or I get everything straight here, earlier this year we submitted to the

Town of Danby a proposal which included what we identified as the safest road, we, internally,

felt was the safest road. After that time, we also decided to talk to some of the citizens so if any

of you were here that were interviewed by our people that we sent out to find out what the

questions and concerns in the community were, I want to thank you for answering the questions.

What seems-- what I think seems to work well is before you submit an official proposal, talk to

the people in the area that might be affected, ask them what their concerns are, see if we can

address the concerns before we submit anything and spend a lot of time doing something that

maybe we could have done different if we had known what you were concerned about in the first

place. So we sent people out. We said, What are your concerns. We got all the concerns and

now what we're doing, as part of the Act 250, we've hired a bunch of outside experts in a bunch

of different areas of expertise. We've got people on the biological, from the historical, on the

environmental, on the transportation side. We've also given the people a list of the concerns that

were expressed by the people in the area. And we said, Okay, what we want you guys to do

now is go out in your area of expertise, review the project, tell us what we're doing, how we

should do things, review the way we propose doing it and see if there's a better way to do. In

fact, I told them, you know, open your mind. If there's new technologies, different ways of

doing things, something we haven't done before, take a look at it. Tell us what we ought to be

doing so that we can address the concerns of the people in the community in the best way we

can. They're in that process now. It's taking a little longer. One problem is when you ask

people their concerns, they tell you. So we gave them to the consultants and one problem is they

have got to address them all. They're working through them. I asked or we've asked if they could

try to have the reports book in the fall, but I also told them if, as a result of your reviews you

come up with some new idea that needs to be addressed or some new possibility we ought to

look at, take your time. I don't want to rush the permitting process for some artificial deadline

when if we look a little bit longer and we address whatever opportunity comes up, we might be

able to come up with a better solution and a better package to present. So the target is to have

the reports in in the fall. Late fall. We're into fall now. It was a couple of days ago. Late fall to

have the reports in and that we'll compile and put them together and we expect to be submitting

our Act 250 application in the spring. Again, these are just targets. If they say it's going to take

a little longer, they want some more things to look at, we're going to give them the time. That's

about all I wanted to say for an opening statement. We are being limited to about 15 minutes and

I probably went a couple minutes over. I'm sure that we'll get into the specifics when we ask

some questions. You can see we have a bunch of people here. I'll just make a brief introduction

if I got time to do that so that you know who we got up here and what areas we'll call on them to

answer the questions as they come up in their area.

We start out here with Ken Enzor. He's our transportation expert. John Mitchell you

just met or you know who he is. Brian Noland and John Suddarth are in the personnel

department and also involved in the safety and hiring of everybody. Robbo is our forester. Van

Schwiebert is our counsel. Don Burns is in charge of the quarry. Dr. Alice Blount (ph.) is our

minerologist and she's a former professor of minerology at Rutgers University, so we have an

expert there. Carter is our president of the trucking company, and Neil Jordan is our expert on

the environment. That's it.

MR. McNEIL: Who didn't know that he was the forester?

AUDIENCE: (Laughing.)

MR. McNEIL: I get it all the time. Everybody who has an empty seat next to them raise your

hand. We need you all to come up and grab one of these seats otherwise you have to go out.

There's plenty of seats. There's ten or twelve more seats up here. There's half a dozen over here.

There's four right here. Right here in front. We've got more seats up here so you either come in

or you go out. The fire marshal is not going to let you stay there and we're going to have to --

there's more seats over here. There's a whole bunch up front. There's more up here up front.

There's two right here. Several over here. And then we can get going. Thank you very much.

Appreciate that. Now we're going to get to the question and answer part of the period. And,

again, we're going to take questions from Danby residents, taxpayers, voters first. We're going to

ask you to state your name. Please don't be offended if I ask you if you do live in town. I know

a lot of people, but not everyone. The questions we would expect, as all of our meetings, are

civil. And I'm sure they will be answered as fully as they can and we're going to limit them to the

effects and the information on the town. Okay. So, there is a microphone here if you choose to

use it, please feel free that way anybody that's standing outside can hear you. Otherwise I'll

repeat the question and we'll have one of the OMYA personnel address it. Questions? Ken?