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?