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Tailings issue tops agenda at Omya forum

November 3, 2005

/By BRENDAN McKENNA Herald Staff/

PITTSFORD — Representatives of Omya Inc. spent almost as much time listening as they did talking at a public forum Tuesday.

The forum was the first in a series the company will hold as it seeks state approval for sites at their Florence plant to dispose of tailings — waste byproducts of their marble quarrying operation.

The company is seeking interim certification to transform three former quarries into sites to store the tailings, which Jim Reddy, president of Omya North America, said are 99.6 percent ground-up rock and 0.4 percent agents used to separate impurities from the calcium carbonate slurry produced by the company.

The primary component of the agents is tall oil — produced from pine tree pitch at paper mills.

"We were just providing a brief overview of our operation," Reddy said. "We wanted input. We were here to listen to what questions and concerns (residents) have got."

Reddy noted that the process of seeking public input was a new one for the company, which generally plays its cards close to the vest to keep competitors from getting insight into its activities. Omya is privately held and so is not subject to the same reporting requirements of publicly traded companies.

"We've never done this before, and most of the people here have never had a company invite them in to tell them what we're doing," he said. "We want to be as open as possible."

He said, "Our corporate philosophy was that as a private company we had an advantage if our competitors didn't know what we were doing."

That philosophy ran into opposition from some environmental groups when Omya first tried to get approval for its tailings disposal plan.

Because the company is made up of engineers and scientists, Reddy said, they tend to find technical solutions then move on, not worrying what their neighbors might think about their plans. But these forums are designed to change that deficiency, he said.

"We're trying to rectify that and let everybody know what's going on, what we're doing," he said.

To that end, Omya representatives collected the questions from the audience, ranging from human cancer rates and potential animal contamination from chemicals around their site to the economic impact of the Legislature's requirements for their proposal.

But their approach wasn't enough to address the concerns of some skeptics.

A group, called Residents Concerned about Omya, boycotted the meeting, calling on the company to first perform a study required by the Legislature before holding its informational meetings.

A representative of the group could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but a flier distributed at the meeting said Omya's initial studies to support its proposals were scientifically flawed and claiming the company is suggesting more talk instead and "unbiased scientific analysis."

Reddy answered those concerns by saying the company had hired people it thought were the best consultants available to do its initial studies. A large portion of the meeting Tuesday was held in hopes of getting input on how it should select the people to conduct the next study so it wouldn't be considered to be biased, he said.

"What we don't want to do is pick another group of consultants and have the same thing happen," he said to the audience. "Help us figure out how to pick consultants so they will be acceptable to the people, the community."

He asked several times for audience members to volunteer or recommend those that might volunteer to serve on steering committees for selecting the consultants.

"We want everybody to be confident that what the consultants said, that what the data said is true," Reddy said. "If you've got some ideas, we have people here taking notes."

Company representatives also collected technical questions from the audience that they pledged to answer over the course of future informational meetings.