Rutland Herald
Editorial

The quarry question

May 30, 2000

The case of the Sheffield granite quarry shows that sentiment is not the determining factor in decisions about development in rural areas. It is a lesson that may be relearned in Danby.

Sheffield is a small Northeast Kingdom town where a South African company has opened up a long quiet granite quarry on a remote ridge. The quarry received an Act 250 permit, though opponents have appealed the permit to the state Environmental Board. The company, meanwhile, has begun operations with the hope of removing 400,000 cubic feet of rock per year.

Residents of Sheffield object to the establishment of a noisy industrial operation in their quiet neighborhood and to the truck traffic it will cause. The company, however, has been able to splinter the opposition by buying up properties near the quarry, sometimes at a handsome price.

The project raises issues similar to issues likely to arise should OMYA continue with plans to develop a marble quarry it owns in Danby. The operation would fill a quiet valley with noise, and narrow local roads would have to handle the steady traffic of heavy trucks. Local residents do not like the idea of their lovely rural valley transformed into a noisy industrial site.

The two quarrying operations have inspired determined grass-roots opposition. The opposition in Danby and neighboring Tinmouth is environmentalism of an elemental sort. It is not the environmentalism of the Montpelier lobbying groups, with lawyers and experts and out-of-state fund-raising operations. It is the environmentalism of local people who love the countryside where they have made their homes and do not want to see it ruined.

Opponents of projects like the quarries in Sheffield and Danby have their work cut out for them. Quarry supporters point out that, if the state is going to have any kind of stone industry, the quarries will have to be somewhere and that even in remote parts of Vermont, there will be at least a few nearby residents. They also point out that rural Vermont is not unused to the noisy work of extracting natural resources. Logging has a long and noisy history in our remote regions, and logging trucks are not unfamiliar on our rural roads.

So arguments based on the feelings of local residents opposing change are not likely to carry the day in environmental hearings. They haven't so far in Sheffield. Act 250 is designed to measure actual environmental impact.

Thus, in Danby serious questions will probably arise about the carrying capacity of the roads. In addition, people will probably try to find out as much as they can about the water table and how quarrying will affect groundwater and stream flow. Local grass-roots groups do not have the experts at their command that the companies do, but these are the factual questions that carry the greatest weight in environmental hearings.

The economic benefits of the Sheffield quarry are not expected to be great. There will be some new jobs, though offsetting job losses may occur in Barre. A rural state does well to foster industries that make use of natural resources. At the same time, the loveliness of the rural landscape helps foster the tourism industry, whose profits are more likely to remain in Vermont.

These are the contradictions inherent in the quarry question. Residents of Danby are already grappling with them.