Ruling stalls proposed Comal quarry
TCEQ permit tossed in rare decision amid pollution fight
A group of Comal County residents has won a big battle in a fouryear legal fight to stop a proposed quarry north of San Antonio that they say will harm the environment and their quality of life.
State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County earlier this month threw out a prior decision by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, saying the regulatory agency acted arbitrarily or capriciously in granting an air quality permit to Alabama-based Vulcan Construction Materials LLC.
The permit applies only to discharges generated by an 800-ton per hour rock crusher Vulcan intends to operate at the site at the corner of Texas 46 and FM 3009. It is rare for TCEQ to be overturned. The judge’s ruling stalls, at least for now, Vulcan’s plans for the proposed 1,500-acre limestone quarry.
The permit allowed Vulcan to emit up to 95,000 pounds of particulates a year into the air, but opponents said they believe it would have released much more.
TCEQ cited the litigation in declining to comment. Neither Vulcan nor its lawyers responded to requests for comment.
The site is near a number of new country subdivisions sprinkled among the rolling hills of live oak and ash juniper trees. It is less than 10 miles from the Bracken Bat Cave, home to the world’s largest colony of Mexican freetail bats, and about 3 miles from Natural Bridge Caverns.
Neighbors are concerned about air pollution, water supply and quality, truck traffic, destruction of caves, and decreased property values that could result from the industrial quarry in a residential area populated by more than 12,000 people.
A coalition of the community’s
residents, known as Friends of Dry Comal Creek, Stop 3009 Vulcan Quarry and Preserve Our Hill Country Environment, along with the Comal Independent School District, has opposed the quarry.
The quarry would stretch about three miles over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, the principal water source for communities that include San Antonio and New Braunfels.
“It’s monumental. We are excited about this,” said Millan Guckian, president of Stop 3009 Vulcan Quarry and Preserve Our Hill Country Environment. Her property is next to the proposed quarry site. “We’ve been fighting this for about four years.”
The battle had largely been fought in the administrative system within TCEQ, whose commissioners granted Vulcan the air quality permit in November 2019 after a series of hearings.
A Vulcan spokesman, Scott Burnham, has previously said that the company has “presented a responsible plan for this site that shows we’re committed to the county and doing things the right way.”
But the community groups and the school district appealed to district court, disputing, the accuracy of Vulcan’s core sampling results, a lack of nearby air-quality monitors and a limit on which emissions were considered by the TCEQ.
In the March 5 letter to lawyers in the case, Judge Guerra Gamble found that TCEQ wrongly determined “that crystalline silica emissions will not negatively affect human health or welfare” because it was not supported by the evidence.
Gamble also wrote that Vulcan’s calculations of its crystalline silica emissions are “not representative of the site” nor supported by the evidence.
The judge found that TCEQ’S determination and Vulcan’s decisions to withhold some information was “arbitrary or capricious.” The district judge further found that an administrative judge had wrongly let Vulcan withhold some information from the opponents by claiming they were protected “trade secrets,” and not allowing the community groups to cross-examine Vulcan.
David Drewa, a spokesman for Stop 3009 Vulcan Quarry, said he doesn’t believe Vulcan will drop its pursuit of the quarry.
“It’s probably not the end of the road,” Drewa said. “We expect them to appeal.”
It Vulcan does succeed on appeal, it must then submit a water pollution abatement plan to the TCEQ and receive approval.
“We’d like for them to just walk away from it,” Guckian said of Vulcan. “But that probably isn’t going to happen.”