Final quarry site plan rejected
NEW HANOVER » The board of supervisors has voted unanimously to reject the final site plan approval for the first phase of the controversial Gibraltar Rock Quarry off Route 73.
The milestone vote occurred in the 20th year that the quarry has been trying to win township approvals since it was first proposed in 2001.
The vote followed a Feb. 10 recommendation from the township planning commission.
The supervisor vote, taken at a Feb. 22 meeting, was the culmination of hours of often salty debate between township officials and Stephen Harris, the attorney for Gibraltar Rock, at both the planning and supervisors meetings.
“I’m not agreeing with anything you say, Mr. Gwynn,” Harris said at one point to Township Manager Jamie Gwynn who, over the course of the past several months, has taken an increasingly aggressive approach to the quarry application.
“What you say as well as what you don’t say matter, Mr. Harris,” Gwynn snapped back.
At one point, planning commission chairwoman Sue Smith even threatened to have Harris removed from the meeting for speaking out of order.
However, as it became evident how the supervisors were going to vote, Harris declined to make a final statement.
“I don’t think there’s anything I could say that would change the
way this train is going,” Harris said moments before the vote.
“There are a number of issues with the final plan before you,” Township Solicitor Andrew Bellwoar told the supervisors.
“It’s difficult to tell you what the total acreage is for the plan. It’s difficult to tell you the status of the permits the applicant is required to have and it would be difficult for me to tell you the applicant has fulfilled all the conditions set out in the preliminary plan approval,” Bellwoar said.
That preliminary plan was approved by the supervisors all the way back in June of 2015 and included a number of conditions that had to be met before final approval could be granted.
Among those was the securing of permits from the state and one of those permits, the mining permit, was revoked in an April 2020 legal victory for the township and the opposition group Paradise Watchdogs/Ban the Quarry.
In the 82-page decision, the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board ruled that the state Department of Environmental Protection failed to properly consider how a hazardous cleanup adjacent to the quarry site would be affected by the start of quarry operations.
And because there is no current schedule for the cleanup of the former Good’s Oil hazardous site off Route 663, the hearing board decision means “the permits are rescinded rather than remanded.”
That decision has been appealed by Gibraltar and a hearing is set for March 18, according to Harris.
As for the cleanup of the hazardous site, Harris said the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has begun a study to look at the best way to clean the site, although township officials disputed his characterization.
“There is no immediate plan to clean up the HOFFVC site,” said Bellwoar in reference to the DEP’s label for the property. “The plan is to begin to collect data to decide what should be done.”
The issue is relevant because quarry operations would require the pumping of thousands of gallons of groundwater as the stone quarry digs deeper into the water table.
The plan calls for dumping water that seeps into the pit into a tributary of Swamp Creek, which, is in turn, a tributary of Perkiomen Creek.
That’s a concern to Mark Connors of Church Road, who is farming 800 acres organically “within less than a mile” of the proposed quarry site.
“I’ve already been flooded out twice in the last year,” he told the supervisors. “Where is all that water going to go when they pump it?”
In August of 2020, Gwynn sent a letter to Gibraltar noting since the preliminary approval in 2015, the township has granted eight-time extensions to allow the company to meet the conditions in the preliminary site plan approval.
In that time the township received three revisions for the plan, the last arriving in September, shortly after Gwynn issued his letter.
The letter informed Gibraltar the township would not be granting any more extensions and made note of the company’s failure to meet the conditions both of the preliminary site plan approval, as well as the conditions of the 2017 approval granted by the zoning hearing board.
The township has nevertheless twice delayed a decision after pausing last fall.
Since the preliminary plan was approved, Gibraltar or Sahara Sand — both are part of the same Fairless Hills-based company — have purchased several of the 54 parcels that surround the quarry site, including one adjacent to the township recreation center on Hoffmansville Road.
The revision to the site plan submitted in September listed eight parcels that add up to just over 218 acres and one of the points of debate most recently has been how those parcels are being subdivided.
“Here we are, how many years later and the plan is still not correct,” said Chris Mullaney, the lawyer representing Ban the Quarry. “They don’t have a mining permit, the pollution over there is incredible, it’s pervasive, and who is going to use that polluted water?”
When contamination was discovered at the site in 2011, and ultimately spread through groundwater. DEP required a $2 million expansion of the public water system for those whose wells were contaminated.
As a result, no one is using the groundwater and the only reason to clean it up is to accommodate the quarry, Mullaney argued.
“Is DEP going to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to clean that up and help one commercial enterprise?” he asked.
Harris said Tuesday that he has yet to receive the official letter Bellwoar must write outlining the reasons for the denial.
“We then have 30 days to file an appeal of the denial,” which he said is likely. That appeal will be heard in the Court of Common Pleas in Norristown, “and whomever is unhappy with the decision there will then likely take it co Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court.