ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 22, 1995 TAG: 9512220021
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
When Acco Stone Co. took control of a 90-acre quarry outside Blacksburg in the late 1980s, it was unaware of a requirement in a 1978 Montgomery County permit that mandated a "visual buffer" of evergreens on the edge of the hole between Jennelle and Yellow Sulphur roads, its attorney said Wednesday.
Years later, the requirement never has been fully complied with or enforced, in part because of vague wording, a county official said.
The county Board of Supervisors attached the condition when it allowed the quarry to expand from 30 to 90 acres after more than a year of mid-1970s controversy. Now Acco Stone wants to expand into another 90 adjacent acres, which would bring its total permitted area to 180 acres.
It is promising to plant 6-foot white pines by this spring to better shield the existing, nearly depleted quarry, and to develop a long-range landscaping plan for the new quarry area by early 1997.
"We're going back and correcting it," said Kendall Clay, a lawyer representing Acco Stone and its parent company, Salem Stone Inc.
The more detailed landscaping plan is one of 11 conditions the county Planning Commission is recommending for a new expansion, the 32-year-old quarry's second since 1978. Other conditions expand hours for sand grinding and blasting.
Wednesday night, the Planning Commission voted 7-1 to recommend approval of the expansion to the Board of Supervisors. Chairman Jim Martin was the lone "no" and member Joe Draper abstained because his engineering firm is working on the project.
The expansion proposal now moves to the Board of Supervisors for a Jan. 8 final vote.
Earlier this month, Planning Commission members asked Acco Stone to come up with a plan for a smaller expansion, to 50 acres instead of the 100-acre addition originally proposed.
Acco Stone officials, accompanied by a lawyer, engineer and geologist, countered by eliminating just a 10-acre buffer zone beside the right of way of the proposed "smart" highway. Limiting the expansion to 50 acres would present an "extreme hardship," said engineer Robert Bolles.
That's because the existing limestone quarry, which supplies raw materials for an on-site asphalt plant, is nearly out of rock. Permitting an expansion into 90 acres will allow Acco to develop the quarry in stages and terraces, rather than cutting a single steep wall at the 50-acre mark and limiting the usability of the adjacent area.
Such a long-range plan could make the quarry usable for as long as 30 years, depending on demand, Bolles said.
Acco plans to take unusable "overburden" from the new area to reclaim and plant a white-pine cover over parts of the existing quarry, Clay said.
At a public hearing earlier this month, quarry neighbors worried about the effect of further digging on their wells. Some also expressed concern about blasting, which one man said may have broken windows at his home.
But Clay said he looked into the blasting comments later and found no evidence to support a link to the quarry. "We feel very strongly that it is impossible that [the broken windows] resulted from our blasting," Clay said.
Jennelle Road resident Andrew Schenker, though, told the Planning Commission that he was aware of residents on nearby Black Bear Run Road who had had problems with the blasting. Acco Stone Vice President M.J. O'Brien challenged that. He said no one had complained to the company. "If we don't know about it, we can't do anything about it," he said.
On the well issue, geologist Adolf Honkala explained how four years of test results from three monitoring wells at the quarry showed no real effect on surrounding groundwater conditions.
Salem Stone Inc. has permits for seven rock mines in Virginia including the Acco Stone quarry, according to the state Department of Mines Mineral and Energy. It has four operations in Wythe County, a marble mine in Campbell County and a granite mine in Bedford County.
Acco Stone's current operation is the largest of four permitted quarries in Montgomery County. The next-largest is the Sisson & Ryan Inc. limestone quarry near Shawsville, which has disturbed 22 of its 34 permitted acres, according to state records. The other two are shale and coal-mine spoil pile operations.
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