Manufacturing Solutions Inc. is seeking permission from the Morristown Development Review Board to raze a hill on its planned industrial park development and sell the gravel created in the process.
The plan was characterized by the town’s zoning administrator Todd Thomas as a standard cut and fill project that wouldn’t have even merited a meeting if MSI hadn’t sought approval for selling the mulched-up rocks and dirt as gravel during the process.
MSI’s engineer, Peter Smiar, told the development board at a Feb. 22 meeting that the hill could produce 330,000 cubic yards of gravel and stone and would be sold commercially on-site. The blasting required to produce this gravel would take place intermittently as needed and take place in two phases over 10 years.
A site visit was scheduled for the property at 6 p.m. on March 22 — the day before an Act 250 public hearing to be held on March 23 at 4 p.m. in the Tegu Building — but Thomas maintains the site visit is closed to the public, due to it being held on private property, a clear violation of public meeting law but a justification he’s used before to close other development site visits to the public.
Thomas told the News & Citizen that a reporter would only possibly be allowed to attend the visit if they remained silent during the visit and claimed he had to defer to MSI’s lawyers for approval for the public to attend.
#SaveTheMountain
The destruction of the elevated slope has also opened another front in artist and adjacent homeowner Thea Alvin’s fight against the ongoing development of the land.
Alvin is an adjoining property owner in the ongoing Act 250 permitting process for the area, but not close enough to the hill in question to be classified as such by Morristown.
What MSI calls a knoll, Alvin calls a mountain.
“I have heard the argument again and again that a person can do what they want with their property,” Alvin said in a recent social media post. “In this case, their property is a solid rock piece of Vermont and surrounding farm fields, soon to be paved and covered in buildings. Maybe 100 buildings, maybe 200. Big ugly industry. Just exactly out of a horror story. Maybe it is their right to do it, but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do.”
In a supporting comment, Morristown resident Leslie Oplinger coined the hashtag #SaveTheMountain to rally others to protest the existential threat she, Alvin and others feel MSI’s industrial expansion represents to their neighboring hilltop fields and the Vermont aesthetic they treasure.
Thomas said Alvin’s comments and others he’d seen around the project on social media were out of line.
Alvin believes the Morristown town plan may be on her side. Under the plan’s “gravel resources” section, it’s stated that any newly proposed gravel pits should only be supported if they’re located east of Garfield Road between the Lamoille River on the south and north-east town lines.
Does leveling a hill and selling its remains count as a gravel pit? That’s up to the development review board to decide.
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