STERLING TWP. — Maple Grove Road cuts a path through a thick Pocono Plateau forest. The woods were peaceful when John Powell moved here more than a decade ago.
Mr. Powell and other residents say they lost that quiet, rural quality in 2011, when a stone quarry built back in the woods seemed to ramp up production practically overnight. All of a sudden, dump trucks hauling crushed gravel started traveling the road each day, Mr. Powell said.
Early November, the township zoning hearing board decided in the quarry’s favor. Now, several Sterling residents hope to reverse the decision in Wayne County court.
They described how living next to the operation disrupted their lives.
School buses and mail carriers were forced to wait for the quarry traffic, Mr. Powell said, and motorists have had to contend with ruts and craters in the gravel road.
“You’re coming through basically residential sections to get to the quarry,” he said.
About a year ago, trucks idled and lined their way to the quarry, resident and former township supervisor Carol Butler said.
The heavy traffic left thick dust plumes and the sound of downshifting shattered the peace, resident Harold Wright said.
Daniele Williams lives next to the operation. She complained of the constant sound of stone crushing mixed with the truck traffic. During the quarry’s heaviest operations, the sounds started work around 6 a.m. and would last until 6 or 7 p.m. in the summer and nightfall in the winter, she said. Sometimes, work would continue on Sunday.
Since then, the operation has slowed significantly. Trucks no longer line the road and the crushers are idle, even as the residents gear up for their legal battle.
They say the township’s zoning ordinance, enacted in 1991, should ensure such conflicts do not happen. The quarry lies in a zone called “rural development,” which allows quarrying as a conditional use. The zone does not allow processing of minerals, including “crushing, screening, washing or grading.”
A view through the trees on a neighbor’s property reveals a blue stone crusher sitting idly at the quarry. A Google Earth picture from 2012 shows an active stone crusher with several gravel piles below its conveyor belt.
Prior quarrying left 150,000 tons piled on the site from rock layers above the high-quality bluestone, Mr. Swingle said. He and his siblings inherited the land after his mother died in 2006, and he hopes to return it to a pasture and raise beef cattle there. He can’t do that without removing the piles, he said.
But stone crushing at the site violates the zoning ordinance, residents contend.
“They think they can do whatever they want and don’t follow the rules, but everyone else has to,” Ms. Butler said.
Last year, the residents tried to persuade the township to enforce its zoning ordinance.
There had been earlier indications that not all was right with zoning. After receiving a notice from the state Department of Environmental Protection about the quarry’s mining permit in December 2013, Wayne County planner Christopher Barrett wrote to the quarriers’ engineer stating it’s “unclear” whether the quarry had zoning approval.
The residents said they thought they were successful in August when the township’s zoning officer issued a notice of violation to Litts B&E Quarry, one of the two quarriers operating at the site. Mr. Grassie is the other.
The quarriers then asked for the township’s zoning hearing board to review the violation. It did so at a hearing in November.
In July and September, Mr. Grassie sent letters to a group of township residents. He threatened to sue them if they continued their fight.
“Continued attempts to interfere with my long-standing and legitimate operation at the quarry will force me to consider all of my options, including litigation against all objectors,” the September letter states.
At the November hearing, the property’s owner, Roger Swingle, who served six years as township supervisor, said stone crushing has been used at this site since the 1970s, long before the township passed its zoning ordinance.
“We believe it was grandfathered, that there’s been some type of quarrying that existed, dating back years,” the quarriers’ attorney James Tressler said.
The board decided in the quarriers’ favor.
The residents responded by combining forces and money under the name Sterling Residents for Responsible Quarry Operation. They hired Honesdale attorney Ronald Bugaj and took their complaints to county court in an appeal of the township’s decision.
In their appeal, the residents argue that the property owners never properly registered stone crushing with the township as a nonconforming use.
During a visit to the township office in January, secretary Deborah Gromlich and zoning officer Corey Pontosky said they have no zoning applications of any kind on file for the site. The only documents they did have are DEP permits and a copy of the zoning hearing board’s November decision.
Mr. Grassie said zoning approval for the quarry was obtained in the 1990s. The file with all the documentation is missing, he said. Mr. Swingle also mentioned the missing file but said he wasn’t sure exactly what was in it.
The residents’ appeal also alleges the hearing board deliberated in secret before making its decision; unfairly considered additional testimony from the quarriers’ attorney after the official record closed; and did not properly notify the public about the hearing, among other issues.
Efforts to reach township solicitor Jeffrey Treat were not successful.
Mr. Grassie said he is confident the quarry meets state and local regulations.
Regarding the crushing, Mr. Grassie and his attorney pointed to a July road maintenance and use agreement between himself and the township. It specifically mentions crushing as a use on the property. The agreement binds Mr. Grassie to maintaining portions of Maple Grove Road as long as he is there making stone.
He lives in nearby Covington Twp. and said he strives to be a good neighbor. When Maple Grove Road residents asked him to stop running machinery after 5 p.m. and on Sundays, he immediately obliged, he said.
“I live here. We’re not looking to cause a problem where we live,” he said.
Mr. Swingle said he isn’t either. “I don’t want to fight with the neighbors,” he said. “It’s not a good thing to do, but we have to do what we have to do to protect our property.”
Mr. Grassie said the gravel he gathers from the site goes to PPL for use in its Susquehanna-Roseland power line project, he said.
“I already have signed contracts for millions of dollars worth of stone sales...you can’t just stop us now,” he said.
He also worries about the implications for his roughly 60 employees if the residents succeed.
“By shutting me down, it’s only going to put more people out of work,” he said.
As of Friday, no court action has been scheduled on the residents appeal.
Contact the writer:
bgibbons@timesshamrock.com, @bgibbonsTT on Twitter