Asphalt Plant Comes Before Stafford Board - Again
An appeal to rezone an asphalt plant to heavy industrial was deferred on February 5. The Board will address it again tonight with concerns over odor top-of-mind.
by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Editor’s Note: This morning’s story included an infelicitous paragraph. We are resending with the paragraph corrected. We apologize for the confusion.
A debate around an asphalt plant along King’s Highway at the February 6 Stafford Board of Supervisors’ meeting comes before the Board again this evening.
The asphalt plant sits on top of a site that has operated as both a sand and gravel mining operation and an asphalt plant since the early 1960s. Originally operated by the P.C. Goodloe and Son company, it was acquired in 2019 by Allan Myer which wishes to rezone the facility from A-1 and B-2 to heavy industrial.
The county stands to benefit in terms of both tax revenues - estimated to be about $12,000 a year in real estate taxes and more than $100,000 a year in business personal property taxes - and jobs. Allan Myer is also offering proffers to deal with issues around lighting and noise.
However, a number of citizens have expressed concerns about the renovations that the site has undergone since being bought in 2019, and the strong odors that the asphalt plant emits.
In an email sent to the Board on February 5, Andrew Craig, who lives near the plant, argues that it underwent significant expansions and did so without the proper permitting during the 2020-2021 timeframe.
Pointing to GIS imagery from 2022, he says there has been “considerable physical plant augmentation with 2 RAP bins, 8 new raw material bins, yet another conveying system, 3 brand new enormous finished asphalt product storage silos and 3 large binder (raw tar) storage silos.”
At the Board meeting on February 6, Amy Taylor with the Department of Planning and Zoning said that two permits filed on the project had indeed expired. However, she also said that they had since been reinstated and passed the inspections that were missing from the original permits, which caused them to expire.
As for the expansion, Taylor said that the Deputy Zoning Administrator in August 2019 ruled that the equipment Myer brought in to replace the original ones on-site did not qualify as an expansion, but rather as a modernization of equipment.
The other concern is with the odors that are created by the production of asphalt that can be smelled for several kilometers beyond the boundaries of the plant. Board member Pamela Yeung noted in her comments on this issue that the company should do something to mitigate this issue.
The Board meeting (read the agenda) begins at 3:00 PM in the George L. Gordon Jr. Government Center.
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