Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News

Rocky Relations
By Amanda Bader & Tree McElhinney . Photos by Tom Dimaurobi

When Keith Kortright hands you his business card, it doesn’t seem controversial. “Mombaccus Excavating, Inc.” You have to read the small print to know what the bulk of his business is: “All Natural & Locally Mined Crushed Stone Products.” Kortright, a life-long resident of the Town of Rochester is a shale pit operator. He and his brother Gary run a gravel mining operation on Rochester Center Road that has been active since the 1940s and in their family since the 60s.

Between the two brothers, they own about 600 acres. The terrain is mostly hayfields and woods, with numerous ponds, streams and…a gravel pit. They had to fight off some developers to acquire the most recent parcel of about 170 acres, but by buying it, Kortright said, they’ll keep it from being subdivided, and won’t end up with neighbors who complain about the mining operation. Kortright also has 50 cows, cuts hay in a lot of different fields in the area, and taps trees for maple syrup.

In Kortright’s opinion, he is part of a long-standing traditional community that makes the area attractive to begin with: saw mills, loggers, gravel pits, run by local families with a fair amount of land, much of which is open. “It’s what makes the country the country, plenty of open space and rolling fields.” And to pay the taxes on “all that countryside that people like to look at,” he says, owners of large parcels need to run businesses like his gravel pit.

But as local mining operations have increasingly made the transition from ancillary business associated with farming to a land owner’s primary venture, they have come under fire by the residential communities surrounding them. The Red Hook Conservation Advisory Council, for example, concerned that a proposed 140-acre mine in the nearby town of Milan could have a serious impact on an area of Red Hook’s groundwater, is calling for a detailed hydrological study to be included in the project’s review process.

And in the town of Saugerties citizens joined forces with town officials to enact a zoning law that prohibits mining on residentially zoned property, an action prompted by Shott Mine Inc’s proposal to excavate 45 acres of land it owns along Morse Road in the residential hamlet of Veteran. Shott’s subsequent appeal of the 2001 zoning law was struck down by State Court Justice Vincent Bradley last year. And although Bradley recently ruled that Shott could remove previously palletized bluestone from the property , the town is seeking a permanent injunction against mining activity at the site.

In the Town of Rochester, however, where approximately 90 percent of properties are zoned residential, efforts by citizens to urge town officials to step up to take the lead in the evaluation of new mining projects appear to have fallen upon deaf ears. In May, Planning Board Chairperson Nadine Carney’s motion for the town to be lead agency for the review of a special use permit that would allow Frank Kortright (Keith’s cousin) to expand mining activities on his property was not seconded. Had planning board members agreed to take on the role, they would have been in the position to ask Kortright to address and possibly mitigate the proposal’s potential environmental impact as required under the state Environmental Quality Review Act.

During a town board meeting a month earlier, officials refused to enact a temporary moratorium on future mining in the town after having resolved to do so at the behest of Rochester residents in December, leaving some to believe that the presence of truck drivers influenced their decision.

“Twenty-five truckers came with big trucks and jammed the [town hall] parking lot, refused to sit down and started to badger the board until they decided to take the moratorium off the table,” said Boodle Hole resident Steve Fornal. “In Saugerties they listen and try to work with people, but here they refused to get involved."

Town Supervisor Harold Lipton said “the truck drivers had nothing to do with it,” when asked why he had voted against the moratorium that, if enacted, would have given the town at least three months of breathing room to explore the possibilities of regulating mining activity through amendments to zoning code. “It’s not necessary to give a reason. I just decided not to vote for the moratorium.” Such decisions continue to rankle those residents who for three years have been keeping tabs on the state Department of Environmental Conservation review of the Metro Recycling and Crushing, Inc. application to install a larger rock crusher on its Queens Highway site. To be able to run this equipment, the Castleton-based company must obtain a new Air Pollution Permit from the DEC, which was declared lead agency for the project in 2000 after the Town of Rochester Planning Board declined.

Although town officials have said they deferred to the state agency because they lacked the technical expertise to assess the impact of a piece of equipment that produces over 1,000 tons of gravel per year, many residents feel they are doing the town a disservice by turning over the decision-making process to an outside authority.

Giving lead agency to the DEC, Fornal said, under the state Mined Land Reclamation Law, limits local government to consider only four conditions when deciding whether or not to grant a special use permit for a mining operation: ingress, egress, routing of truck traffic, and enforcement of reclamation requirements.

“All we are advocating is that decisions that affect the community be made within the community” said Zali Win, who is president of the Rochester Residents Association (RRA), a citizen watchdog group. “When they get passed on to a faceless bureaucracy in Albany, a lot of the local flavor is lost in the sense that someone looking at the project on paper does not have a sense of living in its backyard.”

According to Win, the RRA has spend nearly $30,000 since June 2002, when about 150 residents turned out for the DEC’s legislative public hearing on the Metro application. The money, he said, went towards attorney fees for preparing a legal brief that presented issues regarding noise, nearby water tables, air pollution, traffic and the effect on property values. Another brief was prepared for the DEC’s subsequent issue conference, held this March, along with hard data provided by expert witnesses such as traffic consultants and hydrologists.

Win said the next step is to wait until a DEC administrative law judge decides whether or not to proceed to a legal hearing. “Ultimately, you have a system where whoever runs out of money first loses,” he said.

According to DEC spokesperson Wendy Rosenbach, there is no time frame for this decision.

When asked in retrospect whether town officials should have been more proactive about citizens’ concerns over Metro’s proposal, Lipton said: “You are always going to have people that are against something coming to a meeting.” And when pressed for the town board’s opinion on Metro’s plan to increase mining output in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the Town of Rochester, he said: “It’s in the hands of the DEC now. I don’t think the Town Board has anything to say about it.”

But should it?

Since Metro’s purchase of the struggling Rock Mountain Farms mine in 1998, there are about six locally-run mines remaining in the Town of Rochester, including two owned by the town itself. A law passed by the Town Board in 1993 allows these operations, once previously restricted to excavation, to process stone and make different products—such as specially treated gravel for paving roadways—available for sale. Such a law, makes these gravel pits attractive to large corporations (like Metro) who have no investment in the community.

“We get approached all the time to sell,” said Keith Kortright. “If we did, we’d get good money and take it easy, but I like the people I work with, I take care of them. A big conglomerate won’t do that. They don’t care about the land and the people who live here like I do. They come in, bring in their own people, and run it for maximum profit.”