Posted on November 4, 2024
Morristown has been able to haul material out of its town gravel pit for the past two years. Now, the town has settled a court dispute with the state, ensuring the town will be able to use the land how it wants when it wraps up operations in the pit a quarter century from now.
The Vermont Natural Resources Board’s regional commission earlier this month approved the town’s proposed amendment to its land use permit for the gravel pit, located at the end of Duhamel Road in the Cadys Falls area of town. The town had appealed the permit two years ago, arguing, among other things, that it placed too many restrictions on what the town could do with the 316-acre property once it wraps up the current 25-year phase of pit operations in 2049.
Town manager Brent Raymond said the Duhamel Road pit is, essentially, a working mine, and the Act 250 permit only applies to those decades when it is being used to extract material. The town argued, it ought to be able to use the property without such restrictions after 2049, when the permit expires.
“People had to be reminded that this Act 250 permit wasn’t in perpetuity,” Raymond said.
The town had been shut out of its own pit for a couple of years as it wrangled with Vermont’s Act 250 commission over the state-issued land use permit. It was issued a permit in late 2022, which allowed the town to get in and start extracting and hauling material out last year as the appeal moved forward.
The new phase of operations takes place in an 8.77-acre swath of land next to the previous two phases of the pit — since filled in — and allows the town to remove roughly 700,000 cubic yards of material over a 25-year period. That’s about 58,000 dump trucks’ worth.
The approved permit comes with dozens of conditions, largely around protecting the water sources far underground, but also dealing with noise, dust and the continued allowance for the surrounding area to be used for recreational purposes — there’s a vast network of popular mountain bike trails next to the pit.
The Act 250 dispute meant that, for a couple of annual budget cycles, the town had to purchase its sand and gravel from vendors who fetched a higher price than the town would have spent doing the work in-house.
Raymond said there is still a cost to the town to use its own gravel, such as wear and tear on the town highway department vehicles hauling the stuff away. The town also contracts with someone to do the actual extracting and crushing over a three-week period each year — that’s the limit allowed by the Act 250 permit.
In the 2022 fiscal year, the town budgeted $145,000 to buy gravel and sand. In the current budget approved at Town Meeting Day, that figure is almost $50,000 less, mostly for sand.
Raymond said it’s too early in the budget-crafting process to accurately estimate road material costs for next year.
Mother Nature will have a say.
Raymond said the town ran out of gravel about a week before the area saw major flooding in July, exactly one year to the day after 2023’s historic deluge.
That’s because last winter saw a series of warm spells that brought a sequence of early mud seasons to the area, which meant the town had to use far more gravel than usual during the winter.
After the July flood, the town was able to use much of the material it extracted from the gravel pit, but still had to buy extra.
“We had significant washouts in areas,” Raymond said.
