July 25, 2001
IT SOUNDED REASONABLE ENOUGH. On Oct. 19, 2000, residents living within 500 feet of a proposed quarry site received invitations to a meeting. The invitations read: “This private reception will be an opportunity to discuss future uses of Southdown Inc. property at the southwest corner of West Hyde and West Enon roads. We would like to share our future plans with you and to hear your views and ideas.”
Yet residents who attended the meeting had quite a different experience.
“It was such a farce,” area resident Ada Stockton said. Residents weren’t addressed as a group, but instead had to visit booths that focused on different topics such as blasting, water concerns and the new quarry’s location.
Residents said that when they asked specific questions, they were referred to another representative, who in turn referred them to another.
“It wasn’t really a meeting. You never started off at the beginning of a conversation and heard the end,” said Diane Rowland, a local resident who opposes the quarry. “They really didn’t tell us anything. … I think what Southdown was doing was putting out feelers (to see how people would react).”
Most of the people providing information were not from the company. Rather, Rowland said, they were experts offering information the average citizen wouldn’t understand.
“This was their way of keeping people segmented and trying to keep it low-key,” area resident Jeff Hodge said. Hodge and others who live farther than 500 feet from the site were not invited to the meeting. When Hodge showed up anyway, he was stopped by a sheriff posted at the meeting entrance. “These are the kinds of people we’re dealing with,” he said.
Shortly after this initial meeting, the Xenia/Bath/Miami Township Action Group (X-TAG) was formed. The group cites health, environmental and economic reasons for its opposition to the quarry.
X-TAG has compiled a list of complaints from residents living near other Southdown-operated quarries nationwide - noise, cracks in homes’ foundations, damaged furnaces, rocks hurtled through window and door screens, and split toilet bowls. While most of these damages are hard to directly correlate to the mining activities, X-TAG’s members maintain the new quarry will threaten their quality of life.
“I think in America people have their lives invested in their homes,” said Dawn Falleur of X-TAG and the Green Environmental Coalition (GEC). She said Southdown “crossed the line” when it proposed a mining site so close to so many residences.
The 350-acre quarry site, which straddles Bath and Xenia townships, is surrounded by 47 homes, two churches and a career center with 536 students. An outdoor recreation center is located only 1,000 yards away, and 331 homes are within three miles of the proposed site. Yet according to Xenia Twp. resolutions, an open-pit mine - including one in which blasting occurs - can operate as close as 500 feet from a school or home.
SOUTHDOWN WANTS TO MINE the Greene County land because it’s rich in limestone, an essential ingredient in the company’s cement-making process. The company currently mines limestone from a number of quarries in the area.
The portion of the proposed site located in Bath Twp. is already zoned for mining, but the land located in Xenia Twp. is still zoned for agricultural use. So to move ahead with its plans, Southdown must submit a formal request for rezoning to the township trustees.
X-TAG’s immediate goal is to prevent this rezoning. Since Southdown announced its plans for the site, X-TAG has gathered information on mining, local regulations and taxes; surveyed local residents; and distributed signs reading, “Farms yes, quarry no” to area residents. Hard-rock mining is a notoriously dirty operation, and area residents are concerned about possible health risks - particularly that more rock dust will be produced, causing or exacerbating respiratory problems. Rowland and other residents described a yellow dust that settles on their properties, especially during the summer. “It covered my whole lawn,” Rowland said. “I just cannot understand how they can come in this close to a community.”
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) monitors fugitive emissions from the state’s quarries. The OEPA’s primary concern with quarries is particulate matter (PM) in the dust. PM can come from several sources at a quarry, including blasting, crushing, conveying and screening.
“In terms of health, PM can aggravate respiratory conditions like asthma,” said Andy Thompson of the OEPA Public Interest Center. “There tend to be sensitive groups: the elderly, individuals with asthma and children.”
X-TAG has begun surveying residents living within a two-mile radius of the site. Of the 212 people who have completed the survey, 79 percent are either older than 65 or younger than 18. Eleven percent already have respiratory illnesses.
According to the Regional Air Pollution Control Agency (RAPCA), Southdown doesn’t need an air pollution permit for its quarry operations, although RAPCA does monitor Southdown’s equipment and dirt roads.
“If there was a nuisance affecting nearby residences, we would look into that,” said Bruno Maier, assistant director for public information at RAPCA. “Historically, we haven’t received complaints for the existing quarry operation.”
The same cannot be said of other communities in which Southdown operates. Last year in Sparta Twp., N.J., Southdown signed an agreement with the state to pay $246,350 in fines and implement a dust management plan after residents had complained for two years about the dust coming from one of its quarries.
ANOTHER OF X-TAG’S CONCERNS is the possible affect mining could have on residents’ wells and the area’s water table.
“I’m really concerned about our water table because we’ve had so many problems in the past,” Rowland said. “No one could answer my question, which was, ‘What is this going to do to our wells?’”
Newer wells in the area are more than 100 feet deep, but older wells are only 35 to 50 feet deep. Static water often sits at the upper levels of water tables - water that could be lost if disturbed. If residential wells are disrupted, water lines would have to be piped into the houses.
According to John Kass, plant manager, Southdown is currently studying the quarry’s potential affects to the water table, but no results are available at this time.
“In the 76 years that we’ve been mining in this area, we’ve never hit the water table. We have never affected the water table,” Kass said. “We’re not intending to do it, but we don’t know what the hydrology is yet.”
Paul Wolfe, a geologist at Wright State University, agreed it’s hard to determine the exact effects of the mining without more data. “It’s basically going to drain some water from the rocks,” he said. “There’s a potential impact.”
Just how much would be drained depends on several factors: the depth of the pit, how high the water table runs and the type of rocks in the area, to name a few. “There might be a problem, but it’s not certain,” Wolfe said.
“They’re going to ruin the water table. That’s my main concern,” said Ada Stockton, whose 94-year-old mother, Mary Campbell, has lived in her house on Hyde Road since 1958. Campbell’s late husband worked at the cement plant in the ’60s, and four generations of the family now live on Hyde Road. The new quarry would be directly across the street from their seven houses, some of which are brand new or newly renovated. Many family members attend X-TAG meetings, and Richard Stockton, Mary’s grandson, is X-TAG’s statutory agent.
“We don’t know what we’ll do (if the quarry is approved),” Richard Stockton said. “We’re just trying right now to stop it.”
The potential cost to landowners such as the Stocktons could be staggering. “Who’s going to want to buy a house that’s 200 feet from an open mine?” Rowland asked.
An Ohio State University (OSU) study published last year called “The Value of Open Space and Agricultural Land to Rural Non-Farm Residents” found that in Delaware County, Ohio, rural residences’ proximity to industry has a negative affect on property values, causing them to drop by as much as $13,000. For the study, industrial properties included sites such as railroads, junkyards and quarries.
“Basically, we were looking at industrial properties and the effects on other properties,” said OSU economist Brent Sohngen, author of the study. Sohngen and his team researched house sales in Delaware County from January 1996 through June 1998. “It’s a really quickly growing area,” he said. “It seems to be developing in a lot of ways with both commercial and industrial developments.”
Such development, Kass said, could eventually prove to be positive for residents. He said some former quarry sites have been redeveloped into residential neighborhoods, citing Rona Hills in Fairborn as an example of a former site where, he said, “property values have risen steadily.” Southdown, he added, is looking into the possible effects the quarry would have on neighboring properties.
IN ADDITION TO X-TAG’S concerns about the quarry’s impact, it has been studying the amount of taxes Southdown pays. “We believe they’re paying much less than the average county resident,” Hodge said. “We have a large corporation that’s taken lots out, but not putting a lot back in.”
After an acquisition last year, Southdown became a subsidiary of Cemex, the world’s largest trader in cement. Southdown is the second largest cement maker in the United States, with 12 plants and 41 distribution sites nationwide. The company employs approximately 130 workers at its Fairborn plant, and the proposed quarry would not create additional jobs. The Fairborn plant has been operating since 1924, when it opened as Southwestern Portland Cement Co., which was later bought by Southdown.
Southdown owns more than 4,000 of the 269,000 acres in Greene County, which amounts to almost 2 percent of the county’s land. Yet according to Greene County Auditor Luwanna A. Delaney, Southdown pays less than 1 percent of the property and real estate taxes in the county. Kass, however, argues that the company’s tax bill is hefty enough. “We (Southdown’s Fairborn plant) pay nearly $1 million a year just in property taxes,” Kass said. “If that’s not enough, I’m surprised. Cemex owns 12 other cement plants in the U.S., and we (the Fairborn plant) pay the highest taxes (of any Cemex plant) in the United States, and by no means is it the biggest (facility).”
Southdown maintains it is a contributing member of the community. “We’ve been extremely active in community work,” Kass said. Southdown has contributed to many programs in the Fairborn area, including basketball, after-prom and programs operated by the Greene County Country Club. “They’ve been a long-term friend and supporter of Fairborn,” Fairborn Mayor Larry Long said. He also noted that Southdown has helped pay for a Christmas tree that is erected in the middle of town each year.
TAX CONCERNS raised by X-TAG are also connected to Southdown’s effect on the county’s lands.
"We don't believe they have restored old quarries to the taxable base they had when they began," Falleur said. X-TAG charges that Southdown avoids reclamation - the often expensive task of returning mined land to its pre-mined state - by keeping sites active longer than necessary or by selling the sites to pass the responsibility to someone else. Since nonreclaimed lands are considered wastelands, they are taxed at a very low rate, thus driving down the amount of property taxes the county collects from them each year.
Kass denies Southdown fails to reclaim sites. “They see sites that we’ve been operating for many years, and we’re not finished with them,” he said. “We’ve been reclaiming areas. There’s a lot of areas people can’t see because they’re inside the property or behind walls.”
Bill Boyle of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Mineral Resources Management in Lebanon visited Southdown’s facilities on June 19. He acknowledged that Southdown has a higher than average amount of active mining land, although he added that the company has recently made a concerted effort to reclaim more land. “We’ve just processed quite a few of their releases,” he said.
“Because they are in the business of making cement, they are basically operating a large chemistry lab,” Boyle said. The company, he added, needs to have access to various types of limestone to make a consistent product.
Specific requirements for reclamation of the proposed quarry would be determined during the rezoning process. For the portion of land located in Xenia Twp., Southdown would have to create a reclamation plan and post a yearly bond before it could be issued an annual mining permit. The plan would require Southdown to replace 18 inches of topsoil or subsoil and plant shrubs, trees, grasses or groundcover. “We would check each year to see if they’re meeting all the requirements,” Rhonda Painter, zoning inspector for Xenia Twp., said of Southdown. “Hopefully, the bond would be large enough to induce them to get their money back.”
Kass explained a new technique that would be used in the proposed quarry in which the company mines the outside of an area, then works its way in, reclaiming the area as work proceeds.
X-TAG’S HODGE SENT A LETTER to Kass inviting him to a June 4 meeting and received a response from Ken Shaul, director of mining operations at Cemex in Houston. After scheduling and canceling a couple of meetings, Southdown and Cemex officials finally met with three X-TAG members on July 11.
“They brought some issues and asked some questions,” Kass said. “Right now, we’re trying to find the answers.” While the meeting didn’t produce a truce between residents and the company, it did provide an opportunity for both sides to make their cases.
“I think what we did was take sides,” Falleur said. “We laid out our position.”
Southdown executives also recently met individually with the Xenia and Bath township trustees. According to the Xenia Township Trustees Office, the company told the trustees it expects to apply for rezoning in the next 15 to 18 months and hopes to start quarrying in 2003. “They have to submit a lot of information and come to a lot of agreements with the trustees to get rezoning,” zoning inspector Painter said.
If or when Southdown does apply for rezoning, the application would be forwarded to the Greene County Regional Planning Commission and the Xenia Township Zoning Commission for their recommendations. After public hearings, the Xenia Twp. trustees would make their final decisions. From start to finish, the process would take four to six months if there were no complications.
“There has been nothing requested from (Southdown),” Xenia Twp. Trustee Dick Montgomery stressed. “The trustees are trying to be very judicious, trying not to involve themselves in the speculation. I can say that if they purchased it (the land) 10-plus years ago, one would have to think this (attempting to mine the quarry) was going to come to pass.”
“There are regulatory agencies and zoning restrictions that they must abide by,” said John Martin, Bath Twp. trustee.
However, X-TAG’s members feel the company is using a stall tactic by postponing for several months its official rezoning request. They believe Southdown hopes to prolong the conflict and tire the citizen opposition. In the meantime, X-TAG is encouraging families to write letters to local, county and state officials. It is also hoping to reach out to the public and public officials.
“I don’t particularly have anything against large corporations,” Hodge said. “What we’re asking for is for Southdown to be a responsible corporate neighbor.”
REACH IW FREELANCE WRITER ROB BOLEY AT CONTACTUS@IMPACTWEEKLY.COM.