UPDATED: What’s next for effort to regulate quarries?

How long will the comedy of errors continue?

Well water from the home of one of Copar's victims

By Will Collette

UPDATED: Old quarries kill. Today, Milford, MA rescuers report recovering the body of 18-year old Nenton Dahn of Providence, RI who drowned in the Fletcher Quarry on Sunday. Dozens of people die in old mines every year.

Breaking news: As I prepare this article to run tonight, an e-mail bulletin came in from WJAR Channel Ten that rescue crews are searching for a Providence teenager who may have drowned. He went with his friends to swim in the Fletcher Quarry in Milford, MA. One of the main reasons why quarries must be regulated is to ensure they are reclaimed. Each year, dozens of young people die in quarries. It's just dumb luck this hasn't happened in Charlestown recently.

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On June 20, the Charlestown Town Council held a Special Meeting with only one item on the agenda. That was to consider whether to approve a word change in proposed legislation being considered by the General Assembly to give Charlestown the authority to regulate mining activity.

Instead of “excavation,” a word that several key legislators considered to be too broad, the idea was to substitute “material extraction” in its place. To me, “mining” would have been clearer and made more sense than “material extraction,” but Charlestown loves to over-reach.

That June 20 meeting was being held on the very last day of the General Assembly session. Not only did the Council need to hold its meeting and then vote to approve changing the word, they also had to get that resolution up to Providence and into the legislative meat-grinder before adjournment. 

It was simply impossible. But worse, the Council members, particularly Town Council Boss Tom Gentz (CCA Party), knew that it was impossible, knew that this meeting was an exercise in futility, but they put on the show anyway. 

Once again they had members of the Copar Quarry resistance come before them as victims and supplicants. Indeed, one of those who spoke was later taken onto the CCA Party ticket for Town Council, as if that's going to help bring her and her neighbors any sort of justice.

At the start of the meeting, Boss Gentz mumbled some vague remarks to the effect that circumstances beyond their control delayed this meeting from happening. This remark was intended to cover the fact that if the meeting had taken place earlier, there might have been time to get the enabling legislation passed. Instead, Gentz once again chose symbolism over substance.

Some history

Copar in Bradford (ecoRI photo)

There’s an important backstory that June 20 Special Meeting. The infamous Copar Quarry in Bradford has been making life miserable for its neighbors for over two years. 

Progressive Charlestown has been doing intensive coverage on Copar and Charlestown’s other quarries since October 2012.

Copar neighbors in Bradford and Charlestown have tried to organize a coherent, sustainable resistance but that has largely produced several unsuccessful lawsuits, inconclusive health and environmental reports and a lot of angry people who vent their frustration through e-mails.

Copar took control of a second property, this time totally within Charlestown’s borders. As more attention was focused on Copar by the Westerly Sun and Progressive Charlestown, issues about Charlestown’s other quarry sites – five active, one inactive and a large but uncounted number of ancient, abandoned sites – started to arise.

I told Progressive Charlestown readers and Copar resistance leaders about the ten years of experience I had working with local citizens groups around the US who were fighting the environmental problems caused by coal mines.

Strip-mining coal - the main difference between this and quarrying is scale AND that coal mine operators are legally
required to follow operating standards and reclaim the land. Quarry operators are not.

I noted that there is really only one effective law on the books that regulates mining and that’s the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) enacted in 1977 to regulate coal mining. SMCRA does not regulate any other type of mining but coal.

I suggested paying close attention to the way SMCRA regulates coal mining through background checks on mine operators, bonding, reclamation requirements and citizens participation since those mechanisms had undergone years of legal challenge.

A Charlestown ordinance should mimick the established, legally-tested and sensible core elements of SMCRA which:

1. Block disreputable operators from getting mining permits in the first place;
2. Apply reasonable operating regulations on operating mines and
3. Ensure the land is reclaimed through a combination of reclamation plans filed with permit applications backed up by reclamation bonds .

Those existing operations in Charlestown who claim they are operating responsibly should have no trouble meeting these requirements. If they cannot meet these standards, on what basis can they claim to be responsible operators?

SMCRA has withstood the test of time and litigation so the more Charlestown used SMCRA as a precedent, the more likely the chances of prevailing in the inevitable lawsuits.

Because Rhode Island quarries are virtually unregulated, there is almost no legislative history or legal caselaw to use, making the SMCRA precedent all the more important. When you begin to regulate an unregulated industry, you will almost certainly have to defend your actions in court.

Instead of sticking closely to the well-tested mechanisms in SMCRA, the town put its own ordinance together. While its most recent version contained some of the good elements of SMCRA, it was also loaded with errors and the Town Council took a beating for it when they rolled it out at a public hearing. They withdrew that ordinance.

Local developer Tim Stasiunas spoke at the June 20 hearing against any effort by Charlestown to regulate mining in Charlestown. He said the quarries were already regulated enough by other agencies – which is not true – and that the existing quarries in Charlestown were not causing any problems – which is also not true.

Charlestown's largest quarry - M&M Gravel on Ross Hill Road. Just under 80 acres. While this property ever be reclaimed? Or will it be left as an eyesore, a threat to local water and a public safety hazard?

EPA’s efforts to use the Clean Water and Clean Air Act to regulate quarries have proven ineffective. The one agency that does have jurisdiction over what happens in quarries is the US Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). 

RI DEM has shown itself to be ill-equipped to deal with Copar, never mind all the other quarries in southern RI and elsewhere in the state. It also lacks legislative authority.

MSHA is a great agency and they can and will come into any and all mine sites and issue notices of violation. Indeed, they have not only cited Copar repeatedly at both its Bradford and Charlestown sites, but other quarry operators in Charlestown as well.

MSHA is a great agency, but with limited jurisdiction

But MSHA’s authority is limited only to worker health and safety and not to the environment or the health and safety of quarry neighbors. Stasiunas specifically mentioned MSHA as one of the places where Charlestown should look for enforcement help rather than pass a local ordinance. 

Well, MSHA is already on the job, but their scope is too limited to address, for example, what will happen to the 300 acres of devastated moonscape already dotting Charlestown’s landscape.

Or the deadly danger posed by old quarries off in Charlestown’s woods. Or the crushers, dust and truck traffic at the five operating sites. Or the fate of the Klondike Road inactive quarry owned by South County Sand & Gravel. Stasiunas' advice is ill-informed.

Gentz drops the ball

After taking flak from quarry operators and their lawyers, the CCA Party Boys on the Town Council decided to once again seek refuge by passing the buck to the General Assembly, asking our town legislators – Rep. Donna Walsh, and Senators Cathie Cool Rumsey and Dennis Algiere – to get “enabling legislation” enacted that would permit Charlestown to pass some sort of town ordinance.

Walsh, Cool Rumsey and Algiere did their job and introduced the bills with the language the town asked for. But in the end, when crunch time came, the town dropped the ball and couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain on time. 

Lacking a timely response from Charlestown’s Town Council, the General Assembly never completed action on the bills to grant Charlestown explicit authority to regulate mining, and those bills are now dead until the next session of the General Assembly.

Did you change your mind?

The final vote on Gentz’s symbolic gesture was three to one. The three CCA Party Boys voted yes and Town Councilor Paula Andersen voted “no.”

I asked Paula why she voted “no” since she and Frank Glista were among the first people from outside the immediate Copar neighborhood to support the Copar resistance. She replied by saying her support for the Copar resistance has not changed and is still unwavering. However, she decided to vote “no” because: 

“The proposed legislation (which is being held for further study) won't stop the blasting, the noise or the dust from affecting our Charlestown residents who live at the Copar's front door.

"I feel we should look into strengthening our own ordinances/regulations.  There are current regulations within Charlestown that could be used to regulate the impact of earth removal operations.  We should also look into having a "grandfather clause" included in those ordinances/regulations.

“I've expressed my reasons/feelings several times in public and I knew it was pointless do it again knowing the vote would be 3-1. The bottom line, I wholeheartedly support the health, safety, and welfare of those residents who by no fault of theirs...are made to suffer the loss of the pursuit of a peaceful existence on their own properties.”

Now what?

After spending a lot of time with the Copar resistance folks, the June 20 Special Meeting was a sad thing to watch. Click here to see for yourself. One of the resistance leaders, Tina Shea, ended up pleading for help and admitting that the residents were now pretty much a group of victims.

It’s a terrible thing to not feel safe and secure in your own home. It’s a terrible thing to feel that you have lost control over your destiny. Desperation makes people easy targets for hucksters and false prophets and there have been plenty of those floating around the Copar issue. I have yet to see any of them actually show that they actually have the kind of experience to be helpful.

They have also been willing to overlook inconsistencies, and indeed outright hypocrisy. The biggest example of that is how readily the CCA Party majority that controls town government will spend whatever it takes, risk any of a number of lawsuits, and hold nothing back to fight for things they really care about.

Examples include spending millions to stop Whalerock that included even hiring a lawyer with taxpayer money to represent “anonymous abutters,” firing Bill DiLibero, blocking expanded human activity in Ninigret Park, giving away town resources to favored groups while offering nothing more than symbolic gestures to the Copar resistance.

I don’t expect that to change even with Copar resister Denise Rhodes on their ticket.

For my part, I have urged the residents to organize so they can have the capacity to develop their own goals and their own tactics, rather than being led from one mistake or false hope to another. Without a coherent structure, providing the means to make group decisions and craft plans to focus energy where it will do the most good, the resistance does indeed remain a group of victims.

Even though a lot of time, money and hope has been wasted, the quarry issue hasn’t gone away, and isn’t likely to do so. That means there is still time for a change of direction by the Copar resistance, taking control of their own future instead of hoping for some savior to come along.