Alamance County’s planning board has endorsed a proposed permit for a land clearing and inert debris landfill that Kenneth Phillippie hopes to establish at 4115 Clapp Mill Road in the southwestern part of the county.
The planning board’s members voted 6-to-1 to recommend this contentious request to the county’s board of commissioners after a 2-hour discussion at their latest regularly-scheduled meeting on Thursday.
A majority of the board’s members eventually joined this advisory option despite persistent protests from residents in the unincorporated area where Phillippie proposes to set up this “stump dump.”
Although many of the neighbors remain staunchly opposed to the project, the planning board’s chairman Rodney Cheek seemed satisfied that he and his colleagues had done what they could to make Phillippie’s plans more acceptable to the community.
“I guess at the end of the day, if you want cream and butter, you’ve got to stir the milk up,” Cheek declared in an apparent summary of the review process. “So here we are.”
Under Alamance County’s ordinance for heavy industrial development, the county is effectively obligated to issue a permit if the underlying project meets certain criteria that are spelled out in the ordinance. The ordinance nevertheless requires both the county’s planning board and the board of commissioners to review the permit’s qualifications in order to confirm that it complies with the ordinance – and it gives members of the general public a chance to weigh in on the project at each juncture.
In the case of Phillippie’s proposed landfill, the planning board’s members raised a whole host of objections when they began their review of the requested permit on November 13. Many of these misgivings were amplified by neighboring residents who, among other things, took issue with Clapp Mill Road’s suitability as the landfill’s primary access point as well as the proliferation of private landfills in the southern part of the county.
These assorted objections ultimately prompted Phillippie to return to the drawing board earlier this year to make a couple of tweaks to his original application. The revised request came back before the planning board’s members on Thursday. During this reprise appearance, Paul Koonts, an attorney for the project’s would-be developer, insisted that his client has done his due diligence in complying with the county’s development rules.
“We’ve submitted a 72-page application, and the last two [pages contain] a site plan,” he said during Thursday’s proceedings. “We have hit every single ‘i’ and ‘t’ that has been put in front of us, and we will continue to do so.”
Koonts added that Phillippie’s proposed landfill must also obtain clearance from the state of North Carolina and, going forward, will need to comply with the oversight of both state and county officials.
Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens went on to remind the planning board’s members about their relative lack of agency when evaluating permit requests that follow the ordinance.
“There’s not discretion built into the process for mixed opinions about whether something should be in a certain place,” Stevens explained, “and if you meet the objective qualifying factors, then the permit ‘shall’ be issued.”
The county attorney added that this lack of discretion is a side effect of Alamance County’s atypical approach to land planning when compared to most of the state’s other counties.
“And all this comes back to the absence of zoning,” added the planning board’s chairman.
Given the recommendations of county staff, as well as the assurances of the applicant’s representations, planning board member Lee Kimrey made a motion to recommend the permit application to the commissioners as “complete.” Kimrey’s motion went on to receive the support of chairman Cheek and fellow members Stephen Dodson, Ernest Bare, and Richard Tom King.
The only actual vote of dissent to Kimrey’s motion came from planning board member Amie Perkins. Even so, fellow board member Henry Chandler announced his intent to “abstain” from the vote in light of his concerns over the dispersal of ash, which some of Phillippie’s neighbors trace to the stump dump’s proposed site. Chandler went on to declare his abstention despite a warning from the county attorney that it would be counted as a vote of support in the absence of a bona fide conflict of interest.
Planning board members Lee Isley and John Jordan, Jr. were absent from Thursday’s proceedings.
Phillippie’s permit request is now on track to go before the board of commissioners for what county officials predict will be a similarly cursory evaluation.
The state, for its part, has already issued a separate permit for this same project. In the meantime, the landfill’s most determined opponents continue to rage against Phillippie’s plans as the review of the county-level permit passes from the planning board from the board of commissioners.
Although the commissioners will ultimately hold a formal public hearing on the permit request, a couple of particularly-aggrieved residents got a head start when the county’s governing board held its latest regularly-scheduled meeting on Monday.
These eager detractors included Les Clar, who delivered an especially fiery spiel during a designated public comment period that evening.
“Let me start out by saying I am angry,” Klar told the board of commissioners, “and I believe it’s your fault…What I am most raging about is that this site is in full operation…and this is a site that is not legally permitted yet.”
“It is unnecessary,” added fellow landfill opponent Allan Figas. “There are three other landfills in a three-mile radius…It is unsafe, brings additional truck traffic…It is not supposed to be operating. Yet, there’s ash falling in the adjacent neighborhoods…Bottom line, you cannot allow Alamance County to become a dumping ground for Central North Carolina.”
Following the planning board’s vote on Phillippie’s application, Alamance County’s planning director Matthew Hoagland presented some potential changes to this ordinance that could affect the requirements for road access in future requests for heavy industrial developments.
Hoagland reminded the planning board’s members that the original impetus for these prospective amendments came from the county’ board of commissioners.
“The commissioners asked staff to look into some changes for road access for these industrial developments,” he added. “It’s mostly an amendment to road access based on the request from the county commissioners but there’s a number of other housekeeping items as well.”
The key features of Hoagland’s proposal included a clarification that an industrial project cannot use a secondary entrance in its development plans to serve as the primary entrance for its operations. Another provision would exempt nonoperational traffic, like surveying trucks, from this clarification. Meanwhile, Hoagland said that a further amendment would allow the commissioners to relieve the planning board of a permit request if its members linger over it for more than 45 days.
The planning board’s members unanimously voted to continue their consideration of these amendments at their next meeting.
