Henrico leaders concerned about planned expansion of Goochland quarry

Citing confusion about potential impacts to Henrico citizens, Henrico County officials are urging the Goochland Planning Commission to defer a request on Thursday night’s agenda from Luck Stone Corporation, which is seeking to expand operations at its 70-acre Rockville quarry just west of the Henrico-Goochland border near Pouncey Tract Road and Kain Road.

The proposal seeks a conditional use permit to allow Luck Stone to expand the area in which it can conduct stone-processing operations and also to expand the permissible area within which it can place overburden material (the rock or soil layer that must be removed in order to conduct mining operations). Both expansions would occur east of the existing quarry and closer to about 200 hundred homes in the Westin Estates, West Ridge, Henley and Stonehurst subdivisions just across the Henrico border (in the area north of Kain Road and west of Pouncey Tract Road).

A lengthy report about the proposal by Goochland planners, which included details that Henrico officials said were new to them, was published to that county’s website July 16 – just two days before the scheduled 6 p.m. planning commission hearing Thursday.

In a letter July 17 to the Goochland Planning Commission and Goochland Director of Community Development Jamie Sherry, Henrico Planning Director Joe Emerson asked for the case to be deferred from its scheduled July 18 date by at least 30 days “to allow adequate time for adjacent Henrico County residents to review the information in the report and offer comments on the application.”

At issue, from the standpoint of Henrico County officials, are three key elements that would be part of the proposed changes at the quarry:

• the proposed width and type of buffer between the quarry and the homes that sit adjacent to it in Henrico;

• the height, composition and location of a proposed berm designed to limit noise from quarry operations;

• the allowable hours of operation on the portion of the site for which the conditional use permit is being sought.

Luck Stone wants to create a secondary area on the site for stone processing, a move that also would allow it to relocate more overburden and stone-processing equipment from the existing quarry area and open up additional areas for stone mining, according to the Goochland planners’ report.

It also wants the right to place overburden materials on a larger portion of the site and to use some of that material to build a berm potentially as tall as 150 feet (the equivalent of a 12 to 15-story building) within a previously required 350-foot buffer adjacent to the Henrico border.

But Henrico officials were surprised to learn that the new plans would permit Luck to transform that 350-foot buffer of natural vegetation into one that would contain only 50 feet of natural buffer area along the Henrico line, with the new proposed berm filling the other 300-foot segment. The proposed height of the berm also drastically exceeds the previously approved limitation of 25 feet, according to Emerson’s letter. And the company would be permitted to operate on the site between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every day of the week except Sunday, potentially creating a weekend burden for adjacent Henrico residents, Emerson wrote.

Three Chopt District Supervisor Misty Whitehead told the Citizen Thursday that the details included in Tuesday’s Goochland planning report were different from what company officials displayed during a May 22 public meeting that she and a handful of Henrico residents attended in Goochland.

“This is starting to feel like ‘We’re just going to start piling dirt on top of dirt as this process goes along, a process of years, we’re going to do it six days a week 7 [a.m.] to 7 [p.m.] and we’re going to do it within very short range of homes that Henrico residents have put a lot of time and investment into,’” she said.

Whitehead is concerned that the residents who attended that meeting haven’t seen the new details, and she said the timing of the report’s release was concerning.

“It feels very rushed,” she said. “It’s certainly not how we do things in Henrico. This falls far short of that.”

Henrico officials learned of the proposal informally several months ago, Whitehead said. She then requested a meeting with the applicant and Goochland officials, which prompted the May 22 meeting, which was open to the public. Henrico officials mailed postcards to 90 Henrico homes in the vicinity alerting them to the meeting, and many of the 29 people who attended it were Henrico citizens, Whitehead said.

Some homes in the Westin Estates and West Ridge subdivisions in Henrico are as close as about 70 feet from the quarry’s property line, according to Goochland planning documents.

A 2011 rezoning case established the requirement of a 350-foot-wide buffer between the quarry’s eastern property line and the adjacent Henrico border but allowed for the possibility of changes to that buffer in several different sections, pending future actions. But no changes appeared to be permitted in one of the sections that would be impacted by the new Luck proposal, Emerson wrote in his letter to Goochland officials.

The July 18 Goochland Planning Commission meeting will be streamed online beginning at 6 p.m. If the commission hears the case as scheduled and votes, it will send a recommendation to the county’s board of supervisors, which would be scheduled to hear the case Sept. 3.