Valley Mill & Bonded Concrete
Posted by - Bruce Winn : Category - Conservation Commissions, Pittsfield City GovernmentI recently toured the facilities of County Concrete in Dalton. I’m not the easiest person to please environmentally, but I have to say, County Concrete’s operation impressed me. Their chemicals are behind double-walled structures in case of spills or leaks, their trucks are washed down before they are allowed to go out on the roads, and the water from the wash is captured in such a way as to protect the nearby stream. County Concrete has been a Dalton-Pittsfield business for a long time. They’ve recently been purchased by a larger parent company, but they are still under the same local control.
So why is it that the City of Pittsfield is bending environmental rules to the point of breaking in order to allow an out-of-state competitor to move in right across the street from County Concrete?
I’m planning to tell this tale in a number of installments. I’m intrigued by the story because it ties together so many of BEAT’s subplots if you will, and apparently is beginning some new threads for us as well.
Let me start by saying that land on which the new company will operate is owned by Valley Mill Corporation. Some of you may remember that BEAT, along with a neighborhood group known as RATSSS, fought and won a difficult campaign to stop Valley Mill from buildind a construction and demolition waste transfer station on the banks of the Housatonic River off of South Street. Former Pittsfield mayor Gerald Doyle was the person who actually applied for the permit, so we knew from the start that the power of Boston politics was also behind Valley Mill.
When Valley Mill lost their fight to build the transfer station off of South Street, they applied for a permit to build it instead in Downing Industrial Park. No problem from BEAT’s perspective. As a matter of fact, during the battle we had suggested that the industrial park would be a much better place for their facility. Apparently they agreed. Or did they?
After getting their environmental permits for the transfer station, they applied for an amendment to the permit. They changed the business to a cement plant that would be operated by New York based Bonded Concrete.
I want to make two points here. First, the intent of the environmental regulation that allows amendments to a permit is to avoid having applicants revisit the entire permitting process for some trivial and inconsequential error made on the applications. I don’t think the writers of the regulations envisioned, “Did we say we were going to build a construction and demolition waste transfer station? Silly us, we meant someone else is going to build a cement plant.”
The second point is that by amending the permit instead of reapplying, the applicant is able to avoid close scrutiny and regulatory review of the newly conceived project. The Pittsfield Conservation Commission was aware of this, but allowed this bizarre process to occur. In fact they facilitated it. Why? To be continued.