HUGUENOT—Town of Deerpark residents spoke out against a proposed mining operation during a Town Board meeting March 7. Board members had asked for feedback on the project, which was first brought to the town planning board in 2012.
The project would put a sandstone and shale mine on 39 acres of a 43.3 acre parcel of land located on Big Pond Road in Huguenot in an area that is currently zoned hamlet mixed use. The company, Huguenot Associates LLC, is applying for a special use permit.
According to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) scoping document, the mine would remove roughly 300,000 tons of material per year, requiring blasting and drilling of bedrock, and crushing and screening of the material through an aggregate portable processing plant.
To haul that material could create between 150 and 350 truck trips to the site per day, and could potentially be harmful to the timber rattlesnake, which is listed as threatened in the state of New York.
Addressing the former issue, Lynn Marshall, a retired school bus driver for the Port Jervis City School District, told the Town Board she worried about so many trucks on the narrow, winding roads surrounding the property.
“There’s no room for cars often. Somebody has to backup or pull off just for the bus to get through,” she said. “I can’t imagine dump trucks going up and down there.”
Paul Kuhn, the third generation to live in his house on Big Pond Road, said he worried about the effect so many dump trucks would have on his house’s structural integrity.
