Branford Moves to Evict Stony Creek Quarry Tenants

Branford has gone to court to evict the current tenants of the historic town-owned Stony Creek Quarry, saying the primary tenant, Doug Anderson, failed to pay the town $20,000 in annual rent and the secondary tenant doesn’t belong there. Anderson said he will fight to stay on.

Anderson, the president of Anderson-Wilcox, a well-known housing development company in Branford, said he will not vacate the famed quarry and that he will counter-sue if necessary to preserve his company’s rights. In an interview, he told the Eagle that he has brought the famed quarry new international and national business, aimed at enhancing the quarry’s historic dimensional cut stone. He has a website documenting the Quarry’s new business.

Anderson said he and the town were close to settlement earlier this month, when the town upped and filed suit. “We actually thought we were at the point of having it resolved. We are sort of surprised that the town has taken this route. We thought we were there. We were just hammering out the final royalties.

“It is unfortunate. Sometimes things may have to go the legal route to get resolved. It is not a route I wanted to go down. But we are not going to leave the quarry. We will have to do what we have to do to enforce our rights.”

The town’s lease on the 50-acre site began in 1982 and runs to 2032.

The issue, he said, was not the rent but the royalties. When Former First Selectwoman Cheryl Morris sought a new Quarry lease in 2006, she asked for royalties that would amount to about $16,000 a year. But the so-called third addendum to the long lease was never implemented. Town officials believe he is doing more than $1 million worth of quarry business each year.

For the last year, current First Selectman Unk DaRos said he has sought to resolve the differences over the lease. Anderson told the Eagle back in March when the town issued a cease and desist order that he wanted to work it out.

“We tried that,” DaRos said today. “It didn’t work. We have yet to see the lease payment or the royalties.”

In its court papers, the town seeks two key legal goals:

First, it has asked the housing court, where these issues are adjudicated, to appoint a receiver to oversee and manage the quarry whose distinctive pink granite adorns the Statute of Liberty, Grand Central Station and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Second, it seeks an injunction to bar Anderson and his company from taking any action to further encumber the quarry or dispose of the quarry’s assets.

William Clendenden, Jr., the town counsel, filed papers in New Haven State Superior Court earlier this month saying Anderson has not paid the rent for 2008 and also failed to pay royalties. Clendenen told the court Anderson continues to refuse to do so.

Clendenen also sued the J&J Blasting Corporation, which does not have town permission to operate in the Quarry but maintains it does have permission from the Stony Creek Quarry Corporation, Anderson’s company. On Oct. 6, the town served notice on J& J Blasting to leave the quarry by the following week, but the company is still there.

In the court filings, Clendenen told Anderson that his tenancy in the quarry was to end by Oct. 15 because he had not paid rent, had not paid the town royalties, failed to operate the quarry in accordance with the law, failed to follow an operations plan, permitted occupancy “by others without consent,” improperly encumbered the property and “committed waste, injured and misused the property.”

J &J Blasting Corp, which has offices in Madison and Hamden, and according to sources pays Anderson $30,000 a year for its services, was also told to vacate.

In the four-count complaint, Clendenen asserted that Anderson “stood to benefit unfairly from continuing to mine and deplete the assets and resources of the Stony Creek Quarry and refusing to pay the rent.”

The town also asked for an accounting of Anderson’s assets and liabilities with regard to the quarry and the assets and materials takenduring the term of the lease. According to Anderson, he sent the town all financial records concerning his transactions. “We have been completely transparent,” he said.

The financial records would show that last May, four 25-ton premium Stony Creek Classic Granite blocks sailed to Italy as part of a new venture Anderson’s company entered into with Nikolaus Bagnara,Ltd., one of the leading suppiers of natural stone blocks and slabs in the world. Another shipment went out last week. Darrell Petit, A Branford sculptor who has worked at the quarry for nearly two decades, was instrumental in bringing about the new partnership in Italy.

Anderson told the Eagle that he recently entered into another partnership, this one with O&G Industries, of Torrington, one of the state’s largest masonry and stone outfitters.

When Branford’s Cheryl Morris-Ed Marcus administration enacted the new lease in 2006, it was fraught with difficulties. Its primary change centered on giving Anderson the right to store and redistribute non-granite materials at the quarry, the so-called section 12 of the lease.

This meant that outside materials could be brought into the quarry. Anderson said publicly that he was unwilling to eliminate this new clause; without it he would not be able to pay the new terms set by Morris. It is this transformation of the quarry that was at the heart of the dispute. It was evident on the night of Aug. 29, 2006, when John Opie, then the town’s third selectman, voted against it precisely because of Section 12.

At the time the Board of Selectmen, led by Morris, approved the new addendum, which was negotiated in secret without bids, without RTM approval, without Planning and Zoning Commission approval, without any consultation with abutting neighbors and without valid notice of the Board of Selectmen’s meeting where a vote was taken.

The Aug. 29 meeting was later declared illegal by the Freedom of Information Commission because its agenda identified the topic of the special meeting in such a vague and misleading way: “To consider and if appropriate approve an addendum to a lease.”

At the time Shelley Marcus, then town attorney #2, maintained that the reason no bids or commission approvals were obtained was that this was not a new lease, merely an assignment of an old one.

A Political Backdrop

The quarry’s lease and its aftermath came to symbolize the most divisive activities of the Morris-Marcus administration. The “granite-gate” police inquiry into Unk DaRos arose from Marcus’s investigation into the quarry’s financial operation.

While the purpose may have been to derail DaRos’s potential political campaign for first selectman, the idea backfired. DaRos won office in 2007 by a wide margin.

After he took office in November, 2007, DaRos put the quarry at the top of his agenda. Quickly, the Board of Selectmen unanimously agreed to investigate whether the quarry lease was in violation of the town’s zoning laws. .

Four months later, in March, 2008, Anderson was ordered by the town’s zoning enforcement officer to stop using the quarry as a contractor’s yard for outside business ventures. If he refused he would face multiple zoning penalties, including possible eviction.

Anderson told the Eagle Friday that in order to act in good faith he had given up the idea of using non-quarry stone as part of his operation. Rather he seems to be centering on using the quarry for dimensional cut stone, what it was intended to be used for.

In the past DaRos said that tons of outside material have been brought into the quarry and then left the quarry in violation of zoning rules.

DaRos said he has been patient, trying to work it out over the past eight months. “But they don’t seem to want to straighten it out,” he said in an interview, rebutting what Anderson said were his intentions.

In March, Anderson told the Eagle that he wanted to sit down with DaRos to work out a lease “that puts everyone at ease. I am hopeful that will still be feasible.”

A Stony Creek Institution

Back in 2006, Morris said she sought the third addendum to the quarry lease to give the town a more financially favorable agreement. But the third addendum to the lease has never been enforced. The one approved in the Morris administration that raises the rent to $25,000 a year, increased royalties to the town and permitted outside ventures into the quarry was never implemented.

The Representative Town Meeting ( RTM) Administrative Services Committee studied the lease for more than a year and was prepared to make changes. It ran into difficulty with the Morris Administration and decided instead to let DaRos examine it when he came into office.

As a Creeker, DaRos said the quarry is dear to his heart. He said he wants to find ways to run it that avoid financial difficulties. This happened to the lease long before Anderson took over, and those troubles created numerous legal problems for the town. At one point last year Creekers sought to close the quarry. Since the town owns the quarry, the town could run the quarry, absent a lease. But no plan has been forth to determine the future of the quarry if the town ran it, specifically whether granite would still be harvested for use on great structures the world over.