Selectmen Send Quarry Lease to Zoning Enforcement Officer

Within a day of taking office, the town’s Board of Selectmen unanimously agreed to investigate a highly controversial town lease that has transformed the purpose and use of the famed Stony Creek Quarry where its distinctive pink granite is produced.

At the first meeting of the new board, held on November 21, First Selectman Unk DaRos initiated an official inquiry into whether the quarry lease, the subject of intense controversy for more than a year, is in violation of the town’s zoning laws.

The Board’s action came after DaRos read a letter from six Stony Creek families affected by the quarry changes. They have appeared at numerous meetings over the past 14 months.“This is a bona fide complaint,” DaRos said. ​“I think I am going to start with zoning,” referring to the town’s Zoning Enforcement Officer, Laura Magaraci. DaRos said an investigation was required because ​“if we don’t look at this, it will happen again in another setting.”Then he did what the former First Selectwoman Cheryl Morris did not do. He asked the town’s zoning enforcement officer to investigate the lessee, Doug Anderson, Morris’s hand-picked choice for the job. The officer has the responsibility and authority to enforce the town’s zoning laws, regulations and procedures. Typically the first step, in a case like this, is to inspect the property to determine if there is a violation.The Stony Creek lease saga began 15 months ago on night of August 29, 2006 when a lease —the work of then town counsels Ed and Shelley Marcus — was presented to the former Board of Selectmen. This meeting has now been 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.”Shelley Marcus maintained at this meeting that the new lease was not a lease; it was merely an addendum to a lease and did not require RTM approval. But within weeks the RTM won the battle to approve the new lease.The town owns the famous quarry. It is a natural resource whose existence pre-dates the town’s zoning laws. The Morris-Marcus Administration approved the quarry lease without any consultation with abutting neighbors, without valid notice of the meeting where the vote was taken and most importantly without a Zoning compliance certificate.The Nov. 20th letter from the six families to the Board of Selectman said: ​“The operation of the quarry is a non-conforming use within the residential zone that surrounds it. Its operation is allowed only because it was established before our zoning regulations. As such its degree of nonconformity cannot be expanded. The import and processing of excavation materials embodies the establishment of a new non-conforming use and therefore should not be permitted.”At various meetings throughout the year, these same residents have decried the intensity of truck traffic along narrow roads, traffic that starts early in the day and continues on weekends. The Stony Creek Association has formally protested. In the past, the quarry was not used for off-site storage or redistribution of materials other than what the quarry produced itself.Soon after the previous Board of Selectmen approved the new addendum by a 2 – 1 vote, (John Opie voted against it) the RTM stepped in. The Republicans on the board, led by then Minority leader Kurt Schwanfelder, sought an independent review of the lease and a special meeting. But former RTM moderator Jim Bruno, after seeking legal advice from Shelley Marcus, did not call the meeting.Next the Republicans hired their own attorney, John Lambert. At a September 2006 RTM meeting, he pointed out that allowing storage and redistribution of non-quarry materials was banned by town law. ​“How can the Selectmen approve a use that is prohibited? This goes to Planning and Zoning first, not afterwards,” he told a packed house.The RTM, citing section 73.3 of the town code, voted 13 – 11 to endorse its authority to oversee land and lease transactions. The Republicans also threatened a lawsuit to stop the lease’s enforcement.In the end, the lease was sent to the RTM​’s Administrative Services Committee, which attempted to work out an agreement. Anderson, who is also the president of Anderson-Wilcox, a housing development company in Branford, immediately had the right to obtain collateral in the amount of $2 million on the quarry property.Anderson attended some of the meetings. Initially he was cooperative, but after the lease took effect on January 1, 2007, he became less so. Meetings were held with Morris, Shelley Marcus, who became the point person-attorney on the lease, Karyl Lee Hall, an attorney who lives in the Creek, who spoke for her neighbors, Schwanfelder and chairman Gail Chapman-Carbone.By February, 2007, Anderson let it be known he would not modify the clause in the new contract that enables him to store and redistribute alien quarry materials. The reason, he said, was financial. “ Any modification or removal of this clause will severely affect my ability to not only pay these new terms but also the ability to pay the previous terms due to the lost revenue we were expecting as a result of this clause to cover such,” he wrote or at least authorized.The residents, deeply offended by Anderson’s response and his refusal to negotiate, said the only proper response was to close the quarry. That has not happened. Instead the Administrative Services Committee kept working on the issues and the committee may well continue their work as the new RTM gets underway. Meanwhile, Anderson has been operating the quarry under the second addendum to the lease, adopted by the town in 1999. The RTM committee believes the 2nd addendum does not permit the quarry to be used as an industrial site. But that is not the way Anderson and his attorneys apparently perceive it.The residents agree that the new operation has changed dramatically the way the quarry works. ​“The import and processing of excavation materials embodies the establishment of a new non-conforming use and therefore should not be permitted,” the letter to the Selectmen says.As a new election was nearing, Schwanfelder told the Eagle: ​“There will be no resolution of the quarry lease. ​“They put us in the woods, they weren’t going to get us out,” he said, referring to the Morris-Marcus administration. ​“It will have to wait until a new administration takes office.”And that is what happened a week ago Wednesday when the legal issues raised by the new lease were finally sent to the zoning enforcement officer.DaRos, who spoke out against the new lease at public meetings before his election, read the Creeker’s letter into the record. It asked the Board of Selectman ​“to investigate our charges and if they are found to be valid to bring Anderson into compliance.”The letter writers included Mark Barnes, who once worked at the quarry. He had rushed to the August 29, 2006 meeting when he learned 45 minutes before that the addendum Morris was talking about was in fact the quarry. ​“That’s no way to conduct business,” he declared that night. The FOI Commission agreed one year later. Republican RTM member Pam Fowler and New Haven Register reporter Mark Zaretsky filed the complaints with the FOIC that eventually invalided the meeting.Back on that August evening, Barnes said that the proposed new uses of the quarry required zoning review. ​“It doesn’t seem to me that anybody thought about this,” Barnes added.Now they have.

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