Asphalt plant hearing postponed

<p>A decision on a proposed asphalt plant just south of town has been postponed for three months because the county needs to analyze the company's recently updated plan.</p><p>The contentious issue was set to be discussed and possibly determined at a Tuesday, May 11 hearing of the Board of Supervisors, but the county's permit department needs to do environmental studies to certify claims made in the Dutra Group's latest proposal. The hearing on the issue has been tentatively rescheduled for Aug. 25.</p><p>On April 8, the Dutra Group's engineering firm sent a letter to the county Permit and Resource Management Department outlining its new plan for an asphalt plant just south of town, east of Highway 101 on the Petaluma River. The plan calls for Dutra to purchase rock and sand for its asphalt operation from Shamrock Materials — which operates a concrete plant just north of the proposed Dutra site — and transport it 1,250 feet south to its site.</p><p>“We would be purchasing material from them like any other company would,” said Al Cornwell, an engineer with CSW/Stuber-Stroeh, Dutra's retained engineer firm. “It simplifies everything.”</p><p>The proposal offers two options for transporting the purchased materials from Shamrock's site to Dutra's site — trucks or an electric conveyor belt. According to Dutra's letter, both options fit under current environmental review documents that specify materials will be delivered to the site by barges. The county recently sent a follow-up letter to Dutra asking for more details on the plan.</p><p>Along with its proposal, Dutra submitted studies done by environmental consultants it hired, saying that the options would cause “no new significant impacts” in addition to impacts specified in the environmental review documents.</p><p>Dutra's previous proposal, in January, involved sharing a barge offloading site with Shamrock and using the electric conveyor belt to bring the materials from the barge to their plant. That proposal was an amendment to a previous plan that called for a new barge offload site at Dutra's plant, which caused concerns about river navigation and more.</p><p>“It's much too vague and that's part of their tactic,” Joan Cooper, of the Dutra opponent group Friends of Shollenberger Park, said about the plan. Cooper said that the project's footprint is now bigger because of the increased activity at Shamrock.</p><p>“The project isn't better, its bigger,” she said</p><p>The current proposal to purchase material from Shamrock will be analyzed by the county's permit department, which hired an environmental consultant to certify Dutra's claims about the environmental impacts. The findings will be compiled in a report to be presented to the Board of Supervisors before the August meeting.</p><p>(Contact Philip Riley at philip.riley@arguscourier.com)</p>