Polk County planners vote against proposed asphalt plant
Apr. 23—CROOKSTON, Minn. — Company staff were already packing their belongings and heading for the parking lot — and opponents of their plan were starting to exchange excited glances and fist bumps — before a Polk County administrator had finished reading his recommendation.
RJ Zavoral & Sons' proposed asphalt plant and contractor yard could snarl truck traffic coming off the highway; the company had not proposed adequate measures to mitigate noise, dust, odors and other nuisances; and a nearby bean plant might lose millions if its product was contaminated by the smell of new asphalt, according to Jacob Snyder, an assistant environmental services administrator, and other county staff.
Polk County planning commissioners agreed on Friday afternoon with Snyder's opinion of the plant, voting unanimously to recommend that the county not grant the company an interim use permit that would have allowed it to build and operate the plant for the next 10 years. The final say, however, belongs to the Polk County Board of Commissioners, which is set to meet Tuesday, April 27, for a deciding vote on the future of the plant, which would sit at the intersection of Hwy. 2 and Hwy. 220 about a mile southwest of East Grand Forks.
County planners' preliminary decision was preceded by about three hours of back-and-forth testimony about the merits of the plant. In a nutshell, Zavoral hopes to install a berm around the 30-acre site, heap piles of sand, rock and other materials there, then add it to the company's network of similar sites in the region at which company workers could set up a mobile asphalt plant as nearby jobs arise.
'We didn't want shock value'
The plan drew mostly criticism from neighboring people and businesses, who worried the plant would depress nearby property values, exhale noxious smells and potentially toxic vapors into the air when it was churning out asphalt, and allegedly seep harmful chemicals into the nearby Red Lake River, which partly provides drinking water for East Grand Forks and Grand Forks.
"I don't want to drink the ingredients of old Highway 2 or new Highway 2," Bruce Driscoll, a nearby homeowner, told planning commissioners, referring to a $10.2 million MnDOT plan to resurface the highway's westbound lanes from East Grand Forks to Fisher later this summer. The proposed asphalt plant would sit adjacent to that stretch of roadway. (State administrators opened construction bids for that project on Friday morning in St. Paul — RJ Zavoral & Sons put in a bid for that project, but they were not the apparent low bidder, according to MnDOT staff.)
The company's proposal for the plant site included details, including hours of operation from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and dozens of trucks entering and exiting the site each day laden with asphalt. But company representatives said those represent a "max use" scenario.
"If we ask for anything less, there's no mechanism in this permit that says I can call (Snyder) tonight or on a Thursday night and say it looks like it's going to rain, we need permission to work an extra two hours, and then somehow contact all the residents to allow that," Dan Zavoral, the company's business operations manager and secretary, said Friday. "We didn't want shock value and we didn't want to ask for too little."
The plant design met or exceeded state and federal regulations for dust, odor and other contaminants, company staff said. They also presented a graph indicating that prevailing winds would usually miss most nearby homes and the bean plant. But residents who spoke at Friday's commission meeting weren't swayed.
Laura Raymond, who lives about a mile from the proposed plant site, said she believes the company would do everything it could to minimize residents' concerns, but it wouldn't be able to eliminate them. American Crystal Sugar and Simplot, she presumed, are also on the right side of government regulation, but they still produce foul smells.
"You just cannot control it," she said. "I'm sure (River Cities Speedway) is in compliance with the noise on how much noise they're allowed, but you can still hear the races miles away on Friday nights. It's not going to eliminate it. No matter what you do, you can't."
