BETHEL — At Wednesday’s meeting at 7 p.m. in the town office, the Bethel Planning Board may approve the relocation of a hot mix asphalt plant on North Road, despite many objections raised at previous meetings concerning noxious odors, heavy truck traffic and noise.

Bruce A. Manzer, who owns the Bruce A. Manzer Inc. Bethel facility, wants to move the plant from Richard Douglass’s gravel pit at 274 North Road to the other side of the road next to the Coleman Concrete Plant, which shares the same address.

The project would cost an estimated $100,000. The move is on hold pending Planning Board approval.

Manzer wants to transform a gravel pit by the concrete plant into heavy industrial use by installing and operating a portable hot mix asphalt plant and rock crusher, other improvements, and aggregate stockpiles.

Currently, the plant is shut down for the season, but must move by Jan. 1, 2011.

Since the board’s initial meeting this fall, Bethel has received many letters from abutters and interested parties objecting to the move, including Brian and Gina Douglass. The current site is in their backyard in Brian’s father’s gravel pit.

In a letter dated Nov. 15, they wrote that depending on the weather, the asphalt plant roughly runs from April 1 to Nov. 23.

“When the plant is running, there is a tremendous amount of smoke produced from the location and vented through a stack that oftentimes saturates the air surrounding the gravel pit and beyond,” they wrote.

They also complained about “a very strong odor” which they can smell nearly every day because the plant’s heaters are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week to heat tar in a tank.

“Some days we have been forced to stay inside our house with the windows closed or travel, because the air is ripe with smoke and odor,” they said.

On Tuesday, Gina Douglass said the plant didn’t become operational until this year.

“Spring, summer, fall, it was horrible,” Gina Douglass said.

“I’m upwind from it, so depending on which way the wind blew, sometimes it was horrifying and you couldn’t even open your windows, you couldn’t go outside in your yard. Other days, it would be going my father-in-law’s way and it was right in his yard.”

“I can live with noise, but when it’s pollution and that bad, you just can’t man it, because it makes your eyes burn,” she said. “It’s impossible to stand.”

Bryce Sproul, who heads the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Licensing and Enforcement arm of the Bureau of Air Quality in Augusta, said he wasn’t aware of any noncompliance issues with Manzer’s Bethel plant.

Manzer himself said Tuesday in Anson that both of his asphalt plants in Bethel and Phillips are in compliance with state regulations.

He also discredited many of the complaints he’s heard at Bethel Planning Board meetings and the hearing.

“What they don’t understand is the smoke that they see is moisture, because we’re drying aggregate and we burn roughly a gallon per ton, and if we’re running 150 ton an hour, that’s 150 gallons an hour, so the fuel consumption is not as large as one might think,” Manzer said.

He said there are no chemicals in the steam.

“The only thing they occasionally smell is when asphalt warms up, it has an odor, but it’s not every day, and they’ve been riled by one of the local neighbors,” he said of abutters.

“The plant was fine when it was on his side of the street and we were buying aggregate from him, but once it’s on the other side of the street, we may not buy aggregate from him.”

Manzer said the Bethel plant uses an oil burner like those in house furnaces.

“It just heats hot oil that’s totally encapsulated in piping and that runs through the tank,” he said. “It’s like a hot water tank in reverse, so their statements of fumes and ‘Can’t leave their windows open,’ and all of that, it’s (bogus).”

“To say it doesn’t have an odor would be a lie, but to say it brings people to their knees? No, it doesn’t,” Manzer said.

He also addressed concerns that the plant has little economical value to Bethel.

“In the local economy, we’ve probably dumped in a million and a half dollars between aggregate sales and fuel sales,” Manzer said.

“We have 25 to 30 independent truckers that work out of that location, along with four people at the plant, and when we’re in town paving, we’re generating income for the town as far as we buy lunches and we buy fuel locally. We buy our parts locally,” he said.

“We buy our fuel from Brooks Brothers, so their statement that there’s not much economic gain from our plant doesn’t ring true.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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