{"id":111425,"date":"2015-06-30T17:24:15","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T23:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/town-delays-mill-plan\/"},"modified":"2015-06-30T17:24:15","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T23:24:15","slug":"town-delays-mill-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/town-delays-mill-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Town delays mill plan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The Western Excelsior plant in Mancos has faced criticism because of the dust it produces.<\/span>Sam Green\/Cortez Journal<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The town\u2019s adoption of Western Excelsior Corp.\u2019s Fugitive Particulate Control plan was held off until the mill\u2019s air permits are processed. The town board will also write a letter to the Colorado Department of Health and Environment to ask for a written comment period, as urged by environmental group Concerned Citizens of Riverside (CROR).<\/p>\n

The plan has already been approved by CDPHE. The department is processing air quality permits for Western Excelsior.<\/p>\n

Temporarily abandoning the typical board meeting format, which keeps a time limit on citizen comments and discourages a back-and-forth between citizens and the town board and CROR also hashed out grievances against each other at the June 24 town board meeting.<\/p>\n

Both sides indicated their frustration with a lack of constructive dialog: CROR feels their requests and complaints are going unanswered; and the board feels like CROR won\u2019t be satisfied until they shut down the mill \u2013 action the body doesn\u2019t have authority to take.<\/p>\n

Before the discussion, members of CROR one by one spoke out against the seven options that Town Administrator Andrea Phillips drafted based on feedback she received from the town board workshops, saying they appeared to \u201chave been written by someone who works for Western Excelsior, not the town.\u201d<\/p>\n

The options ranged from adding vegetation and a berm to capture more particulates to more extreme measures like paying to move Western Excelsior. One option entailed a plan to monitor air quality \u2013 a frequent request of CROR.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to work with residents and the company, and every option in my report is completely torn apart. It seems like the residents are not willing to have an open and honest discussion,\u201d said a frustrated Phillips. \u201cThis is something that keeps me up at night. \u2026 I\u2019m trying very hard to find some good solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mayor pro-tem Todd Kearns echoed Phillips\u2019 sentiments.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is not a person sitting in this room that does not want a good outcome from this. It\u2019s hard when it feels like we\u2019re being a little bit hung out to dry by the CROR. \u2026 I think that at some point we have to establish better dialog with the three groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

CROR president Chip Tuthill explained that the board didn\u2019t want to see Western Excelsior closed, and it had no personal complaints against the board but that the options seemed to ignore the group\u2019s repeated requests.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not against the board, we\u2019re not against Andrea. What we\u2019re pointing out is that the entire staff report didn\u2019t include the ten months of comments that CROR had submitted. That report solely projected the interests of Western Excelsior. What we really want to see at this point is the town to adopt a wait-and-see attitude,\u201d said Tuthill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excelsior plan has approval from state health agency<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6371],"tags":[13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-111425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mt-news","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111425"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=111425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}