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Date: 7/12/2021
HOLYOKE – A group of Holyoke residents are objecting to a decades-long plan to fill in the Mt. Tom Quarry with soil and restore the mountain.
Resident Daphne Bord, who helped create the group No Dump on Mount Tom, its Facebook page and website, gave some background on how the quarry came to be and why they were opposed to filling in the quarry. She said the quarry was currently owned by the Mount Tom Company and parts of Mount Tom were divided up years ago.
“There was an agreement in 2002 that sort of divided up the land. I don’t know how many acres exactly, but close to 100 acres on Mount Tom,” she said.
Part of the agreement was that the company was allowed to continue for a certain number of years or until a specific, predetermined amount of material was removed from the quarry. Patrick Kennedy, one of the owners of the Mount Tom Company, said when the land was broken up it was sold and gifted to various organizations. “At that point a portion of the land was sold to the Boys and Girls Club, the Mount Tom Ski area proper, lodges and affiliated buildings,” he said.
Kennedy said it was “approximately 22 acres” that were purchased by the Boys and Girls Club, while a large portion of the land was gifted to U.S. Fish and Wildlife as well as the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). “A lot of the land on the upper area of the mountain was I guess gifted to U.S. Fish and Wildlife. DCR got a portion of the land and trustees of the reservations got a portion of the land as well,” he said. “The quarry property was retained by the ownership group at the time with the right they’d be allowed to quarry ongoing. That right to quarry was ongoing for a period of time, 10 years or a certain amount of material to be removed.” After the quarrying was ceased, he said, the state would be “given the option to acquire the quarry.”
Bord said based on her understanding, in 2002 an “amount of money was paid to the previous owners.” She said, “In the agreement “it was said you can quarry up to this amount of time. It was agreed that the future of the whole area was conservation. It had written in the deed a 50-year right to acquire, they already paid for the land and they were going to acquire it within that 50 years,” she said.
However, Kennedy disagreed with this statement and said the acquisition “was indefinite.” Additionally, he said he and his partner Matthew Donahue were not told about the acquisition when they purchased the Mount Tom Company in 2019. “When we transacted the quarry, that was not revealed. It was not revealed to us by the selling part, it was not recorded in the registry of deeds,” he said. “At that time we weren’t informed that the state [and] DCR had the option on the quarry property. That came out much later, but we acquired the entity that owned the quarry and that’s how we came to be in that position.”
Kennedy said with the purchase of the company came “a fair amount of tax burden” and unpaid taxes. He said that since the ceasing of quarrying in 2012, “it appears no taxes had been paid from that point forward.”
“I would suggest they used it for their purpose and more or less abandoned the cause,” he said. Kennedy went on to say that their “motivation” for the quarry was “to conduct a reclamation project on the site.” The project, he explained, would take course over a 20-year span and “restore the property to contours similar to its original state.”
“Much like the quarry was not mined in a few years, but over the course of a decade, it would be a long term project, reverse the process, gather fill from regional projects,” he said. The soil used to fill the quarry, he said, would be brought in from across the Northeast region, but mainly from the Western Massachusetts region. He said to fill the quarry they would take soil from projects that had been “assessed by engineers'' both at the site they were taken from and before being accepted and approved at the site where they were shipped, ensuring there were no contaminants in the soil.
“The program MassDEP has established as a way to help facilitate appropriate soil distribution throughout the state. These are soils that could be left at a residential property or playground, they’re deemed to be safe at the state established standards,” he said.
However, Bord said in the nine years since the quarrying had stopped, nothing had taken place at the quarry. This, she said, had led to nature taking over the area, something she said residents would like to see stay in place. “Our position is nature has reclaimed the area and moved in because of inactivity, we don’t want to see it filled in,” she said.
Additionally, Bord disagreed with Kennedy’s assessment of how safe the soil was and said contaminates would be allowed up to a certain level. “We’re not sure what it will be filled in with, sort of junk soil somehow regulated by the state, they can allow to have some contaminants in the soil at some level,” she said.
Bord went on to say that the truck traffic that would take place to fill in the quarry would also have harmful effects on the wildlife. “The truck traffic, the contaminates we don’t know about, the destruction of wildlife that moved in, the degradation of the property that the trucks would enable is not what we want to see,” she said. “People hike up there, people don’t want to hike around an active fill site. It is the position of the Department of Conservation and Recreation that they’ve moved to acquire the property and we support that.”
Kennedy said the active fill activity would consist of “on the high side, 30 truck trips per day, but many days would be zero truck trips.” He added that the filling in of the quarry would be positive, allowing for snakes to re-establish migration patterns, “allow for botanicals to grow back [and] allow people to feel more safe and welcome.” Additionally, he said, “If you get in at the design phase, you could create a better wetland.”
Bord then went on to address the Mount Tom Company’s recent bankruptcy filing, which she said she believed was “to get rid of DCR’s right to acquire.” She said, “I think the bankruptcy is the workaround because DCR does have this right to acquire this property.”
Kennedy, however, said this was not the case. He said the company filed for bankruptcy to allow for the city to collect on back taxes and to move forward with the project. “Our motivation includes our intent to try to get people paid, namely the city, in back taxes and move forward with the project. If we are allowed to proceed in bankruptcy it means we have a plan to move forward with the project, or move forward in a way that would allow the city to recoup the back taxes that were due,” he said. “From what I understand there’s not any way around the city being able to waive back taxes due to them for any party.”
Bord said she was part of a large group of people “who care deeply about what’s happening there.” She expressed the feeling of support to conserve the quarry as a place that’s become a family-friendly spot in Holyoke over the years. “There’s broad support for conserving the quarry. In the past nine years, families have taken strollers up there. I was there in February, there was a path through snow and ice,” she said. “There were families there, kids playing in the bottom of the quarry having a blast. This really has become a jewel of Holyoke, no one else has this.”
Kennedy said the ultimate goal of the Mount Tom Company was to do the right thing and to conserve the land. “It’s everyone’s obligation to do the right thing and manage the habitat, we’re not exempt from that. Ultimately our intent was to gift the 40 acres to the state or have it be placed in conservation,” he said. This, Kennedy said, was still the goal, for the land to be given to “DCR or an entity to be named.
“Ultimately to reclaim the land and place it in conservation, so ultimately preserving the land is a large part of our goal,” he said.
Bord said in addition to the environmental concerns, members of the public felt strongly connected to the quarry. “I think that he’s really missing the point, that people have been getting outside more and more with the pandemic and enjoying nature to its fullest. That’s the real risk,” she said. “Those are grave concerns, but generally the public has this strong emotional attachment to the land on the mountain.”
DCR Spokesperson Olivia Dorrance said in a statement to Reminder Publishing, "In a continued effort to protect vital habitat and natural resources on Mount Tom, the Department of Conservation and Recreation looks forward to completing the transfer of the quarry property abutting Mount Tom State Reservation in order to create a continuous protected landscape that benefits wildlife and improves outdoor recreational opportunities, while enabling the implementation of long-term management and safety plans around the quarry."
More information about the proposal to fill the quarry can be found online at fillthequarry.com while additional information about conserving the quarry in its current state can be found online at nodumponmounttom.org.