The applicant behind a contentious quarry proposal along Old Town Road aims to clear the air with the public.
Along Old Town Road is a series of steep switchbacks that end at a rock face and a narrow bank with a stellar view of Shuswap Lake, Sicamous and the Eagle Valley. The property’s address is 200 Old Town Rd. Its owner is Murray Hillson, a Salmon Arm logger who hopes to one day transform the lot into a residence. Building on this mountainside, however, will require the removal of rock, and plenty of it. Which is why he currently has before the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Resources an application to operate a gravel pit over a 20-year period. The operation would include blasting and crushing, with about six truck loads a day on average leaving the site over that period – should the quarry be in operation for that length of time.
“The gravel pit is to pay for the extraction to build the lot,” says Hillson. “If you walk up top there and have a look at the view up there, you can see why I want to get located on that bench.”
Hillson calls the quarry his retirement project, which may be lucrative provided the application is approved and a nearby development gets back up and running.
“My hope is Old Town Bay will start developing again and I can supply them the gravel,” says Hillson. “They can use all the gravel pretty much that I can supply off that pit to build up Old Town Bay because everything there is a metre below flood plain.”
This, says Hillson, would help alleviate the District of Sicamous’ concerns with the impact the quarry would have on the Sicamous-Solsqua Road bridge.
“That saves us 20 to 30 thousand gravel truck loads from going across that bridge.”
The bridge is just one of the issues identified by the district, compelling council to request that the ministry host a public meeting and pursue amendments to the Mines Act so as to give “greater weight to local government involvement and ability to control such permits within their jurisdiction.”
After perusing Hillson’s entire application (which wasn’t made available to the district when a referral was first submitted by the province back in December), district community planning officer Mike Marrs told council the planned mine would be in contravention with Sicamous’ official community plan and zoning bylaw, and he’d also found a number of errors in the application, as well as points that were questionable. Once of Marrs’ concerns was the scope of the project, which in one document in the application shows a series of 10 by 10-metre wide benches up to about 110 metres (360 feet). Hillson says, however, that the benches would only rise about 60 metres, and they would eventually be replanted with vegetation – possibly even a vineyard.
Both the mayor and council expressed disappointment with the lack of consultation between Hillson and the district. Hillson claims he tried working with staff about five years ago and was essentially told that if he spent $10,000 on an engineering study, staff still wouldn’t support a quarry going in.
“So I left there – I went to Mines and hired a mine consultant that does all these applications,” said Hillson. “He looked at it and said this is a really good rock quarry, it’s no problem, we’ll get the grades and we can build this as a rock quarry.”
As for the district’s concerns related to blasting and crushing, Hillson says this would only occur over a two-week period late in the fall or early spring.
“You get all your material ready for summer, and if you get sales in the summer, it’s just a matter of taking it out,” says Hillson.
Hillson says he would meet with the owner of a subdivision below the planned quarry who also has concerns. As for a public meeting, Hillson says this is something he’ll push the ministry to make happen.
