PD22-CU01 Santa Lima mining conditional use amendment
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The source document
The county’s agenda for Planning Commission, Oct 7, 2021
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The county’s minutes for Planning Commission, Oct 7, 2021
The published PDF, as served by the county. This item is one entry in it.
What was said
Machine transcription of 33m of recording, with speaker names inferred from voice matching. 71% of 142 lines carry a name. It shows what was said, not what was decided, and both the words and the names can be wrong.
Uh now we're on to PC three.
Yeah well.
Good afternoon, Planning Commission. Will Poon, PE Senior Engineering, Current Planning. Here for PC three item.
PD22-CU01, so mining operating conditional abuse amendment requests for an existing Santa Lima mining.
It's located on the south side of County Line Road, approximately 3,200 feet west of Sud Coast Parkway.
Conditional use petitions under CU 21-25 by the applicant K ⁇ M Pasco 130 Holdings LLC. And they're filed for a mining operating permit, conditional use permit amendment for existing sand in our rock mine with no blessing in AC Agricultural and AR Agricultural Residential Districts.
Just to paraphrase the conditional use amendment, they're modifying the excavation of approximately 2,642,358 cubic yards of sand with an additional 1,053,492 cubic yards of sand outside the original pit area. The total, as you see there, 3,694,350 cubic yards of sand. of sand. In addition to the previously improved, 1,8996,719 cubic yards of line rock and stone mining. The
area has been expanded to limits for 400 feet on the property line to 100 feet and also 500 feet to 100 feet on the eastern side. The Land O' Lakesorting Operations will strictly be remaining as previously approved. Operation-wise in regards to the conditions and also the site plans reflect what is being proposed and the duration
has not changed on previous day approval, which is March 24th, 2031.
Here is the surrounding zoning map that rewards to the adjacent properties.
Future land use residential district.
Here's the amended sign mining area site plan. I know the applicant has further additional exhibits that could also expand on that if needed.
And we recommend approval conditioning that's provided. Any questions that we had to answer? As briefly mentioned, the applicant and their representative are also here to address any questions or concerns. Thank you.
All right, well, thank you very much. Any questions from up here? Yeah. Thank you well. Thanks.
Mr. Chairman, I'm not sure which mic is which. Do I need both? Okay. Okay. Clark Hobby, Hobby and Hobby, PA 109, North Brest Street, Tampa, Florida, have been sworn here on behalf of the applicant. And the owner of the mine. Our clients operated this mine since the original approval in 2009. I was involved in the amendment in 2017 which allowed Lime Rock mining in one area of the pit. And so it's
been sand mined for over a decade, and then lime rock mining has been occurring since 2017 or 18. Mm-hmm. And what we're discussing today is primarily expanding the footprint of the mine so that on the south side of the mine we go from 400 to 100 foot setback and on the eastern side we go from 500 to 100 foot setback. But what we're doing to mitigate the issues with neighbors is installing an eight-foot uh grass.
berm that will have a landscape on the neighbor's side. And if you follow what the sound experts say, moving the berm actually closer to the neighbors, we believe will actually attenuate any noise emanating from the site from our site to our neighbors. Now, in the last decade or so, the county has approved several projects, including several mines. That Showed the county and the county's accepted that the use of berms
is a an efficient way of attenuating sound emanating from the site. So you can make a fair amount of noise on a site, but if you use a big berm, the noise will not escape and go over the berm. And just a few areas where this has been approved would be Lago Verde mine, seven diamonds, and then you all will record. Paul, the Sheriff's Office has a very large berm that they use around their firing range of a of a software in Hudson. So it's been accepted that we can
do that and not have a noise problem. So I am going to have in just a minute Cliff Manuel can come on up now and he's going to explain the mine itself. But I also have a sound expert named Jeffrey Straw that will testify when Cliff is done. And I have a report from here that I'm going to give to the clerk and would ask that they pass out to you all. And what it shows is that he has monitored the noises that emanate from the site and that we will not exceed the
county noise ordinance for the daytime operations in which the mine will operate, which we know we can't do anyway, but he's looked into the actual burning that will occur on the site and looked at the equipment we'll be running and we will not exceed the noise ordinance. If I wasn't able to show that today I wouldn't be eager to So in any event I'm gonna pass these out. I'll be happy to answer any questions, but I'm gonna ask Cliff to come up and just explain the bourning and the proposal.
Have a motion to receive and file. So moved. Second.
Mr. Chairman Mariano Cliff Manual.
Okay, sorry. I didn't know you were in the middle of a boat. That's okay. Um I'm Cliff Manuel, president of Coastal Engineering. Um and And we have been involved in this project since the beginning and constructed the first berm that we put in place for this particular benefit of both visual and sound barrier. It also provides a very good visual barrier. The berm itself is eight foot in height, has three to one side slopes. It is sodd completely with Bahia grass and then maintained by the applicant throughout the
time period that it's in place. It also so that the residents never see the mining operation start before the mining operation can start, we construct the berm first. So the first thing that's built. Is the berm in place to provide both the sound and visual buffers that it's intended to provide? In addition to that, we learned in our sort of in the first berm that we built for the original footprint, the vegetation that we put between the berm and the property owners has been elevated to three feet so that a nine-foot tree, three-foot
high would provide an additional 12-foot barrier site-wise. And we've improved our irrigation system to make sure that all of our trees and our enhanced vegetation along the berm on the neighbor side of the property will grow in place and be maintained properly throughout the mining operations. It meets the slope stability requirements of Pasco County and the slope stability requirements of the Water Management District. And if there is any erosion that ever occurs on the burn for whatever reason, the mine operators
repair it and resot it in place to make sure it maintains its integrity. And I'm here for any questions y'all may have related to that part of
the discussion.
Anything up here?
I have one question. I noticed on one of the comment cards, one individual by the name of Mr. Reyes, he indicated that the concern that he had was the dust. On the road, could you uh elaborate on that please? Uh the physics of the
I think the question was there was a comment at the community wet meeting at which I was not present about dust on the roads. Do you know if that was dust on the our access road or if they were talking about the roads to the south? Reason why I bring that up, Mr. Hansel, is there are three or four very long washed out dirt roads on the south side and they have an I think a fairly extensive dust issue. We don't access those roads. You might have been talking to someone who was talking about dust on the north side,
but our access road is paved the last I think it's a thousand twelve hundred feet, so I'm not sure.
It
was in reference
to this comment card. Cliff
was at the community meeting, so he may know.
Okay. The good
news is for whichever citizen was concerned about that, the dust abatement and control for both our um access road, which is now paved. and any line rock roads on site that we
use,
we still have to maintain that dust abatement. We do have, when necessary, watering trucks to keep dust control down. We don't want the neighbors to be in a dust cloud during operation. Going back to the berm, the other benefit of a berm, eight foot high around a mining area, as the mine expands, it goes deeper. So the berm starts out at eight feet and then it goes to nine feet, and you know, as you go down, you get deeper and deeper. But the dust control and abatement for our systems keeps the dust and the work inside that burned area, and we haven't had
any known complaints from residents other than that one comment. But um I assure you all that we will address dust control because that's a a big part of our operations that we don't want the
neighbors to be concerned about. Thank you. I appreciate that. Just let me finish real quick. Because in this last sentence, he said that he would like it paved. Is that a possibility or is uh he must be
talking about the um the Lime Rock Road south bus, possibly that we maintain? That's not clear to me. paved the main part of our access where all of our truck act operations are near the control and loading area. And then the entrance now is paved, so I'm not sure exactly where he would be speaking to that issue. But the overall feedback I can provide you is dust abatement is a part of our mining plan and we would not want to have uncontrolled dust or or unmitigated dust as part of our operations.
Thank you. So so the whole haul rows outside into and outside of the the mine, any any rows that are hauled on, those are all paved, correct? We only
have one in This is Clark Hobby again. We our our hall route is that long skinny piece going to the north and so we really don't have any neighbors up there and that's that's paved and then all the on site stuff is all sprayed continuously. Okay. So I suspect that the neighbor again there are these three or four roads to the south that we don't we've never accessed. Okay. They're terrible roads and I'll I'll tell the Planning Commission we have tr for free for many years, graded them with our equipment just to help be a good neighbor. I
understand that maybe that hasn't always been done the last few months or a year or something. And I plan to talk to my client about continuing to do that to be a good neighbor, but their roads are really not great to our south, which is why we never used them to begin with.
But yeah, just to follow up on Mr. Hansel said I I saw that same comment. I want to make sure that that you know the haul roads that you guys actually ho physically haul your trucks on are all paved. Okay. So
Okay.
We don't use Thank you, Mr. Poole. Then uh lastly we have our sound expert that I wanted to have give a little bit of testimony and who had the letter that I just passed out. So I'm asking Denise and staff to promote him. His name is Jeffrey Straw, he's with the firm of Geosonics. Jeff.
Mr. Straw, if you would provide your name and address for the record and state whether you've been sworn.
My name is Jeffrey Straw. I'm Wice President and Army Manager of Geosonics. Our office address is 6900 Southwest 21st Court, Dave, Florida. I wasn't sworn, but it was what it was muted, so I don't know whether that counts or not.
Yeah, if you say you were sworn, I'll accept that.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought it was going to be related generally to noise when you've been asked to review that in my background.
the vibration and acoustic
The other mines that were mentioned, we were an expert, except in the area of uh vibration as well as acoustics. What I have done for this project is look at the
So I think we lost them. Okay.
Pregnant pause.
Technology and great
It appears the issue is on his end, not on the end, not on this end.
Mr. Chairman M in the interest of time, I think we have maybe one person here objecting to it and maybe we can see if he can reestablish this connection. Okay. We can just kick that time into our rebuttal time. That'll sound fine. It sounds fine.
All right.
Therefore, uh whoever's here to speak uh on the other side, please come forward, state your name and address
please. Good afternoon. My name is Joe McManus. I live at [address removed], yeah. at uh southern border of the uh Mine. I do have pictures of the mine, uh satellite pictures that I'd like to give everybody. And I have a packet here. I only I didn't have enough inks, so I only have one for the chairman. And uh if I bring these up or
Sure, we we can have a motion to receive and file.
So moved.
Second.
Sir you can only speak from the mic, but if you give those exhibits to the clerk,
yeah then you can then you can go back over there and speak.
Here we go. She'll pass them out
for you. Okay, you'll see uh My picture doesn't have all the pretty blue stuff and the ridiculously oversized uh berm that they show there. You'll see exactly what it looks like in my picture because it's a satellite view. All right.
If you look at that photograph between the white boxes on the bottom or the south end That's around twelve hundred and fifty feet of my fence line. Putting a smack dab in the middle of all this. In two thousand seven we received our first notice of land usage.
We've obtained legal representation. We did that because we had no idea that someone could come into Such a pristine area surrounded by residents on all sides. And uh zoned agricultural. and dig a huge hole into the aquifer. We didn't know that lime rock came from the aquifer and was used by nature to help filter water. Our attorney advised us to make the best deal we could with K and M because it would
cost an absolute fortune to fight them and that we would probably lose.
A representative from KM told us that Full number one, they were gonna help us maintain our private road, add Lime Rock when it became available. That was 13 years ago. They have, in fact, in the last two years, dropped a powdery substance on the road Uh after the first rain turned into a gray, slippery, soggy mess. And I have a photo of that, but you really don't need to see that. You
can't tell by the picture, but many of those ruts are over nine inches deep. More than one car or golf car has gotten stuck in that mess. We were assured that when it dried out, it would get hard. After two months, they rolled it out, and it was wonderful for a few months until the rainy season began. So it took over ten years to get material. But still no limrack. Those of us who have lived on the road for many years. used to take up collections and
buy the material from the road. I myself have donated a couple thousand dollars over the years, as have many of my neighbors. After K ⁇ M graded the road a few times, much of our material washed out. We're a patient bunch, but ten years is going on ridiculous. They've graded the road, but without material, it just becomes a deeper mud pit. Number two, although they were going to Mine Lime rock,
the long term plan. What that we were told was to build high end homes around a seventy acre ski lake. KM told us this we now know. Because they needed help. collecting signatures to acquire the necessary permits. We did our part. We, along with a few others, helped K ⁇ M Get the signatures required so the board would grant the permits. We were duped. I
believe the commissioners were also taken for the same ride. I believe the c commissioners may have Thought high end homes around Fifty, seventy acre lake. So close to 589 would bring a load of happy taxpaying folks into our community. And now you know it will never happen. Just looking at that picture. especially if they are permitted to remove the sand from the surrounding anchorage. We've all
seen what happens to sand pits once the owner takes out the last truckload. For instance, Marinder and County Line Road, if you recall, had a small sand pit that was an eyesore for over forty years until that corner became so commercially valuable that it was filled in. I think they put a CVS there or something. There were more than one on County Line Road abandoned for many years. There's at least four mines, not in Pasco County. But
in my zip code for We as neighbors would uh would be given an easement. This was the third thing I told us, eventually lake uh access to the lake. We now know that that would and could never happen. And you could refer back to photo number one. Can anyone imagine the cost to cover the bottom of that 70 acres with clay, the whole water? remove the sand, puts the final bullet in that idea anyway. If they took all the
sand around the place. We believe this was always KM's ultimate plan. No matter who they talked to, no matter how they talked to them, no matter how they rolled, we think that it was always their plan, that this was always going to be a sandbit, that they were going to keep it going on for generations. Can M will construct a twenty foot high barrier. This was the fourth thing they told us. which will be planted and maintained by K M according to the permit issued
by the commissioners. It will be five hundred feet from my fence line. After a variance It was determined to be 400 feet. Please refer back to the photograph. On the bottom of the picture you will see Some measurements. I did not walk this off. I used satellite imagery and GPS solutions to measure and you can see that they are approximately 310 feet from my fence. Three hundred and ten feet. That's ninety uh ninety
feet. That's twenty two point five percent mistake on their part. That's huge.
I'm sorry, sir. Is that time? Yes sir. If you could please could please just sort of summarize and that's time, eh?
And I got two extra minutes, wow. Alright, well, I'm guessing though that you know if I leave this with you nobody will read.
Sir, you you actually gave us a written version of all your comments up here, which we have.
Can I ask you a question though? Yes please. So the road you're referring to, is it a road that the mine is using for access?
No, sir. That's a private road. There are four private roads that go down to the mine property. The only one they use is Rigsby. When they say they don't use any. They have a gate on Rigsby they use that one. They w used it as a ploy at a meeting. We're gonna fix your roads, we're gonna be good neighbors. This was all part of the initial get up. This has been years and years in the making and we've been friendly. Everybody's been friendly. Of course, they've been very friendly. until it
actually comes time to do anything. Then they don't do it. They don't come through. We have no reason whatsoever to believe That uh that's With the mound that they're gonna put up right now, they said they're telling you I wear hearing aids when I'm in today. I can hear that drag line every single day. from my back porch every single day. I don't care about their 20-foot burn and I don't care about their X-burn. I live there and I hear it every day. My brother-in-law was very close from me. He's stoned stoned
death. He ears it every he complains to me, they make so much noise. I don't think it's bad. You can see by my pictures, without the blue and all this, how white that is. When that dries out in the middle of the summer and the wind blows through there, it looks like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. The dirt comes out of there like you would not believe. The sand and blows up in the air, clouds and clouds. And it goes whichever way the wind's blowing. It
blows south.
Sir, yes, sir, sir. I asked you about the road. I didn't mean to give you more time. Uh you answered my question about the road. That's that was not my question. All right. Thank you.
Following up on David's question, can staff confirm that is there any requirement or condition for the applicant to maintain? I I don't see anything in the conditions of approval that there is any requirement for them to maintain those roads to the South.
but
Yeah, Wapoon current plan. No sir, there's nothing in the conditions that require that. Okay.
Mr. Chairman, before I set uh Mr. Straw loose, I I do want to correct the record about the road maintenance. I was there when the conversations were taking place with our neighbors in 2016 and 17, and we told them to be good neighbors on a non-contractual basis. We would try to help them with their roads because the roads have been florable since this unplatted subdivision was built for 40, 50 years ago, and we maintained it for a number of years. I think what happened was we had a changeover
in staff on the site about a year and a half ago, and they might not have known that this good neighbor policy was in place. And I'm committing on behalf of my clients today that we will go back to doing what we said we were going to do, and we'll periodically go out and grade or make their roads more passable because they're very bad roads and I freely admit that we don't access them. That was never part of the approval, but we'll do that just to be a good neighbor. And I'm sorry if they haven't been done in the last year or so. I
didn't know that until today. So I I apologize for that. We did not, you know, we didn't go out and and ask people to do things that were improper during the previous approvals. I can tell you none of that occurred because I was there. We didn't make any promises that weren't on the record to our neighbors. Um we want to be a good neighbor, and again, actually the way and and Jeff can explain this now when he finishes his stuff, but moving the berm closer to the neighbors with the landscaping I believe
will actually help both visually and acoustically with abating any noise emanating from the site. So and then when he's done, if I could have just a second, because Cliff knows the site very well and can talk about the uh the dust allegations. So if I could, Jeff We can get you promoted again.
Uh Clark, is there any berm there now? There is
a berm, but see the again the problem is the berm is four hundred feet off of his property line, so he's got a wide open area. The sound can actually go there's enough room for it to go over the berm. Now we're moving the berm closer to him and it'll do a better job attenuating the noise for the neighbors.
What's the current dimension of the zone? Or of the uh berm.
I'm gonna have Cliff answer that. He knows all the technical side of it. Thank you, Claire.
So the the berm that's out there today, that would be reconstructed if this is approved, is eight foot high, the top's about five foot wide, the base is about fifty-five foot wide with three to one side slopes. So it's eight foot tall, fifty-foot. Five-foot base. It's rounded and kind of kept on the top at about five feet, and then it's soldered in place with Bahia grass.
And that's the new berm, not the one that's there now.
The one that's there now is that, and we're moving that berm to the new location. So we're taking that berm, if this is approved, and sliding it, um, reconstructing it in the new position, and then redoing the vegetation and landscaping.
Is that correct from 400 to 100? Yes, sir.
And it's 100 to to the toe of slope. So it's not to the center line of the worm. It's 100 clear feet to the toe of slope and then another 55 feet before you get to the other side where you start dropping into the mine. So when you drop into the mine it's 155 feet before mine starts.
Okay.
Any other questions?
I guess I have a question for staff. Is so there's already existing conditions on this mine that their noise can't exceed sixty six decibels on weekdays and fifty five decibels on weekends.
Actually that's at night
I think Dave. Well it says at night and on weekends.
'Cause I was confused by that until I saw it. Yeah, it says
fifty five decibels between the hours of seven PM and seven PM on weekdays and all hours on weekends. Yep. So um and then there's another condition that says they have to control all Fugitive dusts and they have to have appropriate dust control techniques. And they have to do those at the applicant's expense whenever we determine dust control becomes necessary. I guess my question is: have we received any complaints that
the applicant has violated either the noise condition or the dust control conditions? However, we had to. warned them about dust control and told them to do dust mitigation I guess.
Um Will Pooh currently no sir. There's never been no complaints or phone calls or emails or anything of that complaining in regards to the the dust or noise.
So that's the remedy if we if we if you receive complaints then you can act on it.
Yes, typically what we do is we we address it with the uh the applicant and so forth to address those concerns. And I we have not received any of those
complaints.
All
right, thank you.
As as a follow up to David's question, has there been any physical noise monitoring that's been done at Mr. McManus's property line? M maybe Mr. Shaw will have to answer that in his his question.
Yeah, maybe I'm I'm not aware of specifically near his particular property, but I mean there are, you know, certain requirements reporting wise that they do, so
Okay. Typically the county would not go out and take noise measurements unless there's a complaint.
Right. But I'm wondering if part of uh Mr. Sherr's work out there if he's actually done noise monitoring on that property line.
No, I'll I'll just repeat.
Mr. Shaw and our answer is we have in the past. We have not done any recently. Uh but when we look at this we use the measurements we had from the actual operation early on. make our calculations to ensure that they would be within the 66 SL Mr. Goldstein talked about. We have not had the opportunity to go back out. It's not something that's done regularly.
So this this this was performed with software as opposed to an on-site visit? We've been given this.
I'm sorry. Um
we had done on-site measurements ahead of this. We did some in 2017. We did additional work in 2020 of Actual on-site metrics. And then what we do is take that information, we have insert.
talked about as the pit excavates down, we're actually increasing the height of the barn as the equipment works further down in the hole. We've taken it as a flat level and it meets the criteria of the count. So as they progress in that brown area, the green burner will actually assist in reducing noise as well as the excavation itself. And so it's a mix of some computer analysis, but it is
based on real-time actual equipment from the mine.
Mr Anderson, if I might to b put a finer point on it. So we considered a couple of years ago maybe seeking later hours. So we commissioned a report and they took all it was with the benefit of all the LimeRock uh equipment running with crushers and all that kind of stuff. They monitored it all along our southern boundary and none of it exceeded the sound uh the noise requirements and the ordinance, even without the berm being closer to make it better for sound
purposes. Jeff, was there anything else that you wanted to add vis vis vis your your letter and our ability to meet the performance standards?
No, I think the letter stands for itself and the criteria is attached to the letter. I don't know if there's any other questions, but I'll certainly answer them.
Any any other questions? Anybody up here? No.
Okay, Mr. Chairman Mariano, just just to remind to put a again a finer point on it. So this mine's been operating, I believe, for uh well over a decade. We have no complaints. All we're really hearing is people wish we would do a better job being a better neighbor and giving them some free road grading. And I'm here to say that we're gonna go back to doing that. I apologize if that stopped happening, but we We want to be a good neighbor. We realize that with all the stuff we're doing, even when we're complying with the law and the and the conditions, we
need to be a good neighbor, and I'm pledging to you that we'll do a better job of that.
Thanks. Thank you.
Okay. We have any anybody else to give testimony? I don't believe we do. So if not, uh I hear a motion. Motion to approve. Second. Motion and a second. Any further discussion of the motion? Signify by saying aye.
Aye. Aye.
Aye. Aye. Opposed? Like signed. Okay, motion carries.