Thirty-five years after it was closed down, a quarry just off 29N is back in business, Aaron Richardson writes in the Daily Progress, and the neighbors aren’t thrilled. Imagine you’re driving north on 29, past Walmart and over the Rivanna. There’s a traffic light there, for Polo Grounds Road, on the right. You can turn left, but virtually nobody does. That’s Rio Mills Road. I drove down there for the first time maybe five years ago. It’s a little-maintained road that runs right past a quarry. (Here’s a map of its location.) That quarry has been abandoned since 1975, but a Roanoke-based company has bought it, and they’ve got it back in business. Rockydale Quarries informed folks who live right around there that they were going to resume blasting and quarrying, but not everybody’s happy about it. The county has checked to see if the sound of their work exceeds the noise ordinance, but it falls within it. The property has a permit for the work going back to 1965, and the land is zoned for heavy industry. Still, some of the neighbors have asked the Board of Supervisors to shut down the business, asking that they review the permits and environmental impact, presumably hoping to find some irregularity.
I suspect that the moral of the story will be that if you want peace and quiet, you shouldn’t build or buy a house near a quarry on land that’s zoned for heavy industry.
I accidentally overhauled the technical infrastructure behind cvillenews.com over the past few hours. (It was meant to be a small fix, done late at night to avoid downtime, but one thing led to another…) I’ve upgraded from an ancient version of WordPress to the latest one, while trying to drag along many of the features that were dependent that rickety old version of WordPress. Parts of the site are going to look funny and broken-ish for a bit while I try to massage things back to how they were. Then they’ll start looking funny in new and interesting ways, as I start to make many of the improvements to the site that I’ve been unable to make for years now. Thanks for bearing with me!
9/25 Update: Oh, and it’s possible to post comments now. Because that seems like a useful feature.
Independent candidate Paul Long has withdrawn from the City Council race. He endorsed fellow independents Brandon Collins and Andrew Williams. #
The latest Board of Supervisors’ campaign contribution numbers are in, and the two Democrats are ahead of the two Republicans by decent margins. (These latest figures are current as of August 31.) In the Rivanna district, Republican member of the BOS Ken Boyd has taken in a total of $41k so far this election, to Democratic challenger Cynthia Neff’s $64k. In the last reporting period—the latter half of August—Boyd raised $12k to Neff’s $25k. And down in the Scottsville district, where Democrat Chris Dumler is running against Republican James Norwood for the seat being vacated by conservative Democrat Lindsay Dorrier, Dumler has taken in a grand total of $37k to Norwood’s $17k. $20k of Dumler’s fundraising came just in the last half of August, while just $4k of Norwood’s came in the same period. (Democrat Ann Mallek is running for reelection in the White Hall district, but she has no challenger.)
For those who don’t want to look at raw numbers, Aaron Richardson sums things up in the Progress.
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