Despite Setback, Maryland Community Aims To Continue Fighting Industrial Activity

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – A rural Maryland community lost a round recently in their fight to curb polluting industrial activity in their midst. But they refuse to give up.

In July, Anne Arundel County’s Board of Appeals overturned a decision rescinding a 1967 approval for Westport Reclamation to continue mining sand and gravel and producing concrete in the Lothian area.

A county hearing officer in December had determined that after 55 years, little if any mining was still going on at the site. He cited evidence that the property was being used to store contractors’ material and unregistered vehicles and to dump debris, and he ordered it to cease all commercial operations.

Residents who have long complained about the concentration of mining and waste disposal activities in their neighborhood hailed the hearing officer’s ruling as vindication of their cause.

Westport Reclamation is one of several industrial operations along a short stretch of Sands Road paralleling the Patuxent River. Among the other operations are a large sand and gravel mine, two former quarries undergoing reclamation and two rubble landfills, now closed.

Although the area is zoned for rural agricultural land use, sand and gravel mining is allowed with a “special exception” to the zoning code.

But Belle Grove Corp., the owner of Westport Reclamation, appealed the shutdown order. After hearing from both sides in March, the five-member appeals board ruled in the company’s favor. In a July 20 decision, it said the two parties that had petitioned to close Westport lacked the legal standing to do so.

One petitioner was Tracy Garrett, who lives about a half-mile from the old quarry on Sands Road. The other was Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman, who has said the cluster of industrial activities along Sands Road have made the area an environmental “sacrifice zone,” where a significant number of nearby residents are people of color or have below-average incomes.

Neither lives next to the facility, the board said, nor could they show that they are impacted by Westport’s operations any more or differently than the public in general. Moreover, the board added, the only people who clearly can seek to rescind a special zoning exception are those who spoke against it when it was originally granted more than 55 years ago.

Tutman decried the appeals board’s decision, saying it sets an impossibly high bar for challenging the continued operation of a facility that violated the terms of its long-ago zoning approval. Other Maryland counties limit the duration of such special exceptions or at least review them periodically, he noted.

The county did sue the company in 2022, alleging that it was conducting business at the site that was not permitted under its special exception. The company settled the suit by agreeing to pay a $3,000 penalty, remove any unregistered vehicles and cease using the site as a contractor’s yard. But the county did not join the residents in seeking to shut the operation down.

Patrick DeArmey, a lawyer with the nonprofit Chesapeake Legal Alliance who is representing Garrett and other residents, said they are still deliberating their next steps, which may involve refiling the petition or seeking a legislative remedy.

Tutman said they also are hoping to buttress their complaints with evidence that the health of local residents is threatened by having to breathe air pollution from heavy truck traffic and industrial activity in their midst. They are working with a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Public Health to place air monitors along Sands Road.

“We’re not done yet,” Tutman said.