Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993 TAG: 9301030098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAY TAYLOR CORRESPONDENT\Staff
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
QUARRY OWNER, FOES SEE MORE AT STAKE THAN ROCKS
It is not the 55 jobs that Chuck Barger provides, not the limestone he dynamites out of Rockbridge County's hills, not the taxes his quarry pays, not the shopping center he built out of a scooped-out hill on U.S. 60.The things that Barger wants to be remembered for are not the ones that matter most, his opponents say.
They want to talk instead about the bad times. About flying rocks, shaking walls, rattling pictures, dust, noise.
David Ruley talks about the dynamite blasts that rocked cars on the lifts at Lee's Auto Repair. Robert Reid remembers the shakes that he says cracked the foundation of his home a half-mile from the quarry. Ann Martin remembers that her 15-year-old son nearly drowned in 1989 when he fell into an abandoned quarry Barger owns.
They remember; and they want Barger's company, Charles W. Barger & Son, out of sight, out of mind, and out of Lexington's urban fringe.
Nonetheless, Chuck Barger, a third-generation Rockbridge County quarryman, wants to keep his 62-year-old operation at the edge of Lexington. He wants to move to a site next to his existing quarry and mine for 65 more years.
To do this, he must persuade the county to rezone the site from residential to industrial, and then obtain a special-use permit. For this he must go to the Rockbridge County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. And that is where the politics is heating up.
For Barger, it's now or never. "In the future it's going to be almost impossible to get zoning done for quarries," he said.
The future is now for a band of citizens who oppose Barger, who are starting to show up at planners' meetings, and who are passing petitions and filing lawsuits. Some oppose him because, they say, their homes and businesses have been damaged by Barger's blasts.
For them, too, it is now or never.
"I think it is a fair assumption to say homes have been damaged in a circle around the quarry, and other residents of the town don't seem to be having the same problem," said John Gunner, the leader of an ad hoc group of unlikely allies.
His group includes the working-class owners of modest homes around Houston Street and Skunk Hollow, a retired dairy farmer, a church congregation, business owners along U.S. 60 near Barger's current operation and a film producer from Malibu Beach, Calif., who bought land across from the quarry.
"We have seen it everywhere," said Gunner, "where uncontrolled growth has really destroyed areas and created many more problems than you would have had if, at the onset, you had faced them one at a time."
Let Barger move farther out into the county, Gunner says.
Barger says their complaints are politically motivated and might even be traced back to old grudges. "I think we've got a good story to tell," Barger said, "and it is just a matter of getting that story out to the public."
Barger, whose name is pronounced with a hard "g," views himself as something of a martyr - wealthy enough to go on if the business shuts down but concerned about his workers' jobs. "A lot of the guys who work for me are 40, 50, 60 years old, and they are not going to find a job somewhere else," he said. "I've had to get on my hands and knees and go through a gantlet just to stay in business."
And the people who oppose him don't appreciate the contribution he is making. "Not one person who objects to the quarry goes through life without using stone," he said.
But if rock is, as Barger contends, the blood of modern life, the angry residents of Rockbridge County and Lexington have met him with hearts of stone.
At stake is 112 acres of rolling land. A clear, quiet theater for the majesty of Virginia's mountains, where the sun rises over the Blue Ridge and sets over the Alleghenies. A place where tomorrow a loud, dusty, quarry would clank - but where today cows ramble, corn stalks lie in tillage and evergreens thrive.
This, a mile or so from Robert E. Lee's grave at Washington and Lee University, is where a campaign is on, the Battle for Barger's Quarry, and it will be the last clash on this land either for 65 years - or forever.
To Barger, it comes down to this: If the quarry cannot be moved next door, business is all but doomed.
The location in Lexington, near the crossroads of Interstates 81 and 64, is crucial for trucking his crushed limestone and concrete to his main customers in Rockbridge, Bath, Highland and Amherst counties.
His critics want him to move to a remote location in Rockbridge County, but Barger says obtaining a zoning change and permit would be just as difficult there, and the roads probably would be too narrow for his trucks.
He has warned local politicians that denial of his application to move could close not only the quarry but his auxiliary operations - a concrete plant, a crushing plant and a construction company, all interdependent.
Barger talks of his friendly neighbors, such as the folks at the Lexington Baptist Church. The church was given a half-million dollars worth of fill dirt and rock for free from the Barger quarry and was able to create a field where there once was a gully. This was the "epitome" of good relationships, Barger says.
He talks of turning the rocky area that he will abandon into stores and restaurants, which would form part of a "gateway to Lexington." Already he has put in the southern half of the gate, Stonewall Square.
"We wanted to give something back to the county as the highest and best use of this land," says Barger of the land he and his father quarried off and on from 1962 to 1989. "We could have ruined this land for all future uses."
The gateway's northern post, with old brick buildings, a rusty, hulking cement maker, gravel drives and an abandoned quarry into which Barger trucks dump their unused concrete, is now a scab of lunar landscape. Barger would like to transform it into an attractive business and retail area.
Under Barger's plans, all equipment would be taken across the road and set up in the currently mined pit. Offices would be placed on rezoned land. Then, quarrying would begin on the new tract.
It's a win-win situation, says Barger, who earned a master's degree in business administration from Duke University in a weekend program. Lexington gets an attractive commercial "gateway"; the quarrying continues, hidden from view; 55 jobs are not lost.
But Barger also knows this is an intense political issue with a history: complaints of blasting damage. In 1981, he fielded opposition from citizens as he successfully sought to rezone land he was already quarrying. In a letter to the Board of Supervisors that year, he wrote that, "In most cases the damage problem was caused by settlement, normal thermal stress, wind loads, aging and traffic vibration."
In politics, the players play up their good points and dress down their detractors. "Sometimes you have to question the motives of those who are against you," he said when interviewed.
"Any unsafe act . . . will be used against me and will wipe out a lifetime of good will," he said. "It's a small town, and people's memories go way back."
"We'll bend," he said, "but don't break us."
When the explosion happened on Jan. 24, 1989, Richard Armentrout was on lunch break, back with a Dr Pepper and a cheeseburger from Wendy's. He was eating in his truck in the parking lot of Turpin's Outdoor Power Equipment, where he repairs chain saws and lawn equipment. His driver's-side window was open. As the sky darkened, it was all he could do to duck.
"It's like if you see a flock of birds coming. Like black birds, that's the way it looked," he said.
Quarry rocks. Blown from the Charles W. Barger & Son pit across U.S. 60, where Barger was blasting rock in the future site of Stonewall Square.
"I didn't have no time to get out of the truck," he said. "So I just got down in the truck." The rocks popped, pinged and slammed into his truck. One zinger put a hole in the side panel, not far from the driver's window.
When Lucy Turpin heard the blast, she was standing at the cash register, not more than 100 feet from Armentrout.
When the gray wall of matter appeared, Turpin ducked under the counter and put her head into a trash can. The rocks landed on the roof, blew out the windows and crashed through a window of a door to the shop.
Turpin was taken to the hospital in shock, and there "they vacuumed little pieces of glass out of my hair."
After complaints were filed with the state Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy, Barger reduced the strength of his blasts. Still, months later, David Ruley says, rock still was falling on his auto shop, Lee's Auto Repair, next to the blasting site.
He said that he once confronted Barger in 1989. "I said, `You're going to kill somebody. Is that what it takes to change your procedures?' His response to me was, `We're doing the best we can.' "
Soon after that, Taylor Woody, who owns Woody Chevrolet, complained to the state that rocks had damaged cars on his lot.
Three cease-blasting orders were issued that year, and Barger submitted numerous revisions of his blasting plans to the mining department. Barger said he has acted responsibly, reducing the size of his loads and putting mats over the blast areas. He said state inspectors come regularly to look over his shoulder. "We are an absolutely regulated industry," he said.
People around Houston Street who had given up complaining about the quarry have begun speaking out again.
Bob Reid stood to speak to at a Lexington Planning Commission meeting in mid-December. "Mr. Barger tried to tell me the house has been deteriorating," Reid said. "I agree." It's the blasts that are tearing it to pieces, he said. "He shouldn't be allowed to expand any further. He's not taking care of the property damage."
Barger, in a later interview, said he has tried to answer Reid's complaints, but when his workers pulled a board off of Reid's house, they found it was "obviously rotting." And the foundations had been weakened by erosion, not blasting, he said.
Here is what Barger wrote to his attorney, William McClung, about Reid's legal action against him in April of last year: "Basically the house is old, decrepit and on the verge of falling down because of little or no maintenance. Seismograph reports in the area are well below minimum standards. . . . We will win any battle. It's the war that I am concerned about."
Reid and his wife, Edith, say a contractor tallied up about $5,000 worth of damage attributable to Barger, none related to wood at the rear of the house rotted by occasional pools of water.
The house has shifted and settled - all due to blasting, Reid said - and this has caused the molding in the ceilings to separate from the ceilings, a common complaint around Houston Street. Reid wants Barger to put in a new foundation and fix upstairs damage, at a cost of about $5,000. Barger has refused, and spent about $550 fixing the house.
Barger's workers, in response to the Reids' complaints, put in jacks to support the front end of the house, and, having jacked the house up too high, used wooden wedges on top of the remaining pillars to fill in gaps.
Other stories around Houston Street are similar: The blasts are loud, the walls and basement floors crack and repairs are not sufficient.
Barger says his policy of repairing damage - even when it cannot be traced directly to the blasting - is costing him dearly. "We feel this is being abused," he says. "If it's on that hill up there, it's automatically my fault," he said.
His records show he has spent more than $10,000 in repairs and payments.
Some of the people who have complained to the Lexington Planning Commission have never called him, he said. "There are people I've never met or heard of that have problems with their houses. I can't repair something I don't know about."
Barger's archenemy in the quarry fight, John Gunner, has organized and cajoled people to speak out, rounded up documents and contacted politicians.
The edrenaline that keeps John Gunner on Barger's tail does not flow by accident.
A builder and renovator, Gunner is restoring for his family a house by the proposed quarry site. He had hoped to do the restoration work for a wealthy neighbor, film producer Paul Maslansky, who has put off plans to renovate the historic Maple Grove farmhouse for more than $1 million.
Gunner has a direct monetary interest in Barger's plans, though he says much of his interest is in preserving the Lexington area.
Maple Grove has enough historic interest to lure the Virginia Association for the Preservation of Antiquities into the fight. Maslansky, the owner, attended Washington & Lee in the 1950s, and after striking it big as a producer with films such as the "Police Academy" series, hoped to get out of the California rat race and into the slow pace of Lexington.
"Lexington truly is, in my opinion, a jewel of the Shenandoah Valley . . . and the setting for this jewel should be maintained," he said.
Nearby sits the Lexington Baptist Church. The Rev. Robert Leonard says the church members voted unanimously to oppose the expansion. "If you think about a hole, a pit, 100 feet deep, 500 feet from your church building, and you have little children in Bible school and Sunday school, that doesn't sit well with parents and grandparents when they know the children are out there."
Barger thought he was on good terms with the preacher. Under an agreement with Leonard, Barger put tons of quarry waste into a gully near the church, and eventually a field was created. Leonard points out that the arrangement also had advantages for Barger - tax write-offs for church donations and a dumping location right next to the quarry.
Recently, the county zoning administrator cited the Barger operation for quarrying too close to adjoining property owned by Dick Nuckols.
The citation was issued after Nuckols, by filing a lawsuit, tried to force the zoning administrator to act against Barger. The citation could result in a $500 fine. The state mining department already has cited Barger for the same violations.
Wednesday, county planners will hold a public hearing on the Barger request.
Barger thinks he may have waited too long. The rezoning would not have been a problem even two years ago, he said. But mood of the county and city reached a turning point a couple of years ago, he said, when environmentalists and conservationists came together to fight a proposed cogeneration power plant in Buena Vista. The coalition killed the plant, and got "a taste of success," Barger said.
"There is an anti-business climate," he said. "They want our products, but they don't want the quarry itself."
But Gunner sees it differently. Barger's victory will be a big loss for the community, he said. "From a zoning viewpoint . . . he's condemning all their property.
"All we're asking . . . is that he follow the comprehensive-use plan."
Barger's father, Charles W. Barger Jr., headed the county's first Planning Commission - and in 1972, as one of its first acts, that commission zoned for residential and agricultural use the land that Barger wants to quarry today.
Barger concedes the irony, but he understands that when the planners and supervisors take action on his request, they will be choosing between the elder Barger's public legacy and the younger Barger's future.
Memo: Correction