Quarries, city clash over plans for detour
Making repairs on Granite Falls' main drag is expected to cost a half-million dollars and could take months.
Repairing relations between the city and nearby gravel-mining operations could take even longer.
That was made clear during a meeting last week to discuss an improvement project for East Stanley Street, the main east-west road through Granite Falls. The project likely will require rerouting more than 1,000 gravel trucks that drive through the city daily.
Therein lies the rub.
Granite Falls officials want to close the street completely, to finish the project as soon as possible, and reroute the trucks out of the city. The gravel quarries would prefer an alternate route that traveled through the city over several residential streets.
The disagreement sparked a heated exchange between Granite Falls officials and quarry representatives at last week's meeting. About 30 representatives from the city, Snohomish County, the state and trucking and quarry companies attended the session at the county Administration Building in Everett.
Granite Falls Mayor Floyd "Butch" DeRosia said the quarries' preferred route would disrupt neighborhoods and represented an unwillingness to compromise.
"I don't feel the city should take the full brunt of this project," DeRosia said. "I think everyone should join in and not completely choke off Granite Falls."
City Councilman Matt Hartman said the city was being asked to do too much.
"I have not heard one thing from the quarries that might consider reduced output" to cut traffic loads, Hartman said. "Is this a compromise from that standpoint?"
But Jim Burnett, owner of the Iron Mountain quarry, said such restrictions would be unacceptable.
"No, those kinds of constraints shackle our business," he said. "We're going to eat thousands of dollars a day as an industry."
"Given that, I'm really curious as to how you expect us to compromise," Hartman said.
"It's your project," said Burnett.
"It's not my problem how you get your product to market," Hartman responded. "We have to accommodate an industry that over the past five years has done absolutely nothing."
Eventually, the give-and-take did result in possible solutions, but the exchange illustrated what meeting participants described as years of ill will that has developed over gravel trucks in Granite Falls.
More than 1,000 trucks from quarries outside the city — about one every 30 seconds on average — go through Granite Falls every day, using the only allowable route along Stanley Street.
If the street can be closed completely, the work probably can be done in about six weeks, starting in spring. If one lane is kept open for traffic, the work probably will stretch to three months or more and into the summer tourist season.
The quarry operators presented a detour plan that would send the trucks on other streets through the city. They would move along South Alder Avenue, then onto East Pioneer Street, then onto South Granite Avenue, then for a block along West Galena Street and then onto Cascade Avenue to be reconnected to West Stanley Street.
The city has proposed a route that would take the trucks out of Granite Falls, sending them onto Robe-Menzel Road and south to Carpenter Road, then west to OK Mill Road toward Machias.
Burnett said such a circuitous 15-mile route would be intolerable for the companies. County officials expressed concerns about a narrow bridge on OK Mill Road being unable to handle the weight of the gravel trucks and having to put a signal on the bridge to restrict it to one-lane traffic if truck use increased.
Other suggestions included having empty and loaded trucks use different routes, with loaded trucks moving on city streets and empty trucks moving along county roads.
The quarry operators offered to restrict their operations by one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon.
But no solution was immediately reached.
DeRosia eventually moved the meeting into executive session, excluding members of the public, citing possible litigation — meaning the parties might end up going to court to try to resolve the differences — as the justification.
DeRosia said the decision will be up to the Granite Falls City Council, with some action needed within about two weeks if the road project is to start in spring.
Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com.