City, Pike, Idexx tout blasting compromise, which faces critics and a council vote Monday.

WESTBROOK – A handshake last week between representatives of Pike Industries and Idexx Laboratories gave the appearance that a lengthy, bitter dispute between two of Westbrook’s biggest corporate taxpayers is near an end.

After months of closed-door negotiations, the city announced last week that it had brokered a consent agreement among Pike, Idexx and the city that would allow Pike to operate its controversial quarry on Spring Street, although with restrictions and protections designed to lessen the quarry’s impact on Idexx and other neighboring businesses and residents. For example, the agreement would limit blasting to eight times per year.

But while Pike regional manager Jonathan Olson and Idexx president Jonathan Ayers shook hands at an Aug. 20 press conference at City Hall and said they were happy with the deal, a number of the city’s other businesses and residents decidedly are not.

The consent agreement is not final – it still needs the approval of the City Council. And some businesses and residents are hoping to persuade councilors to reject it outright – or at least send it back for further negotiations to change it.

The council will hold a public hearing and vote on the proposal on Monday, Aug. 30. At the public hearing, the council is likely to hear vocal opposition from those upset that the agreement would allow Pike to resume blasting and other quarrying operations at the site.

Also, two of the businesses most prominent in opposing the plan, Artel Inc. and Smiling Hill Farm, contend that the consent agreement is a sweetheart deal for Idexx, but does little for them and others located near the quarry.

“The agreement gives special rights to one company, Idexx,” Mark Robinson, a spokesman for Artel, said this week.

That 55-employee business, which manufactures carefully calibrated instruments to measure liquids used by science and health laboratories, said it plans to relocate to another community if the agreement is approved. Shock waves from blasting would have a negative impact on the company’s instruments and business reputation, Artel says. Robinson said that other communities, whom he declined to name, are already seeking to have Artel move there.

Warren Knight, president of Smiling Hill, also said that the agreement “offers Idexx benefits and rights that aren’t extended universally to all of the others.”

Knight hopes within the next couple years to build a 20-acre glass greenhouse where the farm would grow vine-ripe tomatoes and employ about 100 people. Shock waves and flying rocks from blasting could damage the greenhouse, Warren has said.

He and Robinson say that Idexx would benefit unfairly from such provisions in the consent agreement as the creation of a buffer zone in the part of the quarry closest to Idexx and the granting of authority to Idexx to ensure enforcement of the agreement.

Knight said the council should send the agreement back to the city’s mayor, Colleen Hilton, with the message: “This needs more work.”

However, the mayor and City Administrator Jerre Bryant, who both brokered the agreement, say it carries benefits for all city residents and businesses. Not only would it keep Pike and Idexx in the city, but it also contains protections for the whole area around the quarry, they say.

For example, Bryant said, the agreement provides buffers along Pike’s property on all sides, protecting all abutters, not just Idexx. And, he said, Idexx “is the only entity that requested independent enforcement authority.”

Both Bryant and the mayor said that the consent agreement – which would lead to the dismissal of litigation that Pike filed against the city if it is approved by the council and a judge – is largely based on the recommendations of the Spring Street Quarry Steering Committee.

That committee, convened by the mayor and made up of representatives from businesses, as well as residents and city officials, spent three months earlier this year coming up with a proposal to allow Pike to operate under certain conditions.

But the consent agreement also includes some tougher provisions, the mayor said at the press conference she called on Friday.

“This is a good day for Westbrook,” Hilton said.

The consent agreement follows the steering committee’s recommendations of limiting blasts to no more than eight times per year. Pike previously had said it needed to blast 20 times per year to be profitable. Idexx hadn’t wanted the blasts to exceed six per year.

Now, if the agreement is approved, blasting could take place later this year or in the spring for the first time since late 2008, Olson said. He said it would depend on how long it would take Pike to make $1 million of improvements the agreement also would require the company to make at the site.

The agreement would ensure that the two major taxpayers stay in Westbrook. Pike, an asphalt production company owned by an Ireland-based corporation called CRH, would be allowed to resume operations at the quarry, which has sat idle while the dispute was under way. With 1,300 employees in five New England states, including 400 in Maine, Pike is not sure how many jobs will be added in Westbrook when the quarry reopens, Olson said.

Idexx, a biotechnology firm that manufactures veterinary products for customers worldwide, says the agreement would allow it to continue with its plans to grow its world headquarters here in the city.

Idexx, located in the Five Star Industrial Park across the street from Pike, previously had threatened to locate its headquarters outside of Westbrook if restrictions weren’t put on the quarry.

Ayers said Idexx plans to start with a $5 million expansion to add 130 administrative employees to the 1,600 workers it currently has. A plan to build a $50 million world headquarters building in the city is still on the table, but won’t take place until the economy improves, Ayers said Friday.

Olson and Ayers struck a positive note at the press conference.

“Thank you for having the spirit of compromise,” Olson told Ayers.

Hilton got teary as she announced an agreement had been reached.

“Pardon me for being somewhat emotional, but this has been months and months of emotion,” Hilton said.

The issue still remains very volatile for some residents and businesses.

Artel, along with Smiling Hill Farm, both of which had been granted intervener status in the lawsuit Pike had filed against the city, have complained of being shut out of negotiations on the agreement.

Jack Wood, facilities manager for Artel, contended that the talks had been biased in Pike’s favor.

He said that even though many businesses and residents were against continued operation of the quarry, “the city for whatever reason took a position that compromise meant making a way for Pike to do business.”

Wood said that seismic waves from the blasts could not only impact its products but its worldwide reputation for quality.

“A high quality metrology lab located in proximity to a quarry…does not give one’s global high-profile customers the confidence to do business,” Wood said.

And some residents are unhappy that Pike would be allowed to resume operations under the agreement.

Westbrook Works, a group of local businesses and residents, is calling on the council to reject the agreement, saying negotiations involved “power politics” between two large companies and “locked out” smaller businesses and residents.

Tim Bachelder, spokesman for Westbrook Residents for Environmental Safety and Trust, said that if the agreement goes forward, he wants it to include a provision that Pike be required make a buyout offer to residents who want to leave. Bachelder, who has described himself as the quarry’s closest neighbor, said last week that he plans to ask the City Council to consider making such a change in the agreement.

However, City Council President Brendan Rielly said that while the council can vote the agreement up or down, it can’t unilaterally decide to make changes in it without Pike and Idexx agreeing to the them.

“The council has two basic choices,” Rielly said this week. “Approve the agreement or not.”

But he said that if the council feels changes were needed, another option might be to table the issue for a couple weeks and direct the administration to go back and try to negotiate those changes.

“It’s not that changes are impossible,” Rielly said. “It’s just that it requires all three parties to agree to them.”

Changes he’d like to see in the agreement include the creation of a renovation fund to help residents near the quarry pay for soundproofing insulation and other “quality of life” home improvements. He also would like a provision requiring Idexx to become more involved in helping Westbrook students learn about science.

However, Rielly stressed, the agreement is a compromise.

“Compromise is always a very difficult thing,” he said. “You don’t get everything you want.”

Rielly said he can’t speak for other councilors, but he said he wants to hear from the public on Monday before making a decision on the agreement.

Overall, Rielly said, he is “encouraged” that an agreement has been reached “on a fairly intractable issue.”

He said, “I think it shows tremendous leadership by the mayor in moving this forward.”

Rielly stressed that the city wants to work with Artel. “We certainly want to them to stay in Westbrook,’ Rielly said.

Hilton and Bryant also said they hope to convince Artel to stay.

“We value Artel as well as all the other businesses of the city,” Hilton said.

Bryant said Friday that if the company feels it must move from its current location, the city would work to find it another suitable site in Westbrook.

Kirby Pilcher, president of Artel, responded that day that “if there were a place that would fit our essential needs, that’s certainly a possibility.”

However, he said, the agreement to allow Pike to resume operations raises doubts that the city, which he said courted Artel to move into the Five Star Industrial Park in 1997, is truly committed to the interests of “clean” businesses in the park such as Artel.

However, Rielly said, the fact that the city could take such a controversial issue “and resolve it perhaps to no one’s complete satisfaction but to a certain level of resolution, shows that Westbrook plays fair.”

When it comes to homeowners who oppose the agreement, Reilly said, “I know they would like no blasting at all.” However, he said, “sometimes we have to make a decision based on the community as a whole.”

He said he believes that provisions of the agreement “provide sufficient protection for (residents).”

Olson said that the agreement would make the quarry “the most highly-regulated quarry I would say in New England and by far in Maine.”

Hilton said her interest in reaching a resolution on the issue began when she was campaigning for mayor last fall.

“I really heard throughout the entire community from people that really implored us to find a way to work something out,” Hilton said.

Some city residents favor the agreement. Ron Usher, who is with a group called Citizens for Balanced Growth in Westbrook, said Friday that he is “pleased with the result” of the negotiations.

Usher, who formerly was a Westbrook city councilor and also a state legislator, said, “There was a great deal of support (in the city) to keep Pike in Westbrook, as a matter of fact to keep them both (Pike and Idexx) in Westbrook and to work together.”

Usher said he has lived on Saco Street for 45 years, about one-quarter of a mile from the quarry. “I know when they blast, but, you know, you’re talking seconds,” he said.

Usher said blasting at the quarry has occurred throughout the years.

However, some residents and businesses such as Artel insist that blasting was non-existent to minimal before Pike bought the quarry from Blue Rock Industries in 2005.

The dispute involving Pike and Idexx came to a head about two years ago when Pike proposed building an asphalt plan on Spring Street near Idexx’s property.

Idexx threatened to build its world headquarter elsewhere.

Pike abandoned the asphalt plant proposal, but Idexx and other neighboring businesses said the rezoning was necessary for the area to become a gateway for high-tech businesses.

The City Council this summer ended up adopting a zoning change that rezoned the Five Star Industrial Park and land around it from industrial to manufacturing. The ordinance change outlawed quarrying in the area, which made Pike’s operation of the Spring Street illegal.

Ordinarily, when an area is rezoned to disallow certain business uses, an existing business that had been legally operating there would be able to continue as “grandfathered” use even though a new business of the same type wouldn’t be allowed in that zone.

However, in this case, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals had previously determined that Blue Rock, the company that Pike bought the quarry from, didn’t meet certain conditions of its 1968 quarry permit. When Pike took that ruling to court, a judge upheld the board’s finding. That meant Pike did not have a legal permit to operate the Spring Street quarry.

But Pike had argued in court that it is unfair to deny the company the right to operate the quarry after the city knowingly allowed quarrying there for about four decades. The case is set to be heard Sept. 21.

However, the consent agreement, if approved, would result in the dismissal of that litigation, and also a lawsuit Pike filed this summer after the council passed the zoning change outlawing quarrying the Spring Street area.

Some businesses and residents say that instead of a consent agreement, the city should simply let the lawsuit play out in court because the rulings so far had been against Pike.

But Rielly, who is an attorney, said Pike has some compelling arguments on its side. “No one has explained to me if this use (quarrying) was illegal 45 years ago, how it was allowed to continue,” Rielly said.

If Pike were to win the lawsuit, Rielly said, the company could operate much as it liked.

“They would be able to do their blasting and we would not have these protections,” he said.

And if the city won, he said, Pike likely would appeal the case. That could cost the city “tens of thousands of dollars,” Rielly said, and the case could drag on for years. He said that would create too much uncertainty for businesses unsure of what future impact Pike’s operations might have.

“Those are all reasons that led to a compromise,” Rielly said.