WESTBROOK – As Idexx Laboratories’ $38 million, 107,000-square-foot addition nears completion after breaking ground a year ago, an agreement on quarry rules for neighboring Pike Industries slowly inches forward.

The expansion sits next to the 550,000-square-foot Idexx main building in the Five-Star Industrial Park, and company officials said it could bring in more than 300 jobs and $15 million in tax revenue for the city.

Brian Rand, Idexx’s engineering manager, said the company hopes to start moving employees into the administrative headquarters on Aug. 1.

When Pike executives announced in 2008 plans to reactivate and expand the decades-old Spring Street quarry, located just down the road from Idexx, it nearly drove the veterinary equipment and water-testing equipment manufacturer to scrap the expansion plans.

In subsequent years, Westbrook officials have been working to facilitate the opening of the quarry and satisfy the concerns of Idexx and other neighbors.

The latest chapter is a familiar one – the long-negotiated consent order that stipulates when Pike can blast and perform other operations is again heading back to the Business and Consumer Court for final approval under Chief Justice Thomas Humphrey, following a vote by the Westbrook City Council on Monday. Councilors Paul Emery and Victor Chau were opposed.

Humphrey has reviewed the agreement the last three times and continued to find inconsistencies in the language in the consent order, making it hard to understand whether Pike or Westbrook officials can legally change operation requirements at the quarry.

According to the city’s attorney, Natalie Burns, language in two paragraphs was eliminated to make it clear that Pike does not have any special exceptions on the property and the land use ordinance matches up with the conditions for blasting and other regulations placed on the Pike property.

One vocal opponent to the agreement, Warren Knight, is still unhappy.

Despite a last-minute meeting between Knight, owner of Smiling Hill Farms and a Pike abutter, and Christian Zimmerman, Pike’s president, Knight is still against the project because he feels he isn’t getting the same treatment as bigger corporations. A similar meeting was held last month with another project opponent and abutter, Artel, but that meeting was successful and Artel dropped its objections.

Knight said Zimmerman offered an easement, “a piece of land 80 feet wide by 400 feet. I’ve got over 1,500 feet bordering Pike,” Knight said.

Zimmerman did not return a phone call for comment by Wednesday.

Knight said he has never seen an offer of any kind in writing from Pike to help ease his problem of only having a 20-foot vegetative buffer between his land and the quarry, while the other abutters have a more dense buffer, up to 100 feet in some areas.

At the City Council meeting Monday, Pike’s attorney, Sig Schutz, said Knight had been offered additional buffering on his property and a payment for use of the land.

Schutz said Smiling Hill Farm has more than 500 feet separating it from the quarry by a Central Maine Power easement.

“The right of way is like a road, there’s no buffering, there’s no growth allowed in that area to act as buffering. They [CMP] go in annually or semi-annually and gets rid of anything,” Knight said Tuesday.

Smiling Hill Farm still owns the land up to the Pike quarry, and, said Knight, if CMP ever left the area, the farm would still own and operate on that land, essentially in Pike’s back door. Knight said there is a fence and some small greenery around the dividing line between his property and Pike’s, but he can also see when looking over the fence enough land to create a more dense buffer on Pike’s side of the fence.

City Engineer Eric Dudley pointed out to councilors that CMP has agreed to allow buffering on the first 20 feet of its easement property, and birch trees and other shrubbery had been planted in the area.

Monday, Emery pointed to pictures provided by Knight of the buffering zone, showing that there was no vegetation more than 12 inches high in the area.

“These are not trees or shrubs. There is nothing there. This does not trap noise or dust. It doesn’t,” Emery said. “If you had 10 feet of trees, evergreens are nice, or a mix of evergreens and deciduous trees, those would trap dust. That might go a long way toward trapping dust drifting over the field. I don’t know if the dust makes it 540 feet and falls into field, but it probably wouldn’t make it past 10 feet of trees, a lousy 10 feet which we don’t have here.

You don’t have it, gentleman.

“So the point I think is this – if nothing else, in good faith you might want to consider putting in slats [in the fence around the Pike/Smiling Hill Farm line] and turfing, putting down soil, digging holes, planting trees and shrubs. Then you’d have a visual, noise barrier, dust barrier,” Emery said.

Humprey will review the consent order in the Business and Consumer Court this month.

According to Rick Gouzie, the city’s code enforcement officer, Idexx will look for an occupancy permit for its new Eisenhower Drive headquarters in August.

The new building offers lots of common spaces, Rand said, such as conference rooms, and has a gym and kitchen area on the first floor, while the second and third floors are designated as offices. Rand said the site can accommodate another 100,000-square-foot expansion in the future.

“We’re pretty close to being done. There’s still some work in the entry, windows and landscaping,” Rand said. “We’re on schedule, on budget. Things are going well.”

In 2010, Jonathan Ayers, Idexx’s chief executive officer, said at a press conference unveiling the plans for the new headquarters that if the rules on quarry operations, later to be known as the consent order, were not strict enough, the company would look to expand elsewhere.

“We need to make plans. We need to decide where we’re going to put our additional jobs,” said Ayers at the time.

That’s when the city stepped in and helped facilitate an agreement that outlined when blasting could occur, where blasting is measured from, how many loads can be transported in and out of the quarry and other regulations to keep both Pike and Idexx in the city.

Idexx