St. Mary's County Board of Appeals OKs Chaney Enterprises' Loveville gravel mine with conditions

The Saint Mary's County Board of Appeals on April 21 voted to approve CUAP 21-0026, the Loveville gravel-mining conditional-use application for a 168.4-acre, six-phase operation owned by South Star Limited Partnership and proposed to be operated by Chaney Enterprises. The board approved the application with conditions including a maximum of 100 loaded truck trips per day, weekday hours, Saturday maintenance hours, required local and state approvals, and state-compliant reclamation.

The permit matter matters because it permits large-scale extractive activity in the Rural Preservation District near Friendship School Road in Leonardtown and triggers additional state reviews (Maryland Department of the Environment and the St. Mary's County Soil Conservation District). The permit will affect local traffic, wetlands buffers, and water use while establishing conditions the board said must be satisfied before and during operations.

The applicant sought county conditional-use approval under Chapter 25 of the county's Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance for Use Type 82 (extractive industry). The project described in staff materials and the applicant's presentation calls for a six-phase gravel mine totaling 168.4 acres (phase sizes listed in the application as 29.0, 16.5, 30.0, 41.7, 22.4 and 28.8 acres). The applicant said the site would be worked in roughly 10-acre compartments, with concurrent mining and reclamation of adjacent areas; topsoil would be stockpiled and then respread as part of reclamation.

County staff and the applicant told the board that state reviews and permits remain required before operations begin. The applicant's attorney said Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) will not process the mandatory mining permit until the Board of Appeals issues the county conditional-use decision; the county Soil Conservation District must also sign off on erosion- and sediment-control designs before MDE acts.

Traffic and hours were a central topic. The operator, Chaney Enterprises' land manager Kyle Murray, said the company does not plan to increase the aggregate daily loaded-truck limit beyond 100 loads (the figure used in prior local permits) and described operational controls it uses, including vehicle cameras, a requirement that drivers not convoy, routes designed to keep trucks onto larger roads, and use of quieter “white noise” backup alarms. Traffic consultant Nancy Randall of Wells & Associates said the board’s requested intersections and roadway links were studied; with the passenger-car-equivalent factor applied to heavy trucks, the modeled intersections retain acceptable levels of service under the county standard even at the permitted maximum (100 loads/day = 200 truck movements). Randall also said the study accounted for employee trips and applied growth and COVID-era adjustments in current counts.

Environmental reviewers and the applicant's consultants described wetlands and erosion controls. Wetland scientist George Junkin said wetlands on the parcel were delineated and that state-required buffers (the parties referenced a 25-foot buffer under Maryland regulation) would be shown on permit plans. Engineer Mike Przybaki (Soltes) and Murray described sediment-trapping basins, earth berms and staged erosion control; the applicants said the mine’s excavation would form a depositional area and that initial clearing is the principal period of sediment-control risk. The applicant described a closed-loop washing system and estimated plant water use in the application materials; the operator said the typical plant recycles roughly 90 percent of wash water and that plant pumping capacity varies by equipment but is large (applicant cited an example of roughly 2,000 gallons per minute for a plant, with recycling the primary mitigation).

Public concerns raised during the hearing and referenced in letters included potential impacts to wetlands and local streams, dust and truck routing through Amish farming areas, noise, well and groundwater impacts, and long-term site reclamation. The applicant told the board it had removed from the proposed mine area a portion that had generated many of the written objections and that the company had met with local residents to explain changes. The applicant also described a reclamation aim of returning mined areas to agricultural fields and said it typically regrades slopes to meet MDE reclamation requirements (generally 3:1 slopes) and respreads topsoil. The operator estimated the resource at roughly two million tons with an expected life near 10 years at current extraction rates (200,000–250,000 tons per year), but the board record and staff materials show the life estimate as projection information rather than a permit condition.

The board adopted specific conditions listed on the record: a maximum of 100 trucks per day (industry parlance in the record was 100 loads/day), dust control (water truck/use of water and required state dust-control measures), approval by all required county and state agencies (including SCD and MDE) before disturbance, a small mobile processing plant with mobile office and scale only, restoration and reclamation to state standards, no onsite burning, and hours limited to 7 a.m.–5 p.m. Monday–Friday with Saturday 7 a.m.–noon for maintenance only and no Sunday operations. The motion also directed staff to prepare the formal order reflecting the board’s decision; staff said the order will be prepared within 60 days and that the statutory appeal period (30 days) applies once the order is signed and mailed.

Outcome: the board approved CUAP 21-0026 with the conditions entered on the record. Staff will prepare the order, and any aggrieved party may appeal the board’s decision to the circuit court after the order is signed and issued.

What’s next: the applicant must obtain required technical approvals (site-plan refinements, sight-distance and entrance work approved by County DPW, Soil Conservation District approval of erosion and sediment control plans, and final MDE mining permits). The board emphasized those state and county technical reviews are prerequisites to on-site clearing and mining activity; the applicant noted MDE and SCD reviews typically walk the limits of disturbance with field staking before clearing begins.