James Terry Lofton’s plans to build a permanent home for his Bowling Green Recycling business are on hold, at least until he can prove to the City-County Planning Commission of Warren County that he won’t pollute groundwater or create a mess.
Lofton asked commissioners Thursday evening to allow rezoning of a four-acre tract he and his wife own at 6130 Nashville Road, across from the entrance to the South Central Kentucky Industrial Park. He wants the land rezoned from light industry to heavy industry, and asked for a conditional-use permit for a metal-recycling transfer station.
But several surrounding residents came to oppose the project. More than three hours of discussion revolved around concerns for the environment and the site’s appearance, said Andy Gillies, executive director of the planning commission. Lofton’s rezoning request was denied 7-4.
“Because of that denial, we never pursued action on the conditional use permit,” Gillies said.
Lofton was disappointed in the denial, but intends to be back with a revised proposal.
“Our plans are to withdraw the existing application and refile at a later date,” Lofton said Friday. “We want to be a good neighbor to the people in our community. We had some negative comments last night because ... we did not convey our operation procedures very clearly, and all our neighbors could envision was a scrapyard. We’re not a scrapyard, and we don’t want a scrapyard.”
The project needs to overcome the negative image opponents painted and convince the community that the project will be environmentally sound, he said.
“We’re longtime residents of Bowling Green, and we’re not going to do anything to pollute our homeland,” Lofton said.
Attorney Kevin Brooks represented several opponents, including two adjacent landowners.
“I think that the issue that we spent the most time on, for certain, was the neighbors’ feelings that the applicant made inadequate provision for groundwater, to prevent contamination of groundwater,” Brooks said. “We felt like that the applicant’s testimony about that was less than convincing, about exactly how it would be addressed. What we would like to have seen was more than just saying, ‘I promise to abide by the law.’ We would like to have seen a specific plan about how that was gong to take place.”
That’s already on the way, according to Lofton.
“We have today drafted a groundwater protection plan for the site,” he said. “We have contacted the state EPA for stormwater permits for the site. Those plans and permits will be moving forward, to get them in place to ensure that we have an adequate protection of the groundwater and stormwater.”
Area residents are concerned about visual pollution as much as water contamination, Brooks said.
“Another issue was the notion of the proposed use not being what you want on a thoroughfare into town,” he said. “Some people would be tempted to call it a junkyard – the applicant certainly wouldn’t call it that.”
Although the land in question is just across Nashville Road from other industrial uses, a metal-recycling transfer station is less visually acceptable than the nearby factory buildings on large lawns, Brooks said.
The industrial park itself is in the city of Bowling Green, but the proposed recycling station site lies across Nashville Road in an unincorporated area, Gillies said.
Lofton has a 4,100-square-foot building under construction on the site, with split-face concrete and a metal building for the intended warehouse. In his opinion, the building will be “far nicer than anything in the area, on that side of the road anyway,” Lofton said. “We are actively looking at the site plan to update it, to incorporate additional landscape screening along the backside of the property.”
At Thursday night’s meeting, Lofton committed to a 20-foot-wide, 200-foot-long buffer of evergreen trees, spaced about every six feet, on the back side of the tract, he said.
The front of the lot would be screened by a slat fence, with evergreens in front of it, and more trees and shrubs would be planted on the south side of the building.
The initial plan called for storing scrap metal in outside bins. Opponents were concerned that rain on the piles would cause corrosion to seep into groundwater.
“That was a concern from both an aesthetic viewpoint for the community, and it also addresses a great deal of the stormwater and groundwater protection,” Lofton said.
He discounted that, saying that material would stay on site no more than a few days, not long enough to rust; but in any case, that won’t be a problem in his revised application.
Lofton is working on revising the plan, possibly adding a second building, to place all storage bins and their contents inside.
“There wasn’t anything last night that was insurmountable,” he said.
Lofton has been operating the business without a permanent base since January, he said; he uses trucks to gather scrap from industries within a 100-mile radius and haul it to recyclers. The planned $400,000 transfer station would provide temporary storage, and take aluminum cans and copper from the general public for recycling, Lofton said. Bowling Green (Kentucky) Daily News