Madison residents weigh in on biomass facilities as work group holds 1st listening session

MARSHALL - Though its biomass facility moratorium does not expire until May 2024, Madison County wants to allow enough time to adequately address the issue in its Land Use Ordinance.

As such, the county's biomass work group met with the public Sept. 19 at the Marshall library to hear recommendations from residents on proposed changes to the ordinance.

Development Services Director Brad Guth, County Land Use Attorney John Noor and Matthew Wilson, a strategic projects coordinator assisting the county on behalf of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, joined with members of the planning board to meet with residents and hear feedback.

One proposed amendment includes the definition for a biomass facility, which would be defined as "a facility that converts biomass sources into value-added products for public or private use. Biomass includes, but is not limited to, wood and wood processing waste, wood pellets, agricultural crops, and waste materials, biogenic materials in municipal solid waste, animal manure, and human sewage," according to a Sept. 14 draft of the amendments issued at the meeting.

Additional proposed amendments include zoning "Large Biomass Facilities" in Industrial land use districts, and relegating "Small or Temporary Biomass Facilities" to Agricultural-Open Space (AO), Residential Agriculture (RA), Commercial (C) or Retail Business (RB) land use districts, with Large Biomass Facility projects to go before the Board of Adjustment for a special use permit.

But a number of residents, including Carl Batchelder and Adam Schwartz felt the definitions were too broad.

"Regarding classifying something as large, you've got to keep this combustion going on, so maybe you set like an input BTU per hour threshold on fuel sources," Batchelder said. "If you're burning more than 450,000 BTUs per hour, you're a large. I don't know what the number is, but maybe some objective number when combustion is a part of what you're doing, so you steer them towards the industrial site versus residential."

Batchelder provided the example of a resident using a free-standing exterior wood-fired boiler to heat their home.

"I know that's not what we want, so that's why I said to specify the BTU input thing," Batchelder said.

The proposed land use ordinance changes will need to be approved by the Madison County Board of Commissioners.

"It seems like this is an awful lot to get to the commissioners in a short order, if you're going to include the small scale facilities," Batchelder said.

Schwartz owns Dirt Craft Organics, a farm and manufacturer of potting soils in Marshall.

"I'm in the early planning stages of building a composting facility where we will be taking in food waste and wood waste to generate a component of our potting soils," Schwartz said. "We've already contributed a good bit of resources toward this project, including hiring environmental engineers and purchasing land."

Schwartz said he felt the definition of a biomass facility "feels really vague."

"I mean, 'biogenic materials in municipal solid waste,' that sounds like food waste to me," Schwartz said. "This doesn't feel in line with the intent of a regulatory thing that would be regarding biomass facilities that are either incinerating or creating wood chips."

Schwartz said he wished to note the thorough permitting process required by the state Department of Environmental Quality that also differentiates between small and large composting facilities.

"So, a duplicate permitting loophole to jump through would feel like, as a small business owner, like an undue burden to also have to go through this process when there's already a state regulatory apparatus that is designed for composting," Schwartz said. "To me, I feel like composting is distinctly separate from biomass, so I'd like to see that reflected in the definition."

Marshall resident Forrest Gilliam, who serves as the town administrator, encouraged the work group to focus on the impact on the community rather than a private-versus-commercial analysis in defining a biomass facility.

"That has nothing to do with zoning, to me. What's the impact on the people around?" Gilliam said. "I think there are a lot of good things that could come, large and small, but those things come with tradeoffs, and obviously the community needs to be protected.

"I hope that as this goes forward, however long it takes, that each time there are updates there is a full discussion with the entire planning board, that there's a chance for the public to hear what's going on, and that there's not a last-minute push to do something that people haven't had a chance to look at," Gilliam said.

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Maxine Dalton raised the issue of traffic as a result of the facilities.

"Some of the small counties in North Carolina and North Georgia say it's not the site, it's the traffic, because this kind of facility can bring in trucks from a 12-county area, bringing in wood and manure and whatever biogenic material is," Dalton said. "The diesel trucks coming in and unloading and loading and going back out again apparently create huge problems. So, that's something to think about, how we would deal with that."

Dalton said she also objected to one of the proposed changes to the submittal requirements, which would stipulate a site plan location's facility perimeter to be at least 100 feet from a nearby residence.

Dalton said she didn't think that was enough space.

"I think about where I live and a biomass facility 100 feet from my house? That's not far enough," Dalton said. "So, I guess it's just more a question of how the zoning map looks to see if the Industrial areas are set away from existing neighborhoods."

According to Guth, there are currently nine parcels that are zoned Industrial throughout the county.

Guth said of the larger biomass facilities throughout the Southeast, in many cases these counties did not have biomass facilities included in county ordinances, and therefore could not regulate them in zoning.

"We looked at a number of the larger-type facilities, including one in Craven County, North Carolina and a couple in Virginia, and we looked at those to try to find guidelines that we could look at for our own work," Guth said. "What we found was that a lot of those places did not regulate those as a special use."

The development services director said the work group plans to hold another listening session in the near future.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Madison County biomass work group hears residents' feedback