Headline in Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Quarry doesn’t dig development: Operator fears new residents will gripe about dust, noise:
In the usual tug of war over suburban development, residents clamor to keep noisy businesses away from their backyards. But in this no-stoplight village, a stone quarry operator wants the backyards to stay away from his business.
Bill Halquist, the president of Sussex-based Halquist Stone, is objecting to a $30 million development that could bring 220 condominium and apartment units – and, he says, a population of new residents to complain about noise and dust from his processing plant.
“They wouldn’t let us put a plant 54 feet away from somebody’s house,” Halquist said. “So why are they putting a house 54 feet from our plant?”
He has every reason to fear. Look at how people who have moved into homes abutting highways have agitated for sound barriers when they discover why the properties were so cheap, or residents who have moved into neighborhoods near gun clubs that have forced the existing gun clubs to close.
Some would say it’s the American way, since settlers have displaced the native Americans and have remade the country to suit themselves, but criminey, haven’t we gotten past that yet?
I guess we have; now instead of smallpox and bullets, now we abuse the power of the majority and the overweaning, controlistic government.
