SWAMPSCOTT — The Select Board voted to extend the excavating company Holcim Inc.’s earth-removal permit by six months Wednesday night, while the town and the company work to resolve Holcim’s pending litigation against the Town of Swampscott.
Since the Select Board initially voted to approve a three-month permit extension on June 26 to give both parties time to resolve the lawsuit, Select Board member Peter Spellios said discussions between Holcim and Swampscott have not yet produced any tangible results.
“There were ongoing discussions between the parties to try and resolve the litigation. Those haven’t, to date, materialized into a definitive result,” Spellios said.
Holcim, formerly known as Aggregate Industries, has conducted excavating operations at the quarry on the border between Swampscott and Salem for more than a century.
In November 2021, Holcim filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Boston, claiming the town regulated and restricted Holcim’s business operations in order to take the site — physically and through regulation — after the town restricted its earth-removal permit.
The company also claimed that by limiting the number of blasts Holcim can carry out each year to 50 and limiting the depth to which the company can blast, the town’s regulations would cost Holcim $34 million in lost revenue throughout the course of 19 years and render parts of the operation useless.
When Select Board Chair David Grishman suggested that the board vote to approve another four-month permit extension, Select Board member MaryEllen Fletcher proposed extending Holcim’s permit by six months instead.
In response, Spellios said that the town’s Earth Removal Advisory Committee had drafted a separate earth-removal permit in the event that the litigation could not be resolved and had limited its permit extension to only a few months at a time for that reason.
“ERAC has actually put forth a different permit than the one that we’re currently extending for this year, so if these were to break down, for example, and hypothetically speaking a settlement wasn’t to be had, ERAC has put forth some recommendations on this year’s permit,” Spellios said.
Spellios added that a four-month permit extension would not differ fundamentally from a six-month one, and supported Fletcher’s suggestion. The Select Board voted unanimously to extend Holcim’s permit until the end of March and set an exact date at its Oct. 4 meeting.
