News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
According to Todd Taylor, the company will shortly begin road work and brush clearing on the mine property, which the company has purchased from Crown Pacific.
"We've got quite a bit of work to do on the property itself," Taylor told The Nugget.
Taylor plans to begin operations at the site in September.
"We are anticipating to start doing some crushing after Labor Day," Taylor said.
The initial haul from the mine will be stockpiled in Hap Taylor and Sons' storage yard in Redmond. However, Taylor noted, the company expects to serve an active market in the Sisters area.
"You'd be surprised how many calls we've got from Sisters asking if there's rock for sale yet," Taylor said.
The mine was the focus of intense controversy in Sisters for a year as two groups of Sisters area residents fought to stop the operation before it started.
That fight ended in January after two days of mediation talks with Hap Taylor and Sons allayed the most pressing concerns of mine opponents.
Under an agreement hammered out in the talks, Hap Taylor & Sons agreed to cut their maximum yearly extraction from the site in half--to 240,000 cubic yards--until transportation improvements such as a couplet through or a bypass around Sisters are completed.
The mine operator also agreed to cut truck trips from the mine from 13 per hour down to seven trips per hour.
Todd Taylor told The Nugget that the mediation agreement restricts truck traffic to Highway 20 through town.
Taylor said that the operation would start relatively small and would not be up to full capacity in the near future.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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