Vermont mining companies stay grounded

Vermont Business Magazine, Jan 1994 by Barna, Ed

Bradford B Van Diver, who provided the foregoing description in "Roadside Geology of Vermont and New Hampshire," characterized the slate business, as of 1986, as "an old industry now in its declining years, suffering from high wastage, costly production, and competition from synthetic substitutes." But a check with companies there found he may have counted out slate too soon.

At US Quarried Slate Products, Andrew Andrushko, one of three partners, took time out to talk from showing. visitors from Japan around the lot. "We're doing a lot of work in Japan," he said, including a Toyota Art Museum project that took 9,000 square meters of slate.

Andrushko said local producers tend to hold local prices down, so an increasing amount of his company's product has been going downstate or to places like Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain. "Mexico is becoming a very good market for us. Over the last year, it's picking up more and more," he said.

"As my teacher told me, you can have a slice of the pie, or you can bake a new pie," Andrushko said. "So we're baking a new pie."

There's plenty of slate, Andrushko said: about 100 year's worth in the Scotch Hill 136 acres that have recently been in the Act 250 process; 500 to 600 years in another 340-acre parcel; and another 1,000 years or so in reserve.

The company has been sinking much of its profits lately into land acquisition, particularly in a narrow strip of land about five miles long centering on Poultney, where the harder slates are colorfast and do not turn brown with time. Andrushko said that is an attempt to head off the conflicts that occur when quarries are proposed near homes -- residences that keep appearing across the landscape, making it harder and harder to operate.

Could pro-active zoning help? Andrushko said he doubted it. "The whole town of Poultney and Fair Haven are built on slate. They would have to stop building at all. So, they're in between a rock and a hard spot there."

In Andrushko's view, the slowdown in the state's economy has not been accompanied by corresponding layoffs among Act 250 employees. Those regulators are now out in the field looking for things to do, and making Vermont a very difficult place to do business, he said.

"If the tree-huggers would get off our backs, we might start getting somewhere," Andrushko said. As it is, a company that gets a large order and needs to put a shed on its factory to house another saw must sometimes wait a year-and-a-half and can lose the contract, he said.

"You can't have a more environmentally sound product than a natural stone product," Andrushko said. "We don't create any toxic wastes or anything."

Joseph Taran, a partner in Taran Brothers Slate in Poultney, said, "People know this area is the slate industry. We're not like all of a sudden bringing a new computer business into the area. It's been made since the 1800s."

Andrushko said the state has aimed its development efforts at creating jobs in the $20,000 to $25,000 range, but in the Slate Belt people are looking for low-tech jobs more in the $14,000 to $18,000 range. "They don't want to be a computer scientist," he said.