Photo courtesy to Village of Downs website.
The Downs Village Board passed a special use permit for the build of a Roanoke Concrete Plant 4 to 3 last night, June 3 2021.
Downs resident Beau Davis said there was a petition that had 440 signatures proposed at the meeting to stop the company from coming in.
The population of Downs is just over 1,000.
Mayor of Downs Mike James, who broke the tie and voted ‘yes’ to the special use permit, said the petition had quite a few Tri-Valley parents, not residents who are tax payer citizens.
“Our job as a board is to listen to the taxpayers, the folks who voted us in. There’s a lot more of a silent majority that’s actually there than versus those who signed the petition,” said James. “We didn’t have time to go through and find out what those numbers are, but we also felt with the assessment done by our police department, from a health and safety standpoint, that the concerns that were outlined in the petition, I saw, were addressed in those mitigation procedures.”