GRANBY — After a year of public hearings about a special permit for a gravel pit on Trompke Avenue, the Select Board this week approved the applicant’s request to withdraw their application based on a legal issue with the membership of the board.

LJ Development, a Belchertown septic system company, had applied for a special permit to harvest 10,000 cubic yards of gravel per year, which the company would use to install septic systems. The pit sits on 18 acres of land behind Trompke Avenue, which LJ Development would lease from the Trompke family.

Residents of Batchelor Street, which intersects Trompke Avenue, and a resident on Trompke Avenue have advocated against the project for its potential impacts on the nearby wetlands, air quality, traffic and noise.

Special Town Council Adam Costa received a letter this week from the applicant’s attorney Damien Berthiaume requesting the board approve a withdrawal of his client’s application without prejudice, which would allow LJ Development to apply for the special permit again at a later date.

According to Costa, Select Board member David LaBonte is ineligible to vote on the gravel pit application because he was elected after three sessions of the public hearing took place. This fact recently came to the attention of Costa and Berthiaume, as the infraction occurred prior to their involvement in the case.

“The problem here is, this is a special permit, and the law says for a special permit, a three-member board can only approve that special permit by way of a unanimous vote,” Costa said. “There’s no practical way that that can occur, because not all three of you are eligible to vote on the application.”

It’s possible to reconstitute the board and effectively start the public hearing process from scratch, Costa said. However, since Select Board membership will change again in May after Chair Crystal Dufresne announced she will not run for reelection, the board would require another reconstitution after elections.

“That (reconstituting the board) might make some sense if the applicant were ready today or anticipated being ready in a couple of weeks to proceed with the application,” Costa said. “It might also be appropriate if there was a belief that the current membership of your board was going to be stable over the course of the next three to six months. I don’t think either of those things are true.”

Additionally, LJ Development has not completed the series of studies and peer reviews requested by the Select Board in September 2024, and therefore it’s unlikely special permitting process will finish prior to the election.

“I think it would be a waste of time for not only you guys (the applicants), but the taxpayers and the Select Board to reconstitute it now and then to reconstitute it again later,” Dufresne said. “I really feel that when you guys are ready to come back, that you need to come back with all those studies.”

Other Select Board members Glenn Sexton and LaBonte agreed to approve the withdrawal without prejudice.

John McLaughlin, attorney representing several homeowners around Trompke Avenue, requested the Select Board consider a withdrawal with prejudice because the applicant has had six months to comply with the Select Board’s request for studies to make a decision on the permit. If the board took this path, Berthiaume wrote to Costa that the applicant would prefer to continue the current process.

“I suppose they could challenge the withdrawal with prejudice as an effective denial, which, in my experience, would simply result in the court remanding it to the board to gather additional information, so I don’t know that a withdrawal with prejudice makes sense in this case,” Costa said.

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.