Plans for asphalt plant near Kechi pulled after opposition

Plans to build an asphalt plant near Kechi have been withdrawn after residents objected.

The proposed plant would have been on the west side of Woodlawn Boulevard at 63rd Street East. That’s about half a mile north of K-254, just outside the Kechi city limits. Flint Hills Materials, an asphalt production company, was the applicant.

“That application has been withdrawn and dropped,” senior city-county planner Bill Longnecker said Wednesday afternoon. “The case has been withdrawn. It’s closed and marked dead.”

People in the Kechi area had protested the zoning change that would have allowed the asphalt plant.

“We find the noise, odors and dust generated by such a plant to not be well suited to the requested area,” according to a protest with 36 signatures.

Flint Hills Materials managing member Chad Bledsoe said public sentiment was the main reason the application was pulled.

“We didn’t feel like it would be a location if the people didn’t want us there,” Bledsoe said. “We want to be in business in an area that works right for everybody, not just us.”

It would have been the company’s first plant. Bledsoe said the company would look for a different location.

The site was in an unincorporated area of the county. But it was close enough to Kechi for the city to have a say over the zoning case.

“If a zoning case is in a small city’s urban growth area, that affords them the opportunity to review the request and make a recommendation on the request at a public forum,” Longnecker said.

The Kechi Planning Commission rejected the plant last week. Six members voted it down and one member abstained.

They wrote that the plant’s smell, noise and traffic would “dominate the immediate neighborhood,” according to planning documents.

The Metropolitan Area Planning Commission had been set to hear the application on Thursday.

Sedgwick County Commissioner Dave Unruh said he was relieved the process didn’t get that far. The area falls in his northeastern Sedgwick County district.

“We don’t have to go through a protracted process of hammering out all the pros and cons of this,” Unruh said Wednesday. “It was clear that … folks in the area were opposed to this.”

Cathy Bonnesen, who lives a half-mile west of the proposed plant location, said she was very happy about the outcome. She had contacted local officials in opposition to the application.

“Everybody I’ve contacted in this whole process has been so willing to listen,” she said. “It has really proved to me that, when you have an issue that concerns you, you can really reach out to city government.

“I’m extremely happy to hear that Kechi will stay a healthy, family friendly place that it has always been.”

This story was originally published January 20, 2016 at 4:54 PM with the headline "Plans for asphalt plant near Kechi pulled after opposition."