Stop all this Excelaron noise 

The March 1 article on the Excelaron project (“Excelaron digs for project support”) implied that county planning staff had presented inaccurate information regarding the noise impacts in Huasna from the proposed project.

Huasna residents are concerned about the predicted increase in noise levels over the extremely quiet existing background rural sound levels in Huasna. Excelaron and their noise consultant are trying to convince the county to blindly apply a county noise threshold, despite the fact that this would allow a 100-fold increase in noise level.

Excelaron would also like the county to adopt a standard in which noise levels are averaged over a 24-hour period. Under this standard, your neighbor could play a stereo full blast for a brief period at any time in the middle of the night, but when averaged over a 24-hour period, it would not exceed the county noise threshold—even if the intensity of the noise was 100 times your normal nighttime background sound level. Adoption of this standard would set a dangerous precedent for future projects.

County staff has studied this project for almost five years and their conclusion is that the project should be denied. Let’s not set precedents that could destroy our quality of life so that a few foreign oil speculators can make money exporting small quantities of tar out of our county.