Mancos residents cleared their throats at last week's trustee meeting, demanding the town's largest manufacturer clear the air.

"Mancos is always going to be an old, dusty cowtown, but we don't need these foreign objects," said Anthony Maestas.

Maestas and his wife, Vicki, made their fifth trek to town hall last week seeking assistance from town trustees to force Western Excelsior to clean up its act. In lieu of solutions in the past, Anthony Maestas claimed company officials have instead given them hams on Christmas.

"I guess they were trying to make us happy through our stomachs, I don't know," he said. "They weren't trying to fix the problems."

The Maestas couple has a four-year-old granddaughter who suffers from asthma, and every time she visits their home at 866 Riverside Drive, the little girl has trouble breathing. They said the problem is due to pollution caused by Western Excelsior.

"We've lived here for four years, and it's just gotten worse," said Anthony Maestas. "I'll be satisfied when it's fixed. Time will tell."

Sawdust and mulch from Western Excelsior manufacturing has even "caked" on top of a rock garden in the Maestas backyard. The garden serves as a memorial to their daughter, who passed away. Company officials promised in April to clean up the mess, but the guarantee remained unfilled three months later, prompting them to seek remedy again at last week's town trustee meeting.

"We're not talking about a layer of dust," said Vicki Maestas. "It's several inches of deep mulch."

Company response

Operating two shifts, Western Excelsior uses approximately 160,000 pounds of aspen trees every day in its manufacturing operations, said business unit manager Kyle Hanson. He told a reporter on Monday that about a quarter of the raw material, up to 20 tons daily, ends up as a byproduct, either in the form of sawdust or mulch.

"You can imagine what 20 tons of this material looks like," he said. "You could probably cover the entire town three inches deep."

Hanson argued the company is not knowingly dumping waste materials anywhere, citing the company spends up to $100,000 annually to transport byproduct to appropriate waste management facilities.

Hanson explained that a majority of the byproduct is being captured through manufacturing techniques, but admitted that less than 1 percent of the byproduct does escape into the atmosphere. The particulates escaping the facility, Hanson said, are not considered air pollution under Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.

"There is a small percentage that is carried out and picked up by the wind," Hanson said. "We are generating more particulates than we should, but we're trying to fix that."

Company officials told town trustees last week they have identified what they believe to be the source of the contamination. Hanson said that within 12 months, the company hopes to adopt procedures to lower escaping particulates by roughly a third, and within 24 months lower particulates by nearly two-thirds.

To better understand the problem, the company conducted a collection survey on July 3, monitoring 24 sites across town. The survey was conducted over a three-hour period during full production, Hanson said.

Using petroleum jelly to collect airborne particulates, the survey was an attempt to determine the amount of company-generated particles that fell on one square meter per hour. According to the survey, Riverside Drive residents, across Monte Street from the facility to the east, receive the brunt of the problem. Approximately 4.7 million microscopic particles were collected in one hour at the heaviest contamination zone, the Maestas family home, Hanson told town trustees.

Town response

Town Administrator Andrea Phillips said complaints about company truck traffic date back to 2005, grievances of noxious smells date back to 2007 and protests about sawdust and particulate matter have been received from residents since at least 2011.

"The town wants to work with Western Excelsior towards a speedy but thorough resolution on the particulates that is fair to both neighbors and the company," Phillips said.

At last week's meeting, Mayor Rachel Simbeck thanked company officials for acknowledging the problem, but added that Western Excelsior's request for more time to resolve the issue was hard to swallow.

"This has been going on for a long time, and asking for more patience is going to be hard," she said.

Town trustee Queenie Barz agreed, saying she hopes the survey data can be used to help resolve the issue once and for all.

"All of our patience is wearing thin, but we have to give them a chance to do what they say they are going to do," she commented.

Simbeck instructed company officials to periodically update town officials of the company's containment efforts in helping to clear the air. Company officials agreed to launch a new blog site to keep residents informed of future facility improvements. The online blog is scheduled to be available at www.dust.westernexcelsior.com by the end of the month, Hanson said.

Hanson promised the company would continue exploring short-term solutions, and said long-range permanent plans include overhauling the manufacturing process completely.

"What we haven't been able to do is specifically address prevention issues at these nearby residences," Hanson said. "As a whole, we have spent more than $1 million over the last eight or nine years to make things better."

Past efforts, considered as Band-aids by both town and company officials, include constructing a fence along the property line to serve as a buffer, replacing the facility's entire air filtration system, reducing the speed of the main blower, renting a warehouse space in Dolores to store byproducts, and reversing fan directions to pull air into the manufacturing facility rather than blow it out.

"We've done a lot, but we acknowledge are efforts haven't been effective," said Western Excelsior president Zach Snyder.

Snyder was tapped as president of Western Excelsior, headquartered in Evansville, Ind., two years ago. The 75,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in Mancos employs approximately 120 people. The company produces soil erosion and stabilization products used in civil engineering projects.

While particulate matter has lightened in recent months, the problem still remains, according to Maestas' next-door neighbor Tom Nunn. He explained that on "bad days" it was impossible to enjoy an outdoor meal in his yard, for example.

"It's gone way past just dust," said Nunn. "It's them dumping their garbage on our property, and they don't seem to give a damn."

tbaker@cortezjournal.com