17 October 2019 (click here for a pdf version)
To: CRC Supporters
Dear Friends,
I hope you have had a restful summer — proud of CRC‘s stand at the LPAT Hearing, but free of the pervasive Hidden Quarry anxiety. CRC Board members have taken a break, but have now re-convened to follow this saga to its conclusion.
As we await the LPAT decision on the Hidden Quarry application, CRC Directors are focusing on meeting our outstanding financial obligations as the last step in closing the great quarry adventure!
Here are just a few key points as background:
- Our community has raised in excess of $750,000 over the seven years since the quarry application was dropped into our midst, an extraordinary level of support for a small community.
- A year ago at our CRC Public Meeting we announced that our budget for the LPAT Hearing was $350,000 including expert and legal fees.
- Although our position a year ago was to present the best case that we could afford to the LPAT, the Tribunal required our list of witnesses well in advance of the Hearing, necessitating an early decision on the number of witnesses we would present. We decided that we could not cut essential components of our case based on the cash on-hand or pledged at that moment in time, and therefore committed to costs that exceeded the funds-in-hand.
- We continued to raise funds in order to close the gap – we maximized fund-raising event revenues, including the golf tournament and the Siberry/Gordon concert in June, we launched a gofundme campaign, and continued our outreach for seek individual donations.
- We sincerely believe that the costs incurred were well justified. The legal representation provided by Chris Barnett and the testimony of all of our witnesses proved to be essential, exceptional and everything we hoped for in our effort to prevent this quarry from being approved.
Our current financial challenge can be summarized with a few numbers:
- We currently have a total of $114,000 payable to our legal and expert witness team.
- We have cash on hand totalling $29,000.
- Conclusion: We estimate that it will take approximately $85,000 in addition to the cash on hand to bring closure to the matter.
We are approaching, once again, all of our supporters. This letter is my request for your help in slaying the deficit. This is it, friends; win or lose—and I passionately hope and pray for a win. If you have donated to CRC in the past, we are asking you for one more donation. If you haven’t been able to help us financially in the past, we are asking you to think seriously about all that our community has achieved over these past seven years and to help us meet this last challenge. Intrepid volunteers have already initiated two great CRC fund-raising events for the fall, the details of which will be made known very soon. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with questions.
Thank you for being a part of the remarkable Hidden Quarry story starring a determined and dedicated community.
Sincerely
Doug Tripp
President
(click here for a pdf version)
