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Can a quarry open with a non-notified resource consent? Yes, it can happen, as HUGH DE LACY explains.  Quitting school at 14 is not the recommended start to a career path in quarry ownership, but within five years of doing so Geoff Scurr (pictured) had bought out the local Waikouaiti earthmoving company and was well on his way.
And when he finally did open up the Kilmog Quarry 25 kilometres north of Dunedin in 1998, he managed to achieve it by way of a non-notified resource consent. Six months ago he added a 50-year-old gravel pit to his resources on an existing-use consent. Quarrying makes up probably only a quarter of his business’s revenue, but that’s looking set to increase. Geoff, the proprietor of GS Contracting in the East Otago township of Waikouaiti, has built his business on the basis of a love for bulldozers and tight money management. He was already exercising the latter skill when he quit school in 1984 and started working for the Silver Peaks County Council, labouring and mowing lawns. He rounded off his informal apprenticeship as a 16-year-old by driving a dozer clearing scrub in Queensland for a year before returning to Waikouaiti. The only machinery work he could find was a couple of days a week with local contractor Allan Fox, supplementing his income with more farmwork – rouseabouting in shearing gangs and driving trucks.
Geoff’s cultivation work with the dozer enabled him to pay the business off completely within the three years, and in 1990 he successively added a new John Deere 2850 wheeled tractor and a second-hand 4250 to his plant, to be followed soon after by a grader and a digger. The main thrust of Geoff’s business remained cultivation, along with farm-tracking, dozing fencelines and clearing scrub. He built it up to a full-time seasonal staff of 14, but got tired of never being at home with his young family, so cut the operation back to a five-day week and the present five full-timers, including himself. He got into quarrying quite early in his business career when friend and local farmer Russell Clayton said there was an old basalt quarry on his property with plenty of life left in it. Together they did the rounds of the neighbours and, by buying up one potential objector, they were able in 1998 to get a resource consent issued by the Dunedin City Council on a non-notified basis – something unthinkable now in most parts of New Zealand.
One of the quarry’s first clients was the late Howard Patterson who used Geoff’s basalt to establish the country’s biggest egg farm near his home in Waikouaiti. Big local forests like Herbert and Silver Peak have been other major clients, as well as public roading contractors. The type and condition of the basalt varies across the quarry site, from the soft and crumbly rotten rock that can be scooped up with a loader for use on farm tracks and residential sub-divisions, to hard and shiny rocks hand-picked by a landscaping client for transport on truck and trailer to the Nelson market. There is also a small local market for such rocks among stone-masons. While most of the rock can be broken up with a ripper, Geoff hires the big Dunedin firm of Blackhead Quarries to do any blasting that’s required. The quarry is at the bottom of the Kilmog Hill northern approaches to Dunedin. It’s close to SH1 but can’t be seen from it, and although the resource consent stipulates the profile of the Hammond Hill on which it is sited can’t be changed, there’s a good 30 years of life in it yet.
The company’s depot is just off the main street of Waikouaiti in a 12 metre by 12 metre two-storey building that Geoff put up in 1990 with the help of a few mates, one of them a builder. To keep their costs down, he and wife Tracey lived upstairs in the depot for eight years, but now with children Jack, eight, and Olive, five in May, they’ve bought a 12 hectare lifestyle block just out of town. There they fatten cattle off the 200ha tussock run they’ve acquired further out, and on which they run 60 cows, grow 20 hectares of swedes and are planting 30 hectares of pines under the Government’s forestry grant scheme. GS Contracting’s main plant inventory these days extends to a Caterpillar D8K and a Komatsu D65EX bulldozer, an International 520B and a Komatsu D415 loader, a Caterpillar 130G grader and three diggers – one ZX225 and one ZX200 Hitachi, and a Sumitomo SH120 for section work.
It’s tricky work because the cable is only 13mm thick and can’t be cut-and-spliced: it has to go intact through, or under, any obstacle, and at one stage two kilometres of it had to be unravelled, fed under the main road, then rolled up again on the other side. The cable-laying progresses at an average of one kilometre a day, but a good day can see five kilometres completed. Between the quarries, farm and forestry work, Geoff Scurr has built up a tidy little business for himself and his family in North Otago, but despite his own successes he reckons he’ll be telling his kids, Jack and Olive, that quitting school at 14 is not an example he wants them to follow.
Q&M Vol.7 No.1 February-March 2010 |
By then Fox was pushing 70, and when Geoff gave him notice of his intention to skip back across the Tasman and seek mining work in Kalgoorlie, Fox offered to sell him the business for $92,000. Itt comprised a Komatsu D40 dozer, a Landrover, a diesel tank and three sets of discs and harrows. By then Geoff had managed to save $20,000, but in the financial climate of the time the banks wouldn’t have looked at him. So Fox accepted $10,000 up-front with the rest left in the business for two years being paid off at $1000 a month.
Geoff initially paid Clayton a royalty for the average of 10,000 cubic metres he takes annually, but in early 2006 bought the 16 hectares on which the quarry is sited. Then, as now, he had the basalt crushed on contract by the Oamaru company Road Metals, and today it produces specified roading materials like AP20, AP32 and AP65, as well as rotten rock and drainage stone.
Geoff has lately opened up a clay-based gravel pit, also south of Waikouaiti, for which he supplies aggregate for gravel roads, cow-lanes and house foundations. Called Tetui Gravel, the pit had been operating for half a century, ensuring it an existing-use consent, and while Geoff hasn’t had much out of it yet he expects it to be a financial goer before this year is out.
A new line of work the company’s entered into is fibre-optic cable-laying for Telecom. With a 1.2 metre deep ripper operated behind the Komatsu dozer, Geoff recently completed the 33 kilometre stretch from Balclutha to Owaka.