BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Union County commissioners, acting as their own planning and zoning board, approved rezoning a nine-acre parcel near Worthington Springs that would make possible the construction of a crematorium.
Garrett Milton, owner of Archer-Milton Funeral Home, presented the application for the zoning change from Residential Single Family Mobile Home to Rural Residential during a March 17 meeting.
Milton emphasized to commissioners his company’s service to the community and told them that since he purchased the funeral home in 2018. Calls to the business had risen from 118 to 178 annually.
Milton said some of the concerns he has heard about a potential crematory on Little Springs Road are odor, noise, and smoke.
The funeral home owner showed the audience a video he took of a crematory in Starke. He pointed out that there were houses all around the facility and that while there was no visible smoke from the operation, it did produce heat vapor.
“These crematories run around 17, 1800 degrees,” he said.
Not residential
Milton also addressed the concerns that the facility would produce toxic pollutants. He cited a report by the Crematorium Association of North America, which claimed the Environmental Protection Agency found no significant pollutants from crematories.
Milton also pointed out that the Jones-Gallagher Funeral Home crematory in Starke is less than 500 feet away from the Windsor Manor nursing home.
“And to me, if there were concerns of health, I can assure you the nursing home right there would probably raise them, and they would probably shut down that crematory,” he said.
Milton said he chose the Little Springs Road location because of a Florida Public Utilities natural gas line close by, adding natural gas is a cleaner and cheaper alternative to propane.
Milton also disputed the claim of his plan’s critics that the proposed site is in a residential area.
“If we go in that southeast corner of our parcel, guess how many homes are within 500 feet?” he asked commissioners. “Zero. If we go in that southwest corner, zero homes within 500 feet. So, is this considered residential?
The business owner said the Jones-Gallagher facility in Starke has 42 homes within 500 feet. He also showed commissioners a photo of the Williams-Thomas Funeral Home crematory in Gainesville, where he said new homes had recently been built nearby.
“What’s residential?” he continued. “I would think Bradford County, with 42 homes within 500 feet, is residential. Little Springs Road with zero.”
Milton also addressed the complaint that his facility would increase traffic on Little Springs Road. He pointed out that, with the current zoning, he could put 18 mobile homes on the property, and those additions would increase traffic vastly more than his proposed facility.
Concerns over emissions
Trey Tucker, who told commissioners he lives near the proposed site, challenged Milton’s claim that the area is not residential. He called Milton’s 500-foot line accurate but “convenient.”
“I could hit four or five homes with baseballs from that property,” he said, adding that seven or eight children live on the other side of the pipeline from the proposed crematory site.
“And as far as some of the points about what they’re doing in Gainesville and what they’re doing in Starke,” Tucker continued, “that doesn’t hold much water with me.”
Tucker added that he did not trust the emissions that would come from the facility. He pointed out that the emissions data Milton presented were for new incinerators.
“I work on air conditioning systems, and I know that you have a loss of efficiency over time,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of rechecking in on these things.”
Gioia Hessler told commissioners she was concerned about the particles that would be emitted from the facility.
“The particles can cause asthma,” she said. “They cause heart disease that causes lung cancer. You have issues with— if you’re pregnant, one study showed that if you’re pregnant, you have a higher chance of having a stillborn baby. And if you manage to have a live baby at birth, there’s a higher chance for brain abnormalities. There’s just a lot of different things that go into it health wise.”
Hessler also claimed that crematory regulations in the U.S. are lax compared to other parts of the world.
“When you look at, for example, the U.K.,” she told commissioners, “they have two to three football fields between their crematorium and any residential buildings.”
Steven Rowdy told commissioners he lives directly across the street from the proposed site. He complained that Milton never notified him by mail or in person that he was considering putting a crematory approximately 1000 feet from his residence.
“I’ve lived in this residence for 27 years,” Rowdy said. “I’ve worked weekends, countless hours of overtime to help pay this property off. I never in a million years thought that we’d be standing here today talking to you guys about possibly putting a crematory right across the street from my house, 200 yards from where I lay my head at night.”
Would you want it upside your place?
Woody Lane told commissioners that he worried about the impact of the crematory on Little Springs Road.
“You have to move over in a lot of parts of it to allow another vehicle to pass,” he said.
Lane also pointed out that the facility in Starke is near State Road 100, and the Williams-Thomas crematory is on Gainesville’s Main Street.
“Yeah, they’re used to the traffic,” he said of the other areas. “Little Springs Road is not used to any kind of commercial traffic.”
Steven Hessler called into question the EPA data Milton cited in his presentation.
“The first thing you see on Google about the EPA when you type in ‘EPA wrongdoing’ is it says they like to put business ventures ahead of human health,” Hessler told commissioners. “So, to just go off the EPA standing, they like businesses, and they like money more than they care about people’s health.”
Hessler, the husband of an earlier speaker, Gioia Hessler, also downplayed Milton’s comparisons of his proposal to the Starke and Gainesville operations.
“If I wanted to live in Gainesville or Starke—” he told commissioners, “if I wanted to live where my neighbor could see through my window, I would live there. I live in Union County because it is small. I love that it’s small. I love that it’s rural. I don’t want to turn it into Gainesville.”
Hessler said he, like Steven Hessler, distrusted information on crematories from the EPA.
Mike Lynch told commissioners that he knew property values in his neighborhood would go down if a crematory were built there.
“Would you want it upside your place? Yours?” he challenged commissioners. “None of you would want it. Be honest about everything. Nobody wants it next to their place. Nobody wants it next to their land. Nobody wants the fumes coming up. You can’t believe what the EPA says.”
Nobody wants to live near a strip club
Avery Drawdy told commissioners that the chemicals released when dead bodies are incinerated can damage the health of the living.
“There’s heavy metals in all of us,” he said. “There’s heavy metals in all of us and they go right in the air, and then they go into our lungs. There’s also the radiation from people who lost their battle with chemo, and that radiation goes right in the air.”
Drawdy also declared that nearby property values would decline if the facility were built.
“If a landfill got put there, nobody wants to live next to it,” he said. “Nobody wants to live next to a strip club. It has the same effect as a strip club. I mean, this is not good.”
Jack Asbury told commissioners that he moved to the neighborhood because it was quiet, residential, and rural.
“I lived in downtown Gainesville,” he said. “That’s not really my thing. I love where I live.”
Asbury described walking with his wife after dinner, walking to and from Blackwell Church and seeing other residents, jogging, and walking along the nearby rural roads.
“My main issue is that we didn’t choose to be in a commercial area,” he said. “They’ve chosen to come to us, and I just don’t think that’s right.”
Under questioning from Commission Chair Channing Dobbs, Milton assured commissioners that he would erect fencing and shrubbery around the facility.
Milton also promised Dobbs that he would not cremate bodies from other funeral homes and that the facility would only process bodies from his two locations.
Another vote required
Under questioning from Commissioner Melissa McNeal, County Attorney Russell Wade said that with the rezoning approved, commissioners would have to approve a special exemption for the crematory to be built. During that process, the board could stipulate setbacks, fencing, vegetation, and other requirements.
Commissioner Donna Jackson emphasized that the evening’s vote to change the land use and zoning for the nine acres was strictly to change the parcel’s density for homes. She said the current zoning would allow 18 mobile homes, and the new zoning would allow nine homes on the nine acres without the special exception. Jackson repeated Wade’s assertion that an additional special exception vote would be required to approve the crematory.
Jackson also responded to Lynch’s question about whether she would want a crematory near her home.
“If you ask me if I would want nine homes or 18 mobile homes or a crematorium, I’m going to choose a crematorium every time,” she declared.
Commissioner Mac Johns agreed with the plan’s opponents that property values around the facility would fall. However, he rejected their claims that emissions from the facility would harm nearby residents, and that Little Springs Road could not handle the impact of the crematorium.
Johns moved to deny the land use and zoning change, but his motion died for lack of a second.
McNeal’s motion to approve the changes passed 4-1.
