Peckham Thanks the Pleasant Valley Community. 

At Peckham Materials we take our mission to be sustainable very seriously. This requires strategic planning, utilizing a wide variety of expertise, and partnering with organizations such as the Dutchess Land Conservancy. Our operation provides critical materials for infrastructure production and maintenance as well as more than 45 well-paying jobs. Planning for a sustainable future means looking ahead to ensure we can maintain our business, continue to improve our operations, and provide livelihoods.

Recently, we presented a rezoning petition to the Town of Pleasant Valley. Peckham Materials drafted the petition believing it provided sound land use planning for the benefit of the town, our neighbors, and our company for generations to come. Unfortunately, during this time of COVID-19 challenges, we have not been able to utilize the traditional means of reaching out to neighbors, primarily with in-person or public gatherings or with a quarry open house. We believe that this inability to hold face-to-face conversations has severely hindered our efforts to fully explain this petition, resulting in misunderstandings and misinformation filling the void on social media.

Due to these circumstances, Peckham is withdrawing its petition so that we may work more closely with our neighbors to provide accurate information and address any concerns. This decision also hopes to ensure that all voices are heard and the facts are clearer before it becomes time to draw conclusions. This way, the community can thoroughly consider the petition and the future use of our lands. Regardless of this petition, we believe better communication is vital and we plan to hold our community open house once COVID restrictions are lifted. See the information below to review Peckham’s vision for the future of the Pleasant Valley Quarry.

Our Future Vision

The map below describes the landholdings of the Peckham Materials Pleasant Valley Quarry. As one of the larger landowners in the Pleasant Valley community, Peckham collaborated with the Dutchess Land Conservancy (DLC) to create conservation easements that would protect large portions of our property from future development. The DLC is a non-profit conservation organization dedicated to preserving the rural character, important resources, and open lands of Dutchess County. These DLC easements will assure that future use and development of our property remains harmonious with the conservation objectives of the DLC as well as the Comprehensive Plan and Town Open Space Plan objectives outlined by the Town of Pleasant Valley.

In the future, Peckham hopes to present the Town of Pleasant Valley with a proposal offering a comprehensive approach to future use of Peckham’s properties that will assist in implementing the Town Centers and Greenspaces Plan. Our proposal will provide three conservation easements to be entered into with the Dutchess Land Conservancy on approximately 295 acres of Peckham-owned lands. The conservation easements will eliminate any future development on the specified Peckham properties, such as sand and gravel mining or housing developments. To offset the loss of any future development rights and mineral resources under the conservation easements, Peckham will request that the Town rezones approximately 23 acres that adjoin south of the current quarry and into the Quarry District. One of the three proposed conservation easements would be situated on adjacent lands, ensuring that the Quarry District would not expand any further. The other two conservation easements would apply to Parcels, west of North Avenue. This comprehensive approach offers a sustainable plan that preserves open space landscape values, identified in the Town Comprehensive Plan, in North Avenue’s Greenway Areas, as well as the Town Open Space and Farmland Plan’s Priority Areas, including the Gretna Road /Salt Point Area and Wappinger Creek Corridor, yet this plan still allows continued mineral resource development on a much-reduced footprint.