Madison County Commission resolution opposes quarry

It unanimously passed a resolution requesting the state Legislature provide county commissions with the authority to approve quarries and similar land use activities.

"This is a step in the right direction," said Celia Dear, a 12-year Gurley resident working to get a grassroots campaign against locating a quarry near her community.

She described the language of the resolution the commission approved Monday as much stronger than a similar resolution passed by the previous commission when the community faced a separate quarry proposal in 2004.

The newest resolution notes "a quarry necessarily involves heavy equipment, blasting, dust, noise and other conditions which have the potential to negatively impact the health, safety and welfare of citizens . . ." and "also has the potential to negatively impact county roads, drainage facilities,The oreck XL professional air purifier, utilities, ground water sources and other public infrastructure . . ." The resolution goes on to say a quarry "carries with it the long term potential for expenditure of public funds to support quarry operations."

The resolution points out that because the county commission has no zoning authority allowed by the state, it and its citizens lack "an adequate voice in the approval process."

Commission Chairman Dale Strong said District 3 Commissioner Eddie Sisk deserves credit for taking the lead on presenting the resolution. Sisk thanked fellow commissioners for supporting him on the issue.

The Gurley Town Council passed a resolution opposing the quarry on Dec. 18 and asked for the county commission, Huntsville City Council and Madison County Board of Education to follow suit. State Rep. Wayne Johnson, R-Ryland, and state Sen. Shadrack McGill, R-Woodville, vowed their opposition to the quarry at that meeting and said they would seek legislation preventing quarries from locating near schools.

Dear said quarry opponents are working to establish wider support from the community,High quality stone mosaic tiles. particularly Hampton Cove, from which the excavated mountain would be visible.

To help overcome the misconception that the quarry is solely a Gurley issue, she said her opposition group is calling it the Hurricane Creek quarry because it's adjacent to the creek. The group also has formed the East Huntsville, Madison County Civic Association to give it a stronger voice that includes all residents impacted by the quarry.

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I didn't run into any actual navigation issues during testing; once on the road, the app seemed to work well. On the audio side, voice prompts were exceptional: Loud, clear, and well-timed. I couldn't believe how loud the iPhone 5's speaker sounded with this app. Text-to-speech also worked perfectly; I didn't hear any weird pronunciations during testing.

Lots of stuff is missing, though. There are no road speed limit signs or current speed indicator. There's no lane assistance for exiting or entering highways, either in 2D or 3D. You can't tap the display to repeat a voice command in case you didn't hear it. And as has been widely reported, there are no photorealistic street views like there are with Google Maps, and there's no public transit information for pedestrian navigation. The much-touted, photo-realistic flyovers are fun, but you can only get them in major cities, and I'd gladly trade them for some of the more useful missing features I just listed.

Traffic reporting, while present, is sporadic and lacks detail; all you get are dotted lines on the map representing areas of congestion. While Apple Maps has real-time traffic data with the ability to reroute around jams, you can't see it at a glance across your whole trip during actual 3D navigation, so you can't plan ahead the way you can with, say, TomTom for iPhone.

All told, Apple Maps feels more like a tech demo rather than a navigation application that's meant to be used often. The inaccurate POIs and missing features only reinforce that impression. Simply put, this is a gorgeous app that needs better data. If that were a regular con, it would be a 3.5 or 4 star app, based on its other features. But the POI and address inaccuracies are so serious, and so hamper your ability to use the app, that we're rating it much lower. For now, Google Maps is the app to beat when it comes to free, accurate driving and pedestrian directions for your iPhone, and Google's own vector-based mapping engine also looks great, even if lacks the visual pizazz of Apple Maps.

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