PORT LUDLOW — Rae Belkin shakes her head when she thinks of a proposed Hood Canal Bridge graving yard at the Port Ludlow Quarry at Mats Mats.

The operation would sit about 200 yards north of the waterfront home she shares with her husband, Bernard.

“I’m trying to figure out in my head the benefits, but there are no benefits to us,” said Belkin, standing on her quiet shoreline at low tide, looking in the direction of Glacier Northwest’s rock barge dock.

Belkin heads up the Mats Mats Coalition, a group representing about 150 residents who live in the neighborhood off Oak Bay Road, about four miles north of Port Ludlow.

The group earlier this decade fought a proposal to expand the rock quarry, which has since shut down for lack of a market to sell its product except by special order.

The state Department of Transportation proposal announced last week listed the quarry as the No. 2 preferred site of three finalists for the huge onshore dry dock in which components for the Hood Canal Bridge — and other state floating bridges — would be manufactured and floated.

Quarry owner optimistic

Glacier Northwest acknowledged that Mats Mats residents would likely be concerned, but company officials said they believed those issues could be settled.

Mats Mats would be large enough for future expansion, although pontoons built there wouldn’t be available until 2009, according to a state analysis.

That’s a year later than pontoons built at the leading site, the Port of Everett’s South Terminal.

The third-ranked site is made up of properties owned by the partnership known as FCB Facilities Team, involving Concrete Technology’s graving dock on Blair Waterway in Tacoma, Todd Pacific Shipyards on Terminal Island in Seattle and AML/Duwamish Shipyard on Puget Sound’s Duwamish Waterway.

Deja vu for residents

For many of Belkin’s longtime neighbors, the latest Mats Mats proposal is history repeating itself.

In 1991, the state proposed the basalt rock mining site for a graving yard to build pontoons for the Highway 520 floating bridge.

The project never came to fruition.

Neighborhood protests were heard then, a time when there were far fewer homes surrounding Mat Mats Bay and the roads leading to the quarry.

With about 300 homes — ranging in price from $150,000 to more than $500,000 — overlooking placid Mats Mats Bay, the second time around for a graving yard is likely to be less popular, Belkin said.

Currently, Seattle-based Glacier Northwest owns the quarry, where the company occasionally blasts rock, mined expressly for placement on eroded shorelines and breakwaters.

Although the state evaluation of the Mats Mats site states that supplies and equipment would primarily be barged in, Belkin said that does not address the traffic that would increase on narrow Olympus Boulevard, the main road leading into Mats Mats from Oak Bay Road.

“How are all those workers going to get here?” she asks.

The graving yard project could possibly employ up to 100 workers.

Transportation contact

Belkin was contacted Friday by Lloyd Brown, Transportation’s Olympic Region communications manager, who offered to open discussions with her and Mats Mats neighbors about the proposal.

Although she is willing to talk to state officials, Belkin already has the highlights of her concerns in mind: Noise, traffic, 24-hour operation, light pollution and the environmental impact on an area known for its shellfish.

“Shall I rally the troops again? I don’t know yet,” said Belkin.

“Everything’s the same as it was in ’91.”

In the past, sounds of blasting and grinding at the quarry reverberated throughout the neighborhood.

The noise particularly affects neighbors like Jack Parent, who lives on South Bayview Drive along the 300-foot channel leading to Mats Mats Bay.

About six years ago, Parent’s home was pelted by rocks, some “the size of your head,” after a miscalculated blast launched them from the quarry.

Nearly missing his son, who was outdoors on Parent’s property at the time, rocks from the blast hit a boat floating through the channel, Parent said on Friday from the deck of the new cedar home he is building.

“Actually now, they call me any time they are going to blast,” said Parent, adding that Glacier Northwest now uses blankets that prevent rocks from flying too far.

Kingdome plan scuttled

Mats Mats Coalition also fought a proposal to use the quarry site to crush the concrete pieces of the Seattle Kingdome after the indoor stadium was imploded in 2000.

Parent said after hearing long spates of noise echoing from the quarry — even people’s conversations — he’s mainly concerned about around-the-clock operation.

Because the state’s bridge replacement project has been delayed nearly two years — the result of finding ancient tribal remains and artifacts at the Port Angeles graving yard site — some observers speculate that a 24-hour operation would be needed to expedite the project.

“They’ve been there a long time,” Parent said of the quarry.

“But never 24 hours. If they find a new scheme to work 24 hours, then I will have to move.

“But why would anyone want to live here with all the banging and booming?”

Port Ludlow contractor Ron Gregory said he’s still trying to learn what the project’s potential effects would be to his project.

Gregory is building luxury homes on his 19-lot, 23-acre Sunrise Cove subdivision on Harold’s Hollow Road overlooking Mats Mats Bay.

“The reality is that it’s a proposal. . . . I don’t know what the impact would be,” Gregory said.

Karen Best, the real estate agent brokering Gregory’s plat, said she was concerned about the noise level from the quarry site.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all,” Best said.