Clemmons Asphalt Plant: Maymead's Gun Club Road Proposal and Who Actually Decides

TL;DR

• Maymead Inc., a Tennessee paving company, has applied for the air-quality permit required to build an asphalt plant at 6010 Gun Club Road — a 5.49-acre parcel inside Clemmons municipal limits. Production is targeted for late spring 2027.
• No rezoning vote is coming. The parcel is already zoned General Industrial, so county commissioners have no say; the decision rests with the county's environmental office, which must issue the permit if the application meets state requirements.
• The nearest homes are about 500 feet from the parcel boundary. The nearest school is Clemmons Elementary, about 1.3 miles away.
• Residents raised air, noise and traffic concerns at the August 27 Forsyth County commissioners meeting. Commissioners took no action.
• Public comment opens when a draft permit posts — at least 30 days, with a possible hearing. Nothing was posted as of August 29.
• The last time Maymead fought for a plant in North Carolina — Watauga County, 2015–16 — opponents lost at every step, and the plant was built.

Gun Club Road runs off Stratford Road on the southwest edge of Winston-Salem, past a row of industrial parcels that make up the Gun Club Industrial Park. One of them, a vacant 5.49-acre lot at number 6010, is where a Tennessee paving company wants to build an asphalt plant.¹

Residents found out and showed up to the August 27 Forsyth County commissioners meeting to object.² The commissioners told them something residents in these fights rarely expect to hear: there will be no vote.

Here is what is actually proposed, who decides, and what the record from Maymead's last North Carolina fight says about how this tends to go.

What is being proposed

Maymead Inc. of Mountain City, Tennessee, filed a legal notice in the Winston-Salem Journal stating that it is applying for the air-quality permit required before construction can begin on an asphalt plant at 6010 Gun Club Road, the Journal reported in May.¹

The site is an undeveloped 5.49 acres inside the Gun Club Industrial Park, zoned General Industrial — and it sits within the Clemmons municipal limits even though it carries a Winston-Salem street address.^{1 3}

Mary Katherine Law, a Maymead vice president, told the Journal the site was chosen to serve the Triad and for its proximity to Interstate 40, and that production is projected to begin in late spring 2027 once the permit is approved. The plant's size and employee count had not been determined, she said: "The market will dictate where we serve."¹

There was one wrinkle in the filing. The legal notice said the permit request was submitted to the N.C. Division of Air Quality — but the proper regulatory agency is the Forsyth County Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection, and as of late May, neither agency had received a formal request. County officials speculated Maymead's consultant may not have known to file locally.¹ The application has since landed: by late August, county staff said they were reviewing it.²

Maymead's crushing operations date to 1930, and the company today operates 16 asphalt plants, three ready-mix concrete plants and a quarry in Mountain City, serving western North Carolina, southwest Virginia and eastern Tennessee, according to its website.⁴

The application does not yet have a public docket. Production capacity, operating hours, stack height, fuel type and emission-control equipment will not be publicly available until a draft permit is issued. The legal notice states that construction will not begin before an operating air permit is received, and that emissions and control-equipment details are available by written request to Maymead Inc., P.O. Box 911, Mountain City, Tenn. 37683.¹

What residents told commissioners

Community members spoke during the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners meeting on Thursday, August 27, telling the board they were concerned about noise, traffic and environmental impacts, WFDD reported.²

Resident Doug Geiger said he was particularly worried about air pollution. "These emissions are known to be carcinogens," he said. "They will drift directly into dense residential neighborhoods, local hospitals, schools and children's athletic facilities. We are talking about a lot of health risks."²

"Are the nearby schools being considered? What about pre-schools? There are a lot around us," another speaker said, according to FOX8.⁵ Commissioners did not act after hearing the concerns.⁵

The comments came during a meeting at which commissioners voted 4 to 3 to deny a separate permit for a land-clearing and inert debris landfill proposed on 102 acres along Salem Chapel Road.⁵ Residents used the public comment opportunity to raise the asphalt plant as well.

Why commissioners said no vote is coming

The two proposals reached the board through different doors, and that difference explains why one got a vote and the other never will.

The Salem Chapel Road landfill required a permit that commissioners themselves issue. They heard it in a quasi-judicial hearing — the board acted as judges, speakers were placed under oath, and the applicant had to satisfy four zoning requirements to win approval.⁵

The Gun Club Road parcel is already zoned General Industrial. No rezoning is required, so there is no hearing before the commissioners and no vote. Commissioners said the decision is ultimately out of their hands for that reason, WFDD reported.²

The remaining approval is the air-quality permit. Forsyth County is one of a small number of local jurisdictions in North Carolina with delegated authority to issue air permits, which it does through the Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection rather than through the state Division of Air Quality.¹ A spokesperson for the county's environmental office told WFDD that staff are reviewing Maymead's application and must issue the permit if it meets state requirements.²

The state has spelled out this division of authority in a previous Maymead case. In its 2016 hearing notice for a Maymead asphalt plant in Watauga County, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality wrote that by law the state must review air permits for compliance with air-quality regulations, that it "has no authority over zoning, land use, or where a company decides to locate a facility," that local governments are responsible for regulating land use, and that "the issuance of an air quality permit does not imply that the proposed facility would comply with local ordinances and requirements."⁶

In practical terms: the air permit evaluates whether emissions from the proposed plant would stay within legal limits. It does not evaluate whether the location is appropriate. The location question was settled when the land was zoned industrial.

What an asphalt plant emits

Asphalt plants are regulated sources of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants.

An emission assessment prepared for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that a typical drum mix asphalt plant — one producing 200,000 tons of hot mix asphalt a year, with a fabric-filter control — emits about 83,000 pounds per year of criteria pollutants if its dryer burns No. 2 fuel oil, and about 75,000 pounds per year if it burns natural gas, of which roughly 28,000 pounds is carbon monoxide and 31,000 pounds is particulate matter. The same typical plant emits 1,300 to 2,000 pounds per year of hazardous air pollutants, depending on the fuel.⁷

Those are estimates for a typical plant, not this one. No capacity, fuel or control figures have been made public for Gun Club Road.

In the Watauga County case, the state said Maymead would have to demonstrate compliance with rules for particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and other emissions, and that the facility would use a bag filter as its primary emission control.⁶ That permit limited the plant to 300,000 tons of asphalt per year to ensure compliance with emissions regulations, High Country Press reported.⁸

How close the homes and schools actually are

Speakers at the August 27 meeting cited proximity to schools, preschools and hospitals. So we measured.

The closest thing to the site is not a school. It is housing. The nearest single-family parcels — on Coghill Drive, in the Parkwood Lake area east of the industrial park — come within roughly 480 feet of the plant parcel's boundary, and an occupied house at 6060 Gun Club Road sits about 570 feet away, based on Forsyth County GIS parcel geometry. More than 300 parcels with at least one bedroom lie within about six-tenths of a mile of the site.³

The schools, measured in a straight line from the parcel:³

Location	Approximate straight-line distance
Clemmons Elementary School	1.3 miles
Clemmons First Baptist Preschool	1.4 miles
Clemmons UMC Pre-School	1.7 miles
Montessori School of Winston-Salem	1.7 miles
Morgan Elementary School	1.8 miles
West Forsyth High School	1.8 miles
Clemmons Middle School	2.0 miles
Novant Health Clemmons Medical Center	2.0 miles

Distances are computed from the parcel's centroid in county GIS records to each campus and rounded to the nearest tenth of a mile. They describe separation on a map, not exposure — where emissions actually travel depends on stack height, terrain and prevailing winds, none of which are public yet.

What is known about effects on nearby property values

There is no published research specific to asphalt plants and residential property values.

Broader research on industrial facilities has found that distance to an industrial site has a statistically significant negative effect on residential property values, but that the effect is largely confined to a relatively short distance from the site. That finding comes from a hedonic pricing analysis of homes sold in 2005 in two regions of the Netherlands, published in Regional Studies — industrial sites generally, not asphalt plants specifically.⁹

It also does not map cleanly onto Gun Club Road. The parcel is already zoned industrial and already sits inside an existing industrial park, which complicates any comparison to studies measuring the arrival of industrial use in a previously non-industrial area.

What happened the last time Maymead sought a permit in North Carolina

Maymead's most recent contested asphalt plant proposal in North Carolina was in Watauga County, and the sequence there is a matter of public record.

Date	Event
2011	Watauga County issues a high impact land use permit for an asphalt plant on U.S. 421 to Johnny Hampton10
Jan. 2015	Maymead leases the Deep Gap site; testimony later establishes Hampton agreed to sell the project to Maymead10 11
June 2015	The county planning director revokes the permit, writing that four years had passed "and no appreciable progress has been made"10
June–July 2015	Mid-fight, commissioners adopt a brief moratorium on asphalt plants, then amend the county ordinance: a 750-foot buffer between such uses and residential property lines, and a 1,500-foot buffer from scenic byways12 13
Feb. 2016	The county Board of Adjustment overturns the revocation, finding a vested right based on substantial good-faith expenditures10
April 2016	Commissioners vote 3-2 not to appeal14
Aug. 2016	The state Division of Air Quality approves the air permit, capped at 300,000 tons per year8
Dec. 2016	A Superior Court judge announces he will affirm the Board of Adjustment in an appeal brought by two nearby residents11
Dec. 2021	Maymead ramps up construction at the Deep Gap site15

Note the order of events. Watauga's new 750-foot residential buffer was adopted in July 2015, while the dispute was live — and it did not stop this plant, because the project's rights vested with the 2011 permit, before the buffer existed.^{13 10}

The plant was built. Maymead's own locations list today includes the Deep Gap plant on U.S. 421.⁴

The Watauga precedent is not a prediction. It is a record of what the available levers were worth: the revocation was overturned, the appeal wasn't filed, the court challenge failed, the air permit was issued, and the ordinance changes came too late to apply. The one lever that was never available there — or here — was an elected board voting the plant down on land already permitted for it.

Clemmons has been through a version of this before

In December 2024, Forsyth County commissioners considered a rezoning to let Master Builders Solutions blend concrete additives — construction chemicals — inside an existing warehouse at 6220 Clementine Drive, about 500 feet from the Peppertree neighborhood in Clemmons. County planning staff recommended denial, saying they had not seen evidence of sufficient safeguards against off-site impacts, and the Clemmons Village Council unanimously passed a resolution opposing it. Commissioners approved it anyway, unanimously, on December 19, 2024, after the company agreed to move all materials indoors, eliminate an outdoor chemical storage container, and restrict the site to that single use.¹⁶

The instructive part is the mechanism. That project needed a rezoning, so there was a public hearing in front of elected officials, leverage for concessions, and a vote — and even then, a unanimous village resolution didn't stop it. The Gun Club Road parcel needs no rezoning at all. The one fight Clemmons residents watched up close had more process than this one will get.

How and when the public can comment

Residents will be able to weigh in after the environmental office completes its initial review. WFDD reports a public hearing will be scheduled once that review is done.²

The county's public notice process allows at least 30 days for public comment on draft permits, and "if significant comments are received or the Director determines that the public interest will be served, a public hearing will be held on the draft permit," according to the Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection's public notices page. Notices are posted on that page and mailed to people on the office's mailing list — contact Peter Lloyd (lloydpb@forsyth.cc) to be added, or call the office at 336-703-2440.¹⁷

As of August 29, 2026, no public notice for the Maymead permit appeared on that page. The most recent notices were dated August 25 and concerned R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's Tobaccoville facility and Classic Packaging Company.¹⁷

What is not yet known

• The proposed production capacity, operating hours, stack height, fuel type and emission-control equipment — none of it is public until a draft permit posts.
• Projected daily truck traffic and the haul route to and from the site.
• Whether the Village of Clemmons — which administers its own development ordinance — has any use conditions or separation standards that would apply on this parcel, and whether the Village Council intends to take a position. No public statement from the council could be located as of August 29.
• Whether the plant is connected to a specific state or local paving contract.
• Maymead's response to the concerns raised August 27. The company answered the Journal's questions about timing and siting in May, but no statement addressing residents' health and traffic concerns could be located as of publication.

FAQ

What asphalt plant is proposed in Clemmons?

Maymead Inc., a paving company based in Mountain City, Tennessee, has applied for the air-quality permit required to build an asphalt plant at 6010 Gun Club Road — an undeveloped 5.49-acre parcel in the Gun Club Industrial Park, inside Clemmons municipal limits despite its Winston-Salem mailing address. A company vice president told the Winston-Salem Journal that production is projected to begin in late spring 2027 if the permit is approved.

Who decides whether the Clemmons asphalt plant gets built?

The Forsyth County Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection, which issues air-quality permits in Forsyth County. The parcel is already zoned General Industrial, so no rezoning is required and no elected board votes on it. A spokesperson for the office told WFDD that staff must issue the permit if the application meets state requirements.

Can Forsyth County commissioners vote to stop the asphalt plant?

No. Commissioners said the decision is out of their hands because the site is already zoned for industrial use. Unlike the Salem Chapel Road landfill they denied 4-3 at the same August 27 meeting — which required a permit the commissioners themselves issue — the asphalt plant needs only an air-quality permit, which is a staff-level technical review, not a vote.

How close would the asphalt plant be to homes and schools?

The nearest single-family homes, on Coghill Drive and Gun Club Road, sit roughly 500 to 600 feet from the parcel boundary, based on Forsyth County GIS parcel data. The nearest school is Clemmons Elementary, about 1.3 miles away in a straight line; Clemmons First Baptist Preschool is about 1.4 miles, and West Forsyth High School about 1.8 miles.

When can the public comment on the Maymead asphalt plant permit?

After county staff finish their initial review and post a draft permit. The county allows at least 30 days for public comment on draft permits and holds a public hearing if significant comments are received or the director determines the public interest will be served. As of August 29, 2026, no notice for the Maymead permit had been posted. To be notified, ask to join the office's mailing list via Peter Lloyd (lloydpb@forsyth.cc) or call 336-703-2440.

What does an asphalt plant emit?

Asphalt plants are regulated sources of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants. An EPA emission assessment estimates a typical drum mix plant producing 200,000 tons a year emits roughly 75,000 to 83,000 pounds of criteria pollutants annually depending on fuel, plus 1,300 to 2,000 pounds of hazardous air pollutants. Capacity and controls for the Gun Club Road plant won't be public until a draft permit is issued.

Footnotes

1. Richard Craver, "Asphalt plant proposed for industrial site on Clemmons/Winston-Salem border," Winston-Salem Journal, May 30, 2026. The legal notice and permit application, the 5.49-acre site and its zoning, the Clemmons municipal limits, the misdirected filing to the state Division of Air Quality, Maymead vice president Mary Katherine Law on the I-40 siting rationale and late spring 2027 production target, the construction-timing language in the notice, and the written-request address for emissions details. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. April Laissle, "Residents raise concerns about proposed Clemmons asphalt plant," 88.5 WFDD, Aug. 28, 2026. The Aug. 27 public comments, the Doug Geiger quote, commissioners saying the decision is out of their hands, county staff reviewing the application and being required to issue the permit if it meets state requirements, and the public hearing to be scheduled after initial review. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. Forsyth County GIS parcel records (PIN 5893-56-9955.00) via the county's public mapping services, accessed Aug. 29, 2026. Parcel acreage, General Industrial zoning, Clemmons corporate limits, and parcel geometry. Distances are straight-line calculations from the parcel to school and hospital coordinates from county GIS and OpenStreetMap; residential distances are parcel-boundary-to-parcel-boundary. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. "About," Maymead Inc., accessed Aug. 29, 2026. Crushing operations dating to 1930, the current counts of 16 asphalt plants and three ready-mix plants, the service area, and the Deep Gap plant on the company's locations list. ↩ ↩²

5. "Forsyth County neighbors push back against landfill, asphalt plant," FOX8 WGHP, Aug. 27, 2026. The pre-schools quote, commissioners taking no action on the asphalt plant, and the 4-3 denial of the Salem Chapel Road landfill permit heard quasi-judicially. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. "Public Hearing, Draft Air Permit, Maymead Materials, Watauga County," N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, 2016. The state's description of its air-permit authority versus local land-use authority, and the bag filter and compliance-demonstration requirements. ↩ ↩²

7. Hot Mix Asphalt Plants: Emission Assessment Report, EPA-454/R-00-019, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, December 2000. Estimated annual emissions for a typical 200,000-ton-per-year drum mix plant by fuel type, including the CO, PM-10 and hazardous-air-pollutant figures. ↩

8. "DAQ Approves Maymead Materials Air Permit for Proposed Asphalt Plant on US 421," High Country Press, Aug. 9, 2016. The Aug. 5, 2016 approval and the 300,000-ton annual cap. ↩ ↩²

9. F. de Vor and H.L.F. de Groot, "The Impact of Industrial Sites on Residential Property Values: A Hedonic Pricing Analysis from the Netherlands," Regional Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5 (2011), pp. 609–623. ↩

10. "Board of Adjustment Overturns Asphalt Plant Permit Revocation for Deep Gap Location," High Country Press, Feb. 11, 2016. The 2011 Hampton permit, the January 2015 lease, the June 2015 revocation and its wording, and the vested-rights finding. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

11. "Judge affirms board ruling to let asphalt plant proceed," Watauga Democrat, Dec. 14, 2016. The Superior Court decision in the appeal brought by two nearby residents, and testimony that Hampton agreed to sell the project to Maymead. ↩ ↩²

12. "Watauga Commissioners Adopt Brief Moratorium on Asphalt Plants, Uncertainty Remains," High Country Press, June 23, 2015. ↩

13. "Commissioners Adopt Residential & Scenic Byway Buffer for Category 1 Uses," High Country Press, July 7, 2015. The 750-foot residential and 1,500-foot scenic byway buffers. ↩ ↩²

14. "Commissioners vote no on asphalt appeal," Watauga Democrat, April 5, 2016. The 3-2 decision not to appeal the Board of Adjustment ruling. ↩

15. "Maymead ramps up construction at asphalt plant on U.S. 421 in Deep Gap," Watauga Democrat, Dec. 21, 2021. ↩

16. Connor McNeely, "Forsyth commissioners approve concrete development facility near Clemmons neighborhood," Winston-Salem Journal, Dec. 20, 2024; and "Concrete construction facility gets rezoning approval," Clemmons Courier, Jan. 2, 2025. Zoning case F-1651: the staff denial recommendation, the village council's unanimous opposing resolution, the Dec. 19, 2024 unanimous approval, and the added restrictions. ↩

17. "Public Notices Regarding the Issuance of Air Quality Permits," Forsyth County Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection, accessed Aug. 29, 2026. The 30-day comment and hearing language quoted verbatim, the mailing-list contact, and the most recent posted notices. ↩ ↩²