The new owners of a marble mine in the lower Avalanche Creek valley near Carbondale checked in with the Pitkin County commissioners on Wednesday. The meeting was far more peaceful than the contentious meetings usually held between the county board and the former owner of the mine.

The mine, once owned by Robert Congdon and called the White Banks Marble and Alabaster mine, was given a 25-year permit in 1998 by the county, but one of the conditions of approval was that the mine owners conduct an annual review at a public meeting with the commissioners.

In 2004, Congdon yelled profanities at former Pitkin County Commissioner Mick Ireland (now Aspen’s mayor) during a meeting.

The mine’s new owners, Dan Strammiello and Jerry Maglio of Denver, are operating the mine through an entity called Elbram Stone Company LLC. They have renamed it the Mystic Eagle Quarry. They spent several minutes with the commissioners yesterday calmly discussing the state of the mine and their plans for it.

The pair bought the mine and the mineral rights from Congdon in May 2007. Strammiello declined to name the price they paid. There has been no mining activity in the last two years, but Strammiello and Maglio are now studying the mine and preparing a new operations plan to put before the U.S. Forest Service, which owns the surface land around it.

“We want to get to the production phase,” Strammiello said.

Near the Mystic Eagle Quarry there are outcroppings of black marble. The marble that is being cut out of the Yule Marble Quarry near the town of Marble, further up the Crystal River valley, is white.

Strammiello said those outcroppings indicate that there might be much more black marble underground.

The mine is also thought to contain opal, alabaster and gypsum, Strammiello told the commissioners, adding that the prior mapping of the mine was not very good and that extensive survey work is now underway.

The quarry contains a partially sculpted giant eagle approximately 100 feet down that an artist spent years chipping out of the alabaster in the mine. The wingspan of the stone bird was to be 42-feet wide.

The new owners of Mystic Eagle Quarry spent last summer cleaning up the site and removed an old camper trailer, along  with 120 cubic yards of trash and debris and 50 tons of rock.

The commissioners asked about potential plans to relocate Avalanche Creek Road around the mine site.  The owners said that they don’t feel that will be necessary.

However, they have hired an engineering firm to design a new road and have the Forest Service review those plans in case the agency thinks the road, which runs through the mine’s operational area, should be moved.

A Forest Service representative said a new road would require an extensive study, including a review in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.

Bill Brunworth, who lives in the Swiss Village neighborhood about a mile from the mine, said he has concerns about adding a new section of road in the area, and about the location of a proposed new secondary mine entrance, which is required for mine safety.

“We feel strongly that it (the portal) should be in the appropriate location, ideally accessible from an already disturbed area, such as off of the existing road,” Brunworth wrote. “We would also argue that any such second portal should be used as an emergency escape route only, and not as another operational access point.”

The mine is located near protected big horn sheep habitat and downstream from the Avalanche Creek campground. But Brunworth’s concerns about the road and a second portal might pale in comparison to his past concerns about Congdon’s habit of blasting away rock once a week to get at the black marble.

“Our intent is not to do any blasting,” Strammiello said on Wednesday.

Instead, he envisions a crew of fewer than ten people cutting the rock to extricate blocks of black marble.

He added that he and his partner consider the mine “a development and business opportunity,” and believe that there is a good market for the black marble, which he said is not being mined anywhere else in the U.S. right now.

“It’s a real business, but we have to do the research and figure out what is there,” he said.

bgs@aspendailynews.com