Bathurst Regional Council last month approved a development application from  Hothams Sand, Soil and Gravel Supplies to extract up to 30,000 cubic metres of hard rock materials from a site off Napoleon Reef Road.

It’s reasonable to expect the quarry to be loud, and there will likely be days when it sends dust across the region.

But councillors have made the decision that those inconveniences – along with traffic concerns raised by nearby residents – do not amount to reasons to reject the quarry.

And while residents are probably right that the $145,000 legal fees council ended up paying in the Dunkeld kennel case may have been playing on councillors’ minds when they made the Napoleon Reef decision, that won’t do them any good if they decided to take the matter further.

The Land and Environment Court appears to be residents’ only hope for overturning the quarry approval, but that would only happen if council staff were found to have erred in recommending approval in the first place.

That would require a closer study of the planning laws in place at Napoleon Reef and, given council staff wrote those rules, you would expect the court to side with them.

Residents might also argue that the rules are inappropriate for that part of our region, but, unfortunately for them, that would prove to be a fight for another day.

And by the time they won or lost that battle, the quarry would be up and running anyway.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow and few residents across the rest of Bathurst would be wanting to swap places with Napoleon Reef locals right now.