Fresno County caves to CEMEX pressure, gravel mining on San Joaquin River will continue | Opinion
More than a century of resource extraction and environmental destruction along the San Joaquin River near Fresno could’ve been halted.
Instead, the Fresno County Planning Commission blinked.
Rather than allow CEMEX’s gravel mining permits to expire in July, as intended, the commission on Thursday sided with county staff and CEMEX’s lawyers and employees over the objections of quarry neighbors and the nonprofit San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust.
As a result, the multinational building materials company has county clearance to continue aggregate mining through July 2027. The extension should allow enough time to complete a draft environmental impact report for CEMEX’s wrongheaded proposal to blast a 600-foot-deep pit near the river — which is the company’s ultimate aim.
The planning commission’s 5-2 vote is binding unless the decision gets appealed to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors by June 23.
Will that happen? It seems unlikely for two reasons: One, filing an appeal costs $500. Two, this is the Board of Supervisors we’re talking about. Expecting that body to side with the environment over industry — in the absence of immense public pressure — is a fool’s hope.
Not to mention the fact that CEMEX (including Central Valley operations manager Pete LoCastro and the company’s employee PAC) has made significant campaign contributions to all five county supervisors, with Steve Brandau ($7,500 since 2019) leading the way.
Besides commissioners Kuldip Chatha and Lisa Woolf, who cast the two dissenting votes against the permit extension, the remainder of the planning commission lacked the resolve to tell CEMEX “no thanks.”
Which, honestly, wasn’t that surprising. Even if the vote had gone the other way, CEMEX would have assuredly appealed and gotten its way with the Board of Supervisors.
In other words, this poker game is being played with a stacked deck.
Blast mine looms over hearing
Last Thursday’s hearing was not specifically about the blast mine proposal, as county staff and CEMEX attorney Paul Mitchell reminded those who spoke out against the extension. Rather, it would simply allow the company to continue its existing gravel quarry and processing operations along Friant Road.
“There is a lot of confusion among the general public,” senior planner Dave Randall said during the hearing.
Actually, there isn’t. The public, at least those who care enough to be informed, knows full well what is taking place and how the blast mine proposal and the permit extension are inexorably linked.
“We’re talking about (the blast mine) because there’s an obvious nexus between the two,” commission chair Ken Abrahamian said.
CEMEX initially submitted the blast mine proposal, a more destructive mining process than has ever been employed near the San Joaquin River, in December of 2019. In June of 2020, the Fresno County Department of Public Works and Planning issued a Notice of Preparation for an Environmental Impact Report.
Three years later, the environmental report still isn’t finished and no one seems quite certain when it will be. It could be several months, or even years. (Or never, if the county follows past precedence.)
So with CEMEX’s existing permits set to expire in July, the company sought an extension to buy more time in order for the blast mine EIR to be completed. CEMEX requested four additional years, and that’s precisely what it got.
Never mind that a conditional use permit issued by the county in 1985 declared, in no uncertain terms, that CEMEX must stop gravel mining along the San Joaquin “in 20 years” and begin environmental reclamation of its quarry and plant sites.
Or the fact that the company’s own consultant, in order to justify gravel mining along the Kings River, declared way back in 2007 that aggregate near the San Joaquin was “down to its last few tons.”
Now, according to Mitchell, CEMEX’s attorney, there are enough remaining gravel deposits at the company’s quarry site to mine for at least another four years.
But when commissioner Austin Ewell asked CEMEX officials and representatives exactly how much gravel remained at the quarry, he was told that information was “confidential and a trade secret.”
What a bunch of nonsense. (I’d use a different word if this weren’t a family newspaper.)
The bottom line hasn’t changed since when I initially brought this issue to the public’s attention in January 2020: The only way to stop CEMEX from blasting a 600-foot deep pit a stone’s throw from the San Joaquin River Parkway is through litigation or immense public outcry similar to the “Save Jesse Morrow Mountain” effort from a decade ago. (Which, incidentally, was another CEMEX proposal.)
We certainly can’t count on county staff, the planning commission or the Board of Supervisors to do the right thing for California’s second-longest river. Not when there’s money to be made off its continued plunder.
This story was originally published June 10, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
