Riverbeds Become Battlefields : Wrestling With Sand Mining’s Gritty Problems

Like prospectors of a century ago panning for gold in the Mother Lode, Reg and Sylvester Marron are mining a bend of the San Luis Rey River just east of here in search of a fortune.

For these brothers, however, profits don’t come with shiny nuggets of bullion. Instead, they’re trying to make their mint from the sand that blankets the wide river bed and its banks.

Business is booming, but the Marrons face mounting pressures from angry neighbors, environmentalists and county officials that threaten to stop their thriving sand mining operation in its tracks.

“We have a successful business,” says Reg Marron. “What’s wrong with that? They want us to stop, but we aren’t doing anything wrong.”

The Marrons are not alone. Throughout San Diego County, sand miners are finding it more and more difficult to make a buck. While in decades past, miners had virtually a free rein to plow river beds in search of sand, today they face a growing array of obstacles that have clouded the industry’s future.

In recent years, a maze of new regulations restricting sand mining have been introduced by federal, state and local governments. As development has boomed, the creep of growth has put residents right at the door step of some mining operations, creating inevitable conflicts.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, say sand mining is a prime culprit in the destruction of the willows and other types of vegetation that line rivers, providing a prime feeding and nesting habitat for many birds and animals. Even coastal residents have a gripe with the industry, maintaining it robs their beaches of some of the sand normally flushed into the ocean by rivers during large storms.

“Sand mining, by necessity, is done in perhaps the most environmentally sensitive areas of all, so that makes it controversial,” said Dana Whitson, Oceanside’s special projects director. “Sometimes the mining can become a nuisance for a neighborhood, but then again it’s absolutely vital to the construction industry.”

Officials in the industry acknowledge that sand mining is not the best-loved of pursuits, but point out it serves a pivotal role in today’s society, particularly in fast-growing San Diego County. Sand, they note, is a prime ingredient in concrete and asphalt, the very building blocks for roads, homes and buildings.

“Everyone can make the connection between hunger and the need for farms,” said William Walker, land-use chairman of the San Diego County Rock Producers Assn. “But they often don’t realize that in order to have freeways, sidewalks, many of the things that are made with concrete and asphalt, you need sand.”

Extracting that sand from riverbeds can be a ticklish business. Skip loaders and large dump trucks are needed. Dust can sometimes swirl and the noise of diesel engines will fill the air. Holes are dug in the river bed, only to fill with sand again as the river runs.

“A lot of people don’t like the trucks, they don’t like seeing big holes being dug,” Walker said. “We understand their feelings, but we can’t have this natural resource without doing that. It’s an inevitable result. All we can do is try to mitigate it as best we can.”

Indeed, many sand miners take pains to be good neighbors.

John Daley oversees a sand mining operation in Oceanside on 40 acres he owns and leases along the San Luis Rey. When Daley launched the operation in 1979, he immediately received complaints about dust and noise from numerous landowners in a nearby neighborhood.

Instead of arguing, Daley spent money to pave the access roads leading into the site. He also cleans the streets weekly. The result has been that few complaints have surfaced in recent years, according to Daley and nearby residents.

“I’m in this for the long term, for the next 20 years,” Daley said. “We operate very sensitively to the neighbors and don’t want to create undue problems. Unfortunately, there are others in the business who cause problems.”

Just downstream from Daley’s operation, a sand mining outfit working a 15-acre stretch of the river has raised the ire of nearby homeowners in recent months. Several residents complain that the firm has caused problems by sometimes working late into the night and uprooting a once-pristine patch of willows and brush that thrived in the river.

What particularly angers some residents is that the sand miner, Harvey Landry of Vista, is doing work without permits from the county. San Diego County officials say Landry has applied for the permits but, as required by county policy, is being allowed to continue until the matter is resolved.

In the meantime, federal wildlife officials say, Landry has stretched his operations into a section of the river earmarked as a possible habitat for the least Bell’s vireo, a small gray songbird on the federal endangered species list.

“Back in 1984 and 1985 that area was high-quality, fresh marsh habitat with some willows,” said Mary Jo Elper, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “(Landry has) exceeded the limits of his permit application and gone further down the river. It’s my opinion he’s done some harm.”

Landry denies he’s encroached on any of the bird habitat and stressed that he’s gotten no complaints from neighbors about his sand mining operation. He expects to receive all the proper permits early next year.

“Nobody has given me any problems at all except Fish and Wildlife,” Landry said. “They’re probably trying to put a stop to everything I’m doing.”

The Marrons are facing similar pressures from their neighbors. Indeed, at times relations between the brothers and nearby landowners have gotten downright ornery.

“The only way I can describe the relationship is it’s like the Hatfields versus the McCoys up there,” said Kate Shapiro, an associate planner with the county. “It’s a long-running feud. Lawsuits have been filed by the various sides. There’s been real bad blood between the two groups.”

And with good reason, says Mike Stacco, who owns a home across the road from the sand mining firm.

“It used to be just a small operation, but now it’s gotten completely out of hand,” Stacco said. “It used to be peaceful and quiet around here. Now it’s noisy and an absolute eyesore.”

County officials threatened to revoke the firm’s business license after verifying that the Marrons had constructed several unauthorized buildings and were running in excess of 20 trucks a day in and out of the business, four times more than is allowed under the firm’s current operating permit.

So far, however, the Marron brothers have managed to persuade county officials to allow the business to remain open. In addition, they’ve applied for a permit that would allow the expanded operation, with a hearing slated for next March.

The brouhaha has Reg Marron irritated. As he sees it, the firm has done nothing more than pursue the American Dream by trying to expand its business. Moreover, Marron insists his firm is being singled out, suggesting that at least a half dozen other sand mining outfits in the county are violating operational limits outlined in their permits.

“The way I look at it, you’re supposed to go into business to grow,” he said. “They’re saying we can’t grow, we can’t dig too deep.

“Why aren’t we allowed to have at least 20 loads a day? It’s so ridiculous. There’s not been one traffic jam. There’s been no accidents.”

Apart from such disputes looms the environmental issues. Many naturalists feel the sand mining industry needs to be more tightly regulated in order to better protect bird and wildlife habitat from damage.

“At the rate we’re going now, we have plenty of highways, too many houses and no riparian areas,” said Emily Durbin of the Sierra Club. “We’ll lose the richest and most productive ecosystem that is known in nature. We need to get back into a better balance.”

Many sand miners, however, say their industry can co-exist with nature. In recent months, for example, the San Diego County Rock Producers Assn. has worked with a task force studying issues involving the endangered least Bell’s vireo, which has put several highway and construction projects on hold because they would disturb the bird’s habitat.

In a presentation to the task force, sand miners stressed that steps could be taken to mitigate effects on the bird. Moreover, they suggested that sand mining could, potentially, help create new bird habitat, doing earthwork that would allow lush areas of vegetation to survive winter storms.

Durbin commended the group for its cooperation, but questioned whether such efforts would prove a success. Instead, she suggested that alternative methods to sand mining, such as harvesting sand resources in the desert, be explored. Sand miners, however, say such methods would prove costly and impractical.

The issue of sand mining’s effect on the beaches has proven just as thorny. Some prominent oceanographers contend that sand mining harms the beaches, reasoning that each cubic yard of sand removed from a river is potentially that much less on the beach.

Sand miners disagree, maintaining that much of the sand is ground into dust by the time it reaches the ocean. And on rivers such as the San Luis Rey, sand miners insist that most of the deposits settle out before the sea.

Nonetheless, leaders in beach communities such as Oceanside have begun seriously pressing the notion that sand, much like water, should be tapped from streams and rivers only at a legally permissible rate.

“You have to have a balance,” said Katherine Stone, a Los Angeles-based attorney who helped formulate the theory of sand rights. “Sand mining has a lot of value. But you have to weigh that against the impact on the beaches.”