Prosecutor Wants Sand Miners in Jail : Environment: Prosecutor says incarceration would force owners of company to make their damage to the San Luis Rey River good.

More than a year after its owners promised to restore sand illegally taken from the San Luis Rey River, a San Diego mining company still has not made a move to bring back the sand or remove its mining equipment.

Prosecutors now seek to put the owners of Marron Bros. Inc., which has a history of such environment-damaging violations, in jail until the work is done.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’ve behaved like river pirates,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Rempel said.

The illegal Bonsall excavations from 1982 to 1990 have robbed eroding North County beaches of much-needed sand, Rempel said, and may have changed land configurations both upstream and downstream. County land-use officials are still unsure how much it will cost to repair the area or how much erosion damage has been done, although this is believed to be the worst such case in county history.

“They exceeded the area that they were allowed to mine by 10 times and they created deep holes, actually lowering the depth of the river by 5 feet,” Rempel said, although the exact amount of excess sand taken has not been determined.

Richard D. Muir, the attorney for owners Sylvester and Reginald Marron, declined comment.

In 1990, the Marron brothers pleaded guilty to 11 counts of permit violations at the site they own along the banks of the San Luis Rey River near Bonsall, including grossly exceeding the limit of sand that they were allowed to take. They also are suspected of mining beyond their property lines.

In 1991, Municipal Court Judge Victor Ramirez suspended the 11-month jail sentence for the Marrons after they promised to remove all buildings and equipment from the property and restore it to county specifications.

Now, more than a year after sentencing, the sand mining operation’s equipment still sits idle on the Mission Road property, its buildings are intact and little progress has been made toward restoration, Rempel said.

The Marrons told the court that financial problems have prevented them from removing their equipment. Rempel said they are just sandbagging.

The brothers are scheduled to return to Ramirez’s courtroom Monday to face charges of violating their probation by not fulfilling their promise. Rempel wants them put in jail until they do.

“I think we will find a miraculous removal of debris and equipment and restoration of the (river) banks if these people saw the inside of a jail, and that work would progress at a record pace,” Rempel said. He estimated it would take three weeks to remove the equipment and buildings.

Sue Gray, chief of code enforcement at the county Department of Planning and Land Use, said mining permit violations by Marron Bros. go back to 1985.

“This has been very frustrating,” she said. “They have had an order from the judge for 14 months, we’ve been working with their probation officer, we’ve given them letters outlining exactly what they have to do, and it has been all to no avail.”

The Marron brothers have also failed to submit a complete restoration plan to the county, and what they have prepared has been “woefully inadequate,” Gray said.

Because there is no reclamation plan available, no one knows how much it will cost to restore the area or exactly how much sand has been taken out, Gray said.

It is also unclear how much damage has been done to properties along the banks of the San Luis Rey River that depend on the water to transport sand downstream, Gray said.

“It could cause upstream properties to lose sand that they would not otherwise lose and could also cause downstream properties to lose or not receive sand that they should have on their properties,” Gray said.

Over-excavating causes the river to accelerate upstream, thereby taking more sand downstream than normal. At the same time, the river downstream from an over-excavated area slows, preventing it from cleaning out a stream area and carrying sand to other areas, Rempel said.

In 1989, Marron Bros. was involved in another sand-mining operation along the San Luis Rey River in Oceanside that was closed after it was discovered that more than a million cubic yards of sand than allowed had been excavated. The Bonsall case involves even more sand.

It would have taken about 50,000 double-loaded dump trucks to hold that amount of sand, which sold for about $4 per cubic yard, Oceanside city officials and sand-miners said.

Oceanside officials said the excessive sand mining caused about $1 million in damage to two bridges and required that the Army Corps of Engineers import sand to restore the river at a cost of $1.3 million.