Brothers Get Jail Time for River Mining : Courts: Judge loses patience with failure of owners of a sand-mining operation to fix damage done to San Luis Rey River a year after initial order.

The owners of a local sand-mining company were sentenced to nearly a year in jail Tuesday after a Vista Municipal Court judge found them in contempt of court for failing to repair damage from their gross over-excavation along the San Luis Rey River.

Exasperated with the failure of brothers Sylvester and Reginald Marron to comply with his order more than a year ago, Judge Victor E. Ramirez sentenced them both to 330 days in jail and fined them $11,000 for one of the county’s worst cases of over-excavation.

The Marrons’ attorney, Richard D. Muir, asked the court to give them until Monday to show that they are acting in good faith to comply with the year-old order, but Ramirez denied the request.

“It’s a little too late for that,” Ramirez said. “I bent over backward to give them ways out of this predicament.

“They have flouted the authority of the court, they have abused the county regulations; they’ve been closed for two years, and they have still not complied with the plan that they had agreed to,” Ramirez said.

Sylvester Marron, 64, fainted while being sentenced and, after order had been restored, his 67-year-old brother, Reginald, shook his fist and made a slicing gesture across his throat at Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Rempel.

In 1982, Marron Bros. Inc. received a permit to mine a 125-foot by 50-foot plot in Bonsall on the banks of the San Luis Rey River. Eight years later, it was discovered that they had mined as much as 10 times more sand than permitted, creating holes in the river and actually lowering its depth by 5 feet, Rempel said.

The Marron brothers pleaded guilty to 11 counts of violating county mining permits in 1990 and were sentenced last year, but they were set free after they promised to remove all buildings and equipment from the property and restore it to county specifications.

Until a week and a half ago, the sand mining operation’s equipment sat idle on the Mission Road property, with its buildings intact and little progress made toward reclamation of the area.

There had been efforts recently to dismantle the mining equipment, but Ramirez was not satisfied.

The judge did, however, leave open the possibility that, if the Marron brothers complete reclamation of the area and remove the buildings and equipment, he would consider releasing them.

County land-use officials had contended that the over-excavation robbed eroding North County beaches of much-needed sand and may have changed land configurations upstream and downstream from the site. It is still unclear how much it will cost to repair the area or how much erosion damage has been done.

Muir told the court Tuesday that the Marron brothers “just don’t have the resources to hire a gang of workers” to remove the equipment and structures from the area but offered no evidence of financial hardship.