Panel Says Groves No Place for a Gravel Mine

The citrus groves surrounding Fillmore in the Santa Clara Valley are not the place for a gravel mine, county planners said Thursday.

In a move that surprised neither the project’s backers nor its opponents, the Ventura County Planning Commission denied Southern Pacific Milling Co. the permit it needs to strip-mine for gravel on a site 1 1/2 miles west of Fillmore for the next 30 years.

The El Rio-based company is expected to appeal the decision to the Board of Supervisors as a matter of course. Indeed, the appeal appeared on the board’s Sept. 10 agenda even before Thursday’s Planning Commission meeting.

“I have serious doubts whether any mining project will be approved by the Planning Commission because they all have the same issues,” said Bill Berger, vice president of operations for SP Milling, which requested the item be placed on the supervisors’ schedule.

After bowing to opposition and pulling a proposal for a much larger mine in the same area earlier this decade, SP Milling had come up with what one commissioner Thursday called a “new concept” in attempting to marry industrial projects with agriculture.

The company has proposed mining two-acre blocks of citrus groves at a time, returning the land to orchards as the project progressed. The operation’s small scale and an extensive battery of stringent conditions would ensure that agriculture surrounding the mine would be unaffected, company officials said.

“This project has been designed to be compatible with our neighbors from Day 1,” Berger said.

While the idea had merit, the time wasn’t right, commissioners ruled.

But mine opponents agreed with Berger that the issue is still to be decided.

“We’ve overcome one obstacle,” Fillmore Councilwoman Linda Brewster said. “We’re not jumping up and down. . . . We realize this isn’t the end of the process.”

The Planning Commission’s decision marked the second time in four months that commissioners have rejected an industrial project in the agricultural valley--and for virtually the same reasons.

As with their May vote against expansion of the Toland Road Landfill--which is within three miles of the proposed mine site--commissioners cited a range of environmental and traffic concerns.

Increased truck traffic, deteriorating air quality and inadequate flood control measures were just some of the reasons commissioners gave for voting against the recommendation of county staff members to approve the mining project.

“Having one [truck] out of every 10 to 12 vehicles on the road is a concern to me,” Commissioner Brian Brennan said.

The company has said its operations would cause worse traffic, noise and pollution without the 103-acre mine because gravel would have to be imported from Bakersfield.

“I don’t think they took into account that [gravel] importation would have a greater effect on traffic and noise impacts through Fillmore,” Berger said.

But it was clear that planners were not swayed by the argument that imported gravel might be an even graver threat to local agriculture.

“They made the only decision they could,” Brewster said. “They looked at the big picture. . . . It’s too experimental.”

The decision had a familiar ring to mine opponents, many of whom had also fought against the landfill expansion. The Planning Commission’s rejection of the landfill expansion was later overturned by the Board of Supervisors.

Now critics of the proposed gravel mine say they are hoping the commission’s decision does not meet the same fate on appeal.

“Haven’t we been through this before?” grower Gordon Kimball asked.