Oxnard, Group Sue to Block Pit Excavation

Citing potential contamination of ground-water basins throughout the region, an environmental group and the city of Oxnard moved Friday to block deep excavation at an El Rio gravel pit approved by county supervisors last month.

Attorneys for Oxnard and the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County filed lawsuits against the county and Los Angeles-based CalMat Co., claiming county officials failed to follow state environmental law. They are seeking an injunction to halt dredging 22 feet below the water table at its highest level.

“I think the concern should be protecting the region’s supply of ground water and not putting that at risk for a cheap supply of aggregate,” said Margaret Moore Sohagi, the attorney who represents Oxnard.

Russ Baggerly, spokesman for the environmental coalition, said the project exposes to harm a series of subterranean basins that supply water to hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of businesses in Oxnard, Ventura, Camarillo and Port Hueneme. Half of Oxnard’s drinking water comes from the basin directly beneath the gravel pit.

“The [project’s] negative impacts on drinking water could continue into the next century,” Baggerly said.

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In separate Superior Court filings, Oxnard and the coalition claim the 167-acre CalMat project on the edge of the Santa Clara River was approved illegally because the state-required environmental analysis considered a proposal vastly different than the one finally approved by the Board of Supervisors on Dec. 17.

The suits also maintain the environmental review did not identify all the major impacts of the project and failed to propose ways to offset them.

If a judge grants an injunction and a trial is needed, it could take parties most of this year to resolve issues raised in the suits, even without appeals, officials said.

If that happens, CalMat officials said, company employees and the public would be the losers. Some of CalMat’s 75 workers at the El Rio site could be laid off, project manager Tom Davis said. The cost of gravel for west county construction projects would soar from $7 a ton to $17. And air quality and road safety would be eroded by thousands of trucks bringing gravel from Kern and Los Angeles counties, he said.

CalMat has reduced the project’s size 90%, Davis said, prompting a host of health, water quality and water supply agencies to drop their objections to it. Ventura County planners recommended approval of the project before the Board of Supervisors ratified it 4 to 1 last month.

“There’s good science to support our position that our project will have insignificant impacts on ground water,” Davis said. “Neither Oxnard nor the coalition have brought forward any science, just fears.”

Under the CalMat plan, the company would take 10 years to excavate 3 million to 6 million tons of gravel as deep as 25 feet below the current pit floor and 22 feet below the historical high ground-water mark. The original proposal called for digging as deep as 80 feet below the high water table. The current proposal covers 167 acres contrasted with the original 436.

Because of the revisions, only Oxnard and environmentalists still actively oppose the project.

And on Friday, City Atty. Gary Gillig said Oxnard is close to a deal that could end its lawsuit. Additional monitoring to detect water contamination at the Vineyard Avenue site and an increase in the number of contaminants tested are key issues, Sohagi said.

“This [lawsuit] does not mean there is any feeling of hostility or animosity toward any of the parties. The purpose of the lawsuit is to preserve the city’s legal rights,” Gillig said, noting that Friday was the deadline for opponents to legally challenge the CalMat project.

“CalMat has proposed an agreement that meets many of the city’s concerns,” Gillig added. “And we will continue to meet to try to end this quickly.”

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CalMat’s lawyer, Marc Charney, said the filing surprised him because he thought all outstanding issues had been resolved in two meetings over the past week.

And Davis said his company had agreed to test ground water on the site monthly instead of quarterly--as the county required--to add additional monitoring wells, and to test for pollutants not previously required.

“Quite frankly, I’m surprised they filed a lawsuit,” Davis said. “My impression is that we’ve agreed on about everything. It just hasn’t been memorialized in writing.”

Reaching agreement with the environmental coalition promises to be more difficult, because representatives say the CalMat project is the gravest threat ever to the quality of local ground water.

“The drinking water basin we’re talking about can be compared in a human to our life’s blood,” said Carla Bard, an analyst for the Environmental Defense Center. “And opening the ground up and exposing that ground water is taking a risk that we cannot afford with the health of Oxnard’s people.”

A variety of disease-causing contaminants could leak into the ground water when it runs into the deep pits, she said.

But Davis said CalMat’s plan to test so frequently for contamination reduces that risk to almost nothing. And its plan to refill all pits with sand once they are excavated provides a filter that would further clean surface water and stop toxic fluids before they reach the huge aquifer from which Oxnard pumps its drinking water.