Granite's numbers racket

Granite's numbers racket

By Phil Strickland

Granite Construction representatives, the folks who want to bring you Liberty Quarry, are digging a hole in which they may bury themselves. Who knows why, but they’ve committed to an environmental impact report that demonstrably is based

on conjecture and fake

“science.”

It is so flawed as to be meaningless.

Meaningless.

According to Betsy Lowrey, the Temecula city planner who scrutinized both the draft and final environmental reports regarding traffic numbers — she knows them every other which way — they’re bunk.

The county agrees, as is evidenced by its throwing out the traffic studies, known as Appendix K1, from the impact report.

To quote from her email on the subject:

A Granite employee

“raw count of 1385 trucks (including many types) was followed by the consultant count which was 1113 trucks — but only 931 aggregate trucks. Granite used the consultant’s count ... . I see nothing to indicate any count was cut in half.”

“... the original report dated April 5, 2005 (that did not make it into the EIR and attaches the raw truck counts) assumes that “if development occurs at a maximum extraction, the project” could result in a savings of 9.36 million truck miles per year.

“It appears Granite nearly doubled their assumption” in a later report to 16.5 million truck miles per year.

“What should be (understood),” she writes, is that the data — Appendix K1 — and Granite’s many assumptions of and references to reduced truck miles thereafter — were not found acceptable by the traffic section of the report, which concluded truck traffic will get worse, not better, in the county.

So, when it comes to traffic stuff, everyone rejects Appendix K1, right?

Wrong.

Granite EIR consultants do one of two things:

One: “Forget” about the traffic section’s determination and use the discredited data; or,

Two: Resort to weasel words because they can’t admit the Traffic Section determined the “science” was hokum and the impacts could not be mitigated.

In short: “No reduction in traffic or trucks anywhere in the county,” concludes Lowrey.

Unfazed and undeterred, Granite continues to lie to the commission, valley and county residents, and the supervisors by using baseless — meaningless, really — numbers to support specious arguments regarding the quarry’s true impact on the viability of the quarry and the resultant impact on the county’s economy.

Let no one go away from these hearings believing the numbers, conclusions and real impacts of the proposed quarry — on everything that breathes and sucks up sunshine — are in any way reflected in Granite’s environmental impact report.

It’s an insult.

Regarding Granite’s veracity, Councilmember Maryann Edwards said in an email: The opponents’ closing arguments will be brought to you by the word