TEMECULA: City seeking Liberty Quarry-related restraining order
Temecula will file the request the day before supervisors consider fast-tracking the Liberty Quarry project
The restraining order would block the board from acting on a request from Supervisor John Benoit to speed up the revised Liberty Quarry plan, which would allow the project to skip the Planning Commission and go straight to supervisors for a decision. The proposal is set to be discussed during a 9 a.m. Nov. 6 hearing in Riverside.
Temecula City Attorney Peter Thorson said Friday the city is seeking an order that prohibits the county from making a decision on the Liberty Quarry proposal until after a ruling is rendered in the city's lawsuit over the project. That suit challenges the ordinances altering the fast-track process to include surface mines among the list of projects that are moved quickly through the county approval process.
"Our lawsuit states that these ordinances were illegally adopted," Thorson said. "The board failed to adopt a proper (environmental) exemption, failed to obtain approval from the State Board of Mines and Geology and failed to obtain planning commission review of the ordinances."
The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, and is the second lawsuit filed by the city against the county with regard to the proposed quarry. A first lawsuit was filed in late July opposing supervisors' approval of the environmental document detailing how a quarry would affect the surrounding environment. A hearing on that first lawsuit is scheduled for Nov. 14.
If the restraining order is denied, however, supervisors could approve the fast-track changes, paving the way for Granite Construction to move forward with its revised application for the quarry south of Temecula.
Derek Cole, an attorney representing Riverside County, said Friday that the county will challenge the request for the restraining order.
"The city has not yet served its moving papers in support of the (restraining order) yet," Cole said, referring to the paperwork that must be delivered to the other parties in such a case. "For that reason, we haven't submitted anything to the court either. Assuming I receive the city's moving papers sometime today, I will have the county's opposition ready by first thing Monday morning, when I will submit that to the court."
The proposed Liberty Quarry has been a divisive issue in the county.
Supervisors in May upheld a planning commission decision denying the project while still certifying the environmental report.
Following the project denial, Granite Construction resubmitted plans for a scaled-down version on the same 414-acre site in between Temecula and the San DiegoCounty line. The revised mine, according to Granite, would have a 50-year instead of a 75-year life span. The quarry would aim to produce 174 million tons of aggregate over its lifetime rather than the 235 million tons originally proposed.
In addition, the new quarry would generate a maximum of 640 truck trips a day, down from 800 trips in the old version, Granite contends. The mine pit would be 710 feet at its deepest point - the old version dug more than 1,000 feet in the ground - and annual aggregate production would be 1 million fewer tons a year, according to Granite.
Granite also has proposed a 20-cent-per-ton tipping fee it says will generate $92 million in revenue for Riverside County. Nearly $62 million of that will come from San Diego County users, the company said.
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