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News Home page Buck McKeon held a meeting at the Sulphur Springs School on Friday, August 20th, to take comments and testimony concerning the Transit Mix surface mine in Agua Dulce. Approximately 200 people attended the meeting. Groups opposing the project were given an opportunity to present their groups position. Transit Mix was given an opportunity, and anyone supporting it was given an opportunity to present positions. The general public was then allowed to line up and speak for two minutes on their position.
After hearing all the comments, Buck McKeon stood up and stated that he could not support this project and would take an active position disapproving the project and recommend to BLM that they not approve the project, because of the severe health and environmental risks the project will create.
Most of the groups there fully opposed the project. The various homeowner’s groups around the project, the Acton Town Council, and this newspaper, presented the reasons why the project would is not needed and would damage the community. Most people felt the main problems with the project are air pollution, respiratory disease, dust, traffic, reduction in home values. , nitrate water pollution, and the lack of need for the entire project.
The only group that gave support to the project was Jim Dusiak for the so called Agua Dulce Town Council. While he said that the project is no good because it wasn’t fully mitigated. But he added id fully mitigated the valuable precious mineral resources need to be available for the communities in the future. He has said that the Agua Dulce Town Council would support the project if it were properly mitigated. No one else would even remotely accept the project.
Dianne Trujillo, of the Agua Dulce Civic, went so far as to say not only to stop the project, but remove the designation of the entire area as a mineral production area and instead build homes in the area. She apparently was unaware that the Agua Dulce Chamber of commerce fully supported the designation of the area as future strip mines.
Besides Dusiak, the only persons supporting the project, who claimed it was fully mitigated, was Vica, from the San Fernando Valley, and the various consultants and partners of Transit Mix.
Not a single citizen came forward to support the project. In fact, the Santa Clarita Chamber of Commerce made a point that they opposed the project and were irritated that Vica, a San Fernando Valley group, was speaking to support the project.
The speakers for Transit Mix were near idiotic in their positions. They took the position that anyone more than a quarter mile away would be absolutely unaffected by the project, not recognizing that our winds here blow 50 and 60 miles an hour. They ignored their own environmental impact report which clear states dust will be all over the place. They also claim that the water that they are going to take out and pollute with the nitrates from the crushed rock, will "never be returned to the river". We have no idea what they mean by this because their water, after they use it, will then be put into settling basins in the river area, which will then "settle" directly into the underground water supply and directly connect to the water again. To claim that the water will never be returned to the river when it was extracted from underground and will be returned to underground is typical of the misstatements that Transit Mix has made throughout this entire process.
Testimony also occurred of the extreme environmental affects in the City of Irwindale with a similar project, where the community are spending millions of dollars of tax dollars to undo the damages that surface mining has created.
A retired public health nurse, stated that she had examined the published records and found a study in Germany where two areas, one with a high amount of PM-10 (dust particles less than ten microns in size) which easily lodge in the lungs, caused this particular community to have a 50% increase in respiratory diseases among it’s children, compared to an identical community , without the PM-10 pollution from surface and industrial mining.
Buck McKeon stated that BLM controls the project and whether or not the Board of Supervisors or Regional Planning approves or disapproves, BLM has the final say to the project. Congressman McKeon will be advising BLM not to approve the project due to the environmental impacts on the surrounding communities. It may not yet be dead, but it looks like it needs a lot of life support if it is going to survive.
Right now the only people willing to support it are Southdown, the parent company of Transit Mix, and the Agua Dulce Town Council, according to Jim Dusiak if it is fully mitigated.
The best comments at the public meeting was from one of the Southdown cronies asked Buck McKeon not to listen to "this bunch of hysterical people who have testified".
. McKeon, after everyone had their chance to speak, stood up and said that he didn’t think the people were hysterical, and that these were his constituents, they had elected him to office and he "…had to listen to them…". He said this just before he took his position to oppose the project. It would seem that developers, by calling people hysterical blew it.
At the worst one lady cried a bit when she talked about her children who are Asthmatic and needed medical care. That is not hysterics, that’s simple concern and care, and lack of public speaking experience. The people who have testified, doctors, homeowners groups, have testified logically and well without even raising their voices.
For this corporate lackey to call these people hysterical is an insult and I would hope that people would make sure that Southdown is a pariah in both this community and all others