Egg City’s New Use Nothing to Crow About, Residents Say
MOORPARK — In neat paper stacks that blanket her dining room table, Patty Waters has assembled every document she can find on a project she fears.
The papers--traffic projections, a safety study, county reports--describe a recycling center that an Oxnard-based business wants to build on the former Egg City site north of Moorpark.
Waters lives less than a mile downhill, close enough to remember vividly the stench and truck traffic created by the old egg production facility and its 18 million chickens.
But while Waters worries about the number of trucks the recycling center could bring onto local roads, the center is not the only industrial project on her mind.
About two miles away, a gravel and sand mine has already received the county’s blessings to expand, which could add as many as 1,180 round-trip truck trips each day onto narrow California 23. The two-lane highway is one of only two roads that residents of the hills north of town can take into Moorpark.
The two projects have enraged many of the ranchers and retirees who populate these hills, and Waters has organized a group of homeowners--calling themselves Preservation of our Rural Environment--to fight the recycling project. The group will argue before a county panel Wednesday that the project requires a full environmental impact report, something county planners argue the project doesn’t need.
Opponents of the mine expansion, meanwhile, have banded together under the name Fairview Neighbors. They filed a petition in Ventura County Superior Court on Friday, asking that the court force county officials to conduct a new environmental study of the project.
The two groups share members and a common concern: that their landscape of citrus orchards bordered by eucalyptus trees could be threatened by encroaching industrialization.
“It deserves to be protected,†Waters said, gesturing at her family’s lemon groves. “This is one of the few places like this left. For the county to ignore that, it’s really sad.â€
But backers of both projects are quick to point out that the industrialization is already there. It has been there, in fact, longer than most of residents.
Egg City began production roughly 30 years ago and, at one point, dumped as many as 250 trucks on the highway each day. The mine, currently run by Transit Mixed Concrete, a subsidiary of a Houston-based company, has been in operation for almost 50 years.
“The people who are the loudest voices are people who bought the land knowing there was a mine in the area,†said Glen Reiser, an attorney representing Transit Mixed Concrete. “So it’s not like there’s some great surprise out there.â€
Although they have provoked similar reactions, the two projects are vastly different. In December, Transit Mixed received permission from the Board of Supervisors to mine an additional 42 acres of scrub-covered hillside at its location north of Broadway and Walnut Canyon Road. Overturning an earlier County Planning Commission vote, the board also gave Transit Mixed permission to build an asphalt plant at the site.
The recycling facility proposed by Oxnard’s M Maintenance, in contrast, would not require digging into the hillsides or moving large amounts of earth. The company wants to use five concrete pads that once supported henhouses as platforms for sorting waste cardboard, metal and concrete from construction sites. An aging warehouse would hold baled cardboard until it could be shipped to other recycling facilities outside the county. All utilities to the site, including fire hydrants, are already in place, ready for use.
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Although neighbors complain about possible pollution--from the asphalt plant and concrete-crushing equipment at the recycling center--their concern about the two projects centers primarily on the road they all share. California 23 is the main road through the area, linking it to Fillmore, Moorpark and beyond.
It is also, neighbors say, a mess. Trucks start wheezing uphill toward the mine in the early morning hours, then come barreling back down loaded with rock. Other trucks haul locally grown lemons, oranges and avocados to packing houses.
“I don’t care if they call it a state highway,†Waters said. “I don’t care if they call it the Indianapolis Speedway. It’s still a two-lane road.â€
Some trucks, heading west, take Grimes Canyon Road southbound, creating problems on that road as well, residents say.
“The road is starting to break up right where the truck tracks are,†said Dennis Hodnett, who lives near the intersection of Grimes Canyon Road and Broadway. “They weren’t designed to handle this.â€
Farther down California 23, the prospect of more trucks worries Moorpark officials, who already field complaints from residents about traffic congestion in town. In December, Mayor Patrick Hunter asked county supervisors to reject the mine’s proposed expansion and asphalt plant, citing the impact on Moorpark roads. The city, Hunter said, has not taken a position on the recycling facility.
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For Moorpark Unified School District board President Tom Baldwin, the real danger lies at the highway’s intersection with Casey Road. A new magnet elementary school is under construction nearby. The school, which will include students from throughout Moorpark, will not have bus service, Baldwin said.
“That means we’re going to have a lot of cars coming out of there,†he said. “It just sounded like a formula for disaster.â€
Acting on his own and not as a representative of the school board, Baldwin has written the county and asked for a full environmental impact review of the recycling project. He will also discuss the project with other board members at their Tuesday meeting.
Salvadore Plascencia, owner of M Maintenance, finds the talk about truck traffic puzzling, at least as far as it concerns his proposed facility. Plans for the center predict 59 two-way truck trips each day, nothing compared to the traffic Egg City once produced, he said.
“What is the problem?†he asked “People say there’s going to be a truck every few seconds, but it’s going to be 50 loads a day, maximum.â€
The mine operators, meanwhile, say that the number of truck trips approved by the county is an upper limit that would only be reached in the busiest of times. And they point to a 1993 state Department of Conservation study that found aggregate rock supplies in existing Ventura County mines nearly depleted, showing the need for their expansion.
“The county does not have adequate reserves to meet those projections,†Reiser said. “If it doesn’t come out of this mine, it will have to come out of somewhere else.â€
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Backers of Plascencia’s project insist that the recycling center would be an environmental boon, not the menace neighbors fear. David Goldstein, an analyst with the county’s Recycling Market Development Zone, works to lure recycling businesses into the area. As cities throughout the county approve construction of more housing tracts, the need grows for this kind of facility, he said.
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