Rock Quarry is an Asset to the Community

The San Rafael Rock Quarry has been an asset to this community for more than 100 years. It provides private businesses and local governments with a resource that has helped build and maintain many of the roads, highways and projects throughout Marin County at a savings of millions of tax dollars. In 2009 alone, the San Rafael Rock Quarry contributed essential building material to 382 projects throughout our county.

The quarry is also considered a regionally significant mineral resource due to its unique location along the bay. Marin County and the state of California both rely on the San Rafael Rock Quarry for emergency response material when flooding occurs, hills slide or levees fail.

My family takes great pride in the role we play toward these infrastructure projects and emergency relief efforts. We also take pride in the steps we've taken to demonstrate our commitment to our community. In order to further build trust with our neighbors we've made significant cutbacks to our operations. Since 2000, the quarry has decreased these key components of our business: reducing operating hours by 64 percent, reducing barge loading hours by 54 percent and reducing truck trips by 72 percent.  Since 2004, we have also made significant investments to improve our operations and lessen the impacts of the quarry  at a cost of $11 million. Overall, these voluntary improvements and major reductions to operations have made neighborhood complaints drop more than 90 percent during the past four years.

It's been more than six years that the San Rafael Rock Quarry has been moving through an extensive environmental and public review process with the county of Marin on both our operating conditions and reclamation plan for when activity is no longer under way. Now, at its upcoming September 28th meeting, the Marin County Board of Supervisors will make a final decision that will determine whether we can continue as a viable operation.

The reality is that for the San Rafael Rock Quarry to remain economically viable, our newly proposed operating conditions cannot be restricted further. Our proposal offers to considerably reduce the hours on both our processing and barge loading operations, which will significantly lower the quarry's production capability when compared to previous years.

The San Rafael Rock Quarry has already taken major steps to operate sensitively to its surrounding community and we promise to continue working with that approach. We propose to permanently limit operating hours to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, except for 50 mulligans of 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday to allow us to respond to spikes in local demand if needed.  There will be no crushing activities on weekends. Also, trucks going to and from the quarry are limited to weekdays from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. year round, and are limited to 125 trucks per day, which is less than half the number prior to 2004. We also mandate that all inter-site trucks be tarped and request that the county of Marin and all other municipalities require all trucks coming to the quarry related to public projects be tarped as well.

With 173 conditions of approval, we are hopeful that the board of supervisors will allow us to now move forward. We are ready to continue serving the needs of this community and remain a valuable local resource for years to come.

Throughout this entire review process, we have received tremendous support from the Marin community. Our team was greatly humbled by the outpouring of support at the September 14th supervisors' hearing from hundreds of local residents. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all the residents that have attended public hearings on our behalf, written letters of support to me and sent letters-to-the-editor or to the board. Again, I cannot thank you enough.

Aimi Dutra oversees community relations for the Dutra Group.