In an unprecedented move this week, the City of Santa Clarita is taking its fight against the multinational corporate giant Cemex Mining Company to the streets — in the form of a new billboard campaign.  The billboard marks the City’s hardest-hitting outreach efforts to date to prevent the sitting of the largest mining project ever to be approved by the Bureau of Land Management — a 69 million ton mega mining project — just one mile from the City’s eastern boundaries.

 

The 80-foot billboard located on SR 14 at Sand Canyon in the City of Santa Clarita, features a photo of traffic backed up for miles and is worded: “Think Traffic is Bad Now….Just Wait,” along with the phrase: Cemex Mega Mining, with a red line through the words. 

 

Santa Clarita has been fighting the sitting of the massive sand, rock and gravel-mining project in Soledad Canyon, just east of the City limits, since 1999, because the full project as planned will have disastrous impacts for the City and the Los Angeles area at large.  It will:

 

· Add more than 1,164 big truck trips every day to Los Angeles area freeways

·  Put 18-wheelers and other trucks onto local freeways every two minutes, 24 hours a day

· Blast four times a week with 8,800 pounds per blast 

· Mine, excavate, stockpile, crush and process sand and gravel 17 hours per day Monday through Saturday 

· Cause State air quality standard for particulate emissions to be exceeded by more than two-times, and cause the State standard for Nitrogen Dioxides to be exceeded by more than 1.5 times.

 

This is a legacy Santa Clarita community leaders do not want brought to the Santa Clarita Valley and the greater Los Angeles area. “The size and scope of the mining project Cemex wants to locate in Soledad Canyon is far too large to be near more than 500,000 residents in the north Los Angeles County region,” commented Ken Pulskamp, City Manager for Santa Clarita.  “We would like to see this project reduced to historical mining levels, which is about a tenth of what Cemex is trying to bring here.”

 

The City has also launched a direct mail campaign with business reply postcards, educating Santa Clarita Valley families about the potential dangers and impacts of living so close to what would be the nation’s largest mining project ever. Response from the community has been overwhelming with the City receiving thousands of returned postcards in the weeks following the mailing of the brochures. Santa Clarita has worked with Congressman Howard McKeon to introduce HR 5471, legislation currently making its way through the House of Representatives that would limit mining in the area by Cemex to historical levels only, while also providing compensation for the mining company.  Cemex has opposed the legislation, announcing instead that they plan to begin mining in 2008, despite vehement community opposition to the size and scope of its mining project.

 

For more information, go to www.santa-clarita.com/news/tmc.asp.