Palo Alto joins effort to stop quarry at Juristac

Palo Alto added its voice this week to a growing coalition of cities and environmental groups that are rallying to prevent a proposed quarry from taking over a grassy expanse in the hills south of Gilroy that is sacred to the Amah Mutsun tribe.

Known as Juristac or Sargent Ranch, this area has been used for generations of Amah Mutsun, descendants of the Ohlone people whose ancestral lands include Palo Alto and other swaths of Santa Clara County. Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, said that people have been coming to Juristac for thousands of years for sacred ceremonies and healing. The tribe’s ancestors are also accustomed to coming to the mountain tops to pray, Lopez told the council at the Dec. 3 meeting.

“Juristac is our most sacred site, without a doubt,” Lopez said.

Now, this sacred site is in jeopardy. Under a proposal from the San Diego-based investment group Debt Acquisition Company of America, the land would be converted into a 298-acre sand and gravel mining operation and a 105-acre buffer zone that would separate the excavation activities from neighboring lands.

The project would unfold in three phases and consist of three pits, dug up in each phase to facilitate mining, a processing plant and a 1.6-mile conveyor belt. Over its 30-year life span, the mine operation would remove about 35 million cubic yards from Sargent Ranch, creating about 25.3 million cubic yards of saleable sand and gravel aggregate, a product used in construction. Once the mining is done, the area would be “reclaimed.” Pits would get filled up and topography would be adjusted so that the land can be retained as open space or used for cattle grazing, according to the environmental documents for the quarry.

The goal of the project is to create a high-quality aggregate needed for various uses in the county and other local markets, according to the applicant. The operation would, however, come at a cost. The environmental analysis concluded that the quarry would “interfere substantially with wildlife movement”; that it would cause a “substantial adverse change in the significance of the Juristac Tribal Cultural Landscape”; and that it would cause “a substantial adverse change in the significance of tribal cultural resources.”

For these reasons, as well as others, civic leaders and environmental groups have joined the Amah Mutsun people in urging Santa Clara County officials to reject the quarry proposal, which is currently under review. County staff are now putting together the final Environmental Impact Report for the quarry project. Once that’s done, the county Planning Commission will consider the permit application.

Alice Kaufman, policy and advocacy director for the conservation nonprofit Green Foothills, is among those who hope the commission will reject the quarry plan. Her group is part of a coalition of environmental and religious organizations that submitted a letter to the Palo Alto council, urging it to follow in the footsteps of the cities of Gilroy, Morgan Hill, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Sunnyvale and Santa Cruz County and adopt a resolution opposing the project.

The letter cites Juristac’s significance to both the Amah Mutsun people and to area wildlife. The California condor forages in the area and Juristac’s creeks and ponds provide habitats for red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders and western pond turtles. The letter calls Juristac a “critical habitat for a wide variety of species, including threatened and endangered species.” Kaufman noted at the Dec. 2 meeting that mountain lions use this Juristac area as a migration route.

“Being able to migrate in and out is incredibly important, particularly for large animals like mountain lions, which are now a candidate for listing as a threatened or endangered species by the state of California,” Kaufman said.

In Palo Alto, the cause of protecting Juristac was taken up by Council member Lydia Kou and Mayor Greer Stone, who co-authored a memo urging their council colleagues to formally adopt a resolution opposing the quarry. The memo notes the recent effort by the Amah Mutsun tribe to revive the California condor, a species that, according to the memo, serves as messengers between tribal members and their deceased relatives.

“It is shortsighted to try to recover a species only to turn around to destroy their habitat,” the memo states. “Juristac is not only a biodiversity hotspot but an important wildlife connectivity area that links the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Diablo and Gabilan mountain ranges.

“Developing a quarry, a processing plant and all the associated roads and infrastructure here would severely degrade one of the last remaining wildlife connectivity areas in the region.”

Stone likened the proposed quarry to the recently shuttered Lehigh quarry in the hills outside Cupertino, an operation that formally shut down last year after about a century of operations and more than 2,135 violations between Jan.1, 2012, and Dec. 31, 2022, according to the list that the county compiled at the request of County Supervisor Joe Simitian. This included 37 violations involving the Bay Area Quality Management District, 809 violations involving the California Air Resources Board and 761 citations from the U.S. Mining Safety and Health Administration, according to the county.

“We should let Lehigh be the example that once these quarries are approved, reclaiming that land is incredibly challenging. It’s an expensive legal battle,” Stone said. “Here we have the opportunity to stand up for the environment, to stand up for the Amah Mutsun tribe, to stand up for future generations who will likely look back and go, ‘I wish we had a chance to prevent that before it opened.’”

Kou, who is concluding her council term this month, linked the proposed resolution to the council’s broader goals of protecting the natural environment. She urged her colleagues to stand with the Amah Mutsun tribe and suggested that the quarry plan is being driven by “Build, baby, build” ideology.

“Protecting diversity in the region is directly connected to the health and well-being of our own community here in Palo Alto as the cumulative impacts of the destruction of this sensitive habitat impacts us all,” Kou said.

This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.