Stop the Truck: Between a rock mine and a hard place
The Ventura County Reporter features news story on "Appeal denied in truck violation case."
Bill Lascher, Editor of the VC Reporter, published in this past week's edition a short article on the Gravel Truck battles, which Bill says is the prelude to a much longer story in the coming weeks.
Some excerpts and a link to the full article follow:
….The most recent development came with County planners’ refusal to hear an appeal by Ozena’s owners of a violation of existing conditional use permits…
“…What we’re opposed to is turning Route 33 and highway 150 into a de facto trucking route,” said Michael Shapiro, the new chair of the Stop the Trucks! Coalition.
“We’re opposed to having this town, which is dependent on a tourist economy, education, and the arts, inject industrialization. “It completely obscures and takes away from the heart and soul of what the town is about…”
….Shapiro and other opponents worry that lax enforcement against Ozena could mean GPS and other mine operators would also run trucks down Highway 33, which would overwhelm the Ojai Valley. He said that a regional solution addressing the demand for construction materials should be worked out between officials in Ventura, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo in such a way that no one community takes the environmental brunt.
Ojai, he added, has a fragile airshed. In a crucial study used in the fight against Weldon Canyon, a company known as Environ convinced the Ventura County Board of Supervisors that harmful emissions get trapped in the Ojai Valley’s air.
“That cost [of forcing trucks to take an alternate route via Interstate 5] is far, far less in real human terms than the cost of the damage that [truck traffic] is going to do to Ojai,” he said. “In looking at the whole political landscape I would like to think that people are finally looking at the bigger picture to save a town’s way of life.”
http://www.vcreporter.com/article.php?id=5679&IssueNum=161
01-31-08
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