Company agrees to end sand dredging
California regulators reached an agreement with a Mexican company to shut down the last coastal sand mine in the United States and avoid a legal battle over a dredging operation that experts say has caused devastating erosion in Monterey Bay, officials said Monday.
The California Coastal Commission, which began investigating sand mining by Cemex USA in 2010, is expected to vote July 13 on a deal that would require the company to halt extraction at its Lapis Sand Plant, an 8-acre operation on a remote beach in the Monterey County town of Marina.
The agreement will allow the plant to extract smaller amounts of sand for three years, according to sources close to the negotiations. All equipment would then have to be removed from the beach. A company plant a quarter-mile
inland would be allowed to process stockpiled sand for another three years before shutting down, the sources said.
The deal would require Cemex to restore the land and protect sensitive species, according to details of the agreement released by the Coastal Commission. In the end, the land would be sold for less than market rate to a nonprofit or governmental entity that would open it up to the public, the commission said.
“We have long sought a solution here to stop the loss of sand, and to protect the beaches in the Monterey Bay,” said Lisa Haage, chief enforcement officer for the Coastal Commission, in a statement. “If this settlement is approved, we look forward to working with the community on designing future uses of the property that provide for public access, conservation, habitat protection and public education.”
The Lapis plant, which began dredging in 1906, has been sucking up roughly 270,000 cubic yards of sand per year, even though other such operations were banned from the California coast 27 years ago. That’s the equivalent of a large dump-truck load every half hour, 24 hours a day — enough to cause severe erosion along the southern Monterey Bay coastline, according to geologists and oceanographers who have studied the impacts.
The coarse, amber sand is packed into bags and sold for a variety of uses, including for sandblasting, stucco, grout and golf course bunkers. Home Depot sells it as “Lapis Lustre.”
Cemex officials insisted they had complied with all laws and denied the plant was responsible for the erosion, but said Monday they wanted to be a good neighbor.
“For the last several years, Cemex has worked with the California Coastal Commission and more recently, the State Lands Commission and the City of Marina, to reach an agreement regarding the Lapis sand plant operation that is mutually acceptable and which respects the interests of our employees, the community and other stakeholders,” the company said in a statement.
The agreement came after the Lands Commission sent a letter in May ordering an immediate halt to the dredging. The letter argued that Cemex was taking public property and must therefore lease the land from the state, which would require additional environmental review.
“We anticipated this to go on a lot longer, so it’s a huge victory,” said Jennifer Savage, California policy manager for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, a national marine preservation group. “This has been one of the most egregious violations on the California coast, and to see all of that hard work prevail against a multimillion-dollar company that likes to litigate is really affirming that the little guys, the public, can win.”
Cemex had taken advantage of a loophole in state law by placing its dredge in an artificial lagoon just above the mean high tide line, which is the boundary between public and private land under the California Coastal Act. That arguably placed the dredge outside the jurisdiction of the Lands Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which can regulate industry in the surf zone.
The Coastal Commission, backed by local politicians, geologists and environmentalists, claimed that the state did have jurisdiction because high tides regularly replenished the lagoon with fresh sand from Monterey Bay.
The commission said Cemex had significantly ramped up its mining, hastening southern Monterey Bay erosion that the U.S. Geological Survey in 2006 found was among the worst in California.