A brief history: Santa Clarita, Cemex
The legal battle between the city of Santa Clarita and Cemex spans decades, numerous court filings and legislative procedures.
As part of a lawsuit filed by Cemex in December against the city, but made public Thursday in a City Council closed session agenda item, Cemex said its predecessor Transit Mixed Concrete submitted plans in May 1990 to the federal Bureau of Land Management to mine Soledad Canyon, which the federal agency issued a Record of Decision giving the project the go-ahead in August 2000. The city immediately challenged it in court.
"Over the next seven years, (Cemex) and the federal government successfully defended the project from multiple challenges brought by the city," the lawsuit said. “In several of these lawsuits, the city, after losing the cases, was sanctioned with attorneys’ fee awards based on bad faith litigation.”
The lawsuit said Los Angeles County officials approved the mining project in 2004 via a consent decree, but that decision sparked additional litigation by the city in state and, eventually, federal court.
“The frivolous and lengthy litigation brought by the city against the Soledad Canyon Project did not conclude until 2009, when the city dismissed its appeal of one of the district court’s awards of attorney’s fees against it for bad-faith litigation in attempting to block the project,” the lawsuit said.
In 2005, the city tried to annex the mine site in what Cemex described in the lawsuit as an attempt to “interfere with and stop the Soledad Canyon Project.” The company filed a legal complaint in December 2005 in response to the annexation attempt. Eight months later, in August 2006, a settlement was reached between the company and the city that rescinded the annexation attempt and required that further annexation plans must have an environmental impact report, according to exhibits in the lawsuit.
A year later, in 2007, the city began working with Cemex to try to resolve their dispute, according to city documents.
In April 2013, then-Sen. Barbara Boxer introduced Senate Bill 771, which allowed the Secretary of the Interior to cancel Cemex’s mining contracts and prohibit mining in Soledad Canyon. In exchange, the Secretary of the Interior would have to sell federal lands in San Bernardino County, the proceeds of which would be used to compensate Cemex for their mining contracts. The bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, but never passed the Senate, according to congressional records.
Cemex informed the city in 2015 it would pursue the remainder of the approval process to mine Soledad Canyon. After a series of letters involving Rep. Steve Knight, R-Palmdale, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Van Nuys, Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, Cemex, the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers, the mining contracts for Cemex were canceled in August 2015. A year later, Knight introduced a bill to block mining in Soledad Canyon. He reintroduced that bill, this time dubbed the Soledad Canyon Consistency Act, in March 2017.
State Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, introduced Senate Bill 57 in December 2016. That bill would reopen public comment on the state permitting process for the mining project’s water supply should the federal government give it the final approval to proceed.