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Mountain View is the latest city to take a stand in solidarity with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which is fighting to preserve a piece of sacred land from being developed into a sand and gravel quarry.
The city council passed a resolution at its April 25 meeting in support of the tribe’s efforts to preserve the Juristac open space, “a territory that covers the southern hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, above the Pajaro and San Benito Rivers,” according to a report prepared by Mountain View city staff.
More than 5,000 acres of the Juristac land is currently owned by the Debt Acquisition Company of America. In 2016, the company proposed a sand and gravel mining operation, dubbed the Sargent Ranch Quarry Project, on a roughly 400-acre site.
Ever since the quarry was proposed nearly seven years ago, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band has been fighting hard to shut it down and preserve Juristac, Tribe Chairman Valentin Lopez told the Voice in an interview.
“The plan calls for destroying our most sacred site and stripping down four sacred mountains in Juristac,” Lopez said. “This is just a continuation of destroying our culture, destroying our spirituality, our indigenous knowledge, our identity.”
The situation intensified last July when Santa Clara County released some initial environmental findings on the project. The county’s report found that the proposed mine would create more than a dozen significant and unavoidable impacts, including to tribal cultural resources and wildlife movement — findings that are fueling the community’s outcry.
When asked to comment on the mounting opposition, a Debt Acquisition Company of America (DACA) spokesperson said, “We are still early on in the process of securing approval from the County and welcome a robust community dialogue throughout.”
The environmental findings also list a few alternative ways to approach the project that would reduce its impacts, and the company spokesperson said DACA is open to one of them, which suggests reducing the amount of resources mined and relocating the processing plant.
Alice Kaufman, policy and advocacy director with the Palo Alto-based environmental nonprofit Green Foothills, said that building a quarry in the proposed location would destroy a vital wildlife corridor.
“Juristac is important because of its location. It lies right at the toe of the Santa Cruz Mountains, just south of Gilroy,” Kaufman said. “So it’s the gateway for animals to migrate to the entire rest of the state. The Santa Cruz Mountains are essentially an island of habitat surrounded by a sea of development.”
Because of the significant amount of development in Silicon Valley, “there are only two remaining pathways for wildlife to get in and out of the Santa Cruz Mountains,” Kaufman explained.
“One of them is Coyote Valley, which is about 20 miles to the north in San Jose, and Juristac is the other one,” she said. “This open pit mine would lie directly across the route that animals have to take to cross underneath Highway 101 and migrate out of the Santa Cruz Mountains, or back in.”
In the years since the project was first proposed, multiple local jurisdictions have thrown their support behind the Tribe’s efforts, including the cities of Morgan Hill, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and Gilroy, as well as the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. With last night’s council action, the city of Mountain View joins the list.
“The city of Mountain View stands in solidarity with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band,” Hicks told the Voice after the April 25 decision. “We stand with them in creating a more sustainable, just and equitable future for the region.”
After the initial environmental impact report was published last year, Santa Clara County received more than 7,500 public comment letters challenging the proposed Sargent Quarry project, according to the Protect Juristac website. The county must now prepare responses to those comments that it will eventually publish alongside a final environmental impact report, which Fifth District Supervisor Joe Simitian said could take a significant amount of time, given the volume of public input. Simitian said last he heard, the county planning department is aiming to have a timeline mapped out in May for how long it will take to respond to the comments.
Once the final report is complete, the proposal will head to the county’s planning commission for a hearing. Kaufman said that whichever way the planning commission votes, it’s likely someone will appeal the decision – which would then send the project to the Board of Supervisors to make the final call.
Simitian said he won’t weigh in on the project unless it comes across his desk, which he said won’t happen “in all likelihood until it makes it way to planning commission and gets appealed up to the Board of Supervisors, which if I had to give my best guess, I think probably doesn’t happen until at least early 2024,” he said.
That being said, Simitian noted that in early 2018, he requested that county staff explore any opportunities that arise to acquire and conserve the property. While such an acquisition hasn’t come to fruition yet, Simitian said, “sometimes those opportunities don’t present themselves until the 12th hour.”
But in the absence of any concrete plan to preserve the property, Chairman Lopez said his tribe is relying on public support to stop the quarry project from going forward. He said the massive outpouring of solidarity over the past few years has exceeded his expectations.
“Part of that, I believe, is that there’s very strong environmental interest and concerns here as well,” Lopez said. “We’re really thankful to the citizens of Mountain View who have supported us, because we have had a lot of support there.”
