Stoned in Santa Barbara

A family owned quarry business is no match for determined bureaucrats.

Brian Doherty from the January 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

To get the patent claim, the Antolinis had to convince a federal judge that they had a unique and profitable product that they had been working for years. The "profitable" part was a sticking point. "What the state, county, and Forest Service were trying to do," Paul believes, "was use the regulatory process to drive up costs, by such things as limiting where we could put overburden [waste rock from the mining process], to render the operation uneconomical and drive us out of business.

"We used to push our overburden west, but the Forest Service said we can't have that since it might be seen from some campgrounds on that side. Then they ordered us to push it to the east, but then there was a landslide there." Now the Antolinis must keep their waste on-site, within lines determined by the county. That means the crew must work around their own waste rock, making mining slower, tougher, and much more expensive.

"We're being strangled to death," Hank says. "You can't work here, you can't work here. If you get stuck in the middle of a big job and can't dig up the material to finish it, you can get blackballed in this business."

The Antolinis point to a memo from a 1990 meeting of county officials that they say suggests a plan to squeeze them out of business. It says, cryptically, that the county must "determine what reclamation we want. It will significantly affect the patent application (mining cost)." While open to interpretation, the wording indicates that regulators knew that their approach to the Antolinis' reports would have a serious impact on the company's costs.

The long list of studies that the Antolinis have been required to undertake dates back to an environmental assessment done under the Forest Service in 1978 and now fills a page and a half: revegetation plans, biological evaluations, paleontological studies, visual analysis reports, air quality reports, another environmental assessment, a plant survey, a biological survey, a soil fertility analysis, two mineral reports, engineering and geological reports, a geotechnological engineering review, a landslide monitoring plan, a moisture/density test, a volume expansion analysis, a slope stability analysis, and, yes, even more. The total legal and professional costs racked up by the Antolinis stand at nearly $700,000--and counting.

But for now their battle to survive has come down to getting approval for the reclamation plan. Under California's Surface Mining and Reclamation Act of 1975, all mines are supposed to have an approved reclamation plan in order to operate. (In practice, anyone pursuing an approved plan in good faith is usually allowed to continue operating.) Such a plan describes how, after mining is finished, the operator intends to restore the land to some use other than a hole in the ground.

A good reclamation plan requires the services of geologists and engineers, and is very expensive to prepare. The Antolinis have prepared a lot of them: a May 1990 reclamation plan, a May 1996 reclamation plan, a January 1997 reclamation plan. That's $330,000 worth of required reclamation plans alone. Now there's the new reclamation plan under consideration in September and its costs as well.

But the expense that causes the Antolinis the most heartburn is the approximately $50,000 in fees they have paid the Santa Barbara County planning staff for processing their applications--or, as Hank sees it, paying the county officials for their so-far unsuccessful efforts to close his business.

The Antolinis have concluded that someone on the county's planning staff has it in for them. Indeed, there have been three attempts by the planning staff to close the mine, though the full Planning Commission, which has to authorize any mine shutdown, has yet to agree to do so. Hank insists that county geologistBrian Baca even told him, on his first visit to the quarry, that he intended to shut it down; that the Antolinis would drown in their own overburden because of restrictions on where it could be placed. Baca denies making any such comments.

However, there are certain on-the-record items that do seem to indicate ill will on the county's part. One is a letter to an Antolini lawyer from the Forest Service during his patent application. The contents of the letter boded ill for the Antolinis' claim, and a county planning official attached a sticky-pad note reading, "the thumbscrews continue to tighten."

County planning official Baca also has sent inspectors to the quarry, looking for public health and employee safety problems, without informing Antolini. A county building official, Frank Breckenridge, was sent to look for "an imminent hazard" at the mine, but found that "the engineering hazards could not be classified as an imminent threat to public safety."

A federal mine safety inspector was also sent to find hazards at Colson Quarry and couldn't. Robert Montoya, a Mine Safety and Health Administration employee, remembers being told, when he said he found no safety threat to the county, to "go up there and find something."

And once, when the Antolinis submitted a plan requesting interim access to two portions of their patent currently off-limits to them, Baca sent the limited plan out as if it were a reclamation plan for the entire quarry. That resulted in long letters from the planning and development director tearing the plan to shreds for not doing what it was never meant to do.

Baca insists he is not hostile to the Antolinis; he says the county is just trying to make them comply with the law. For his part, he doesn't understand why they keep spending tens of thousands of dollars on shoddy reclamation plans.

But whether such plans are adequate is up to the planning staff, which is free to exercise a great deal of discretion. "If you give them 10-foot topographical lines [on a map], they'll decide they want five-foot," says Hank. There is no objective standard. "Whatever you submit, they find a way to throw it back," says Paul.

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