RIVERSIDE -- In a blow to the hopes of thousands of residents, the city of Temecula's bid to annex 5,000 acres on its southwestern border was rejected Thursday night by the county's Local Agency Formation Commission.

As a result of the panel not approving the annexation, Granite Construction can move forward with its application to dig a quarry in a 400-acre corner of the acreage near the community of Rainbow. The quarry application is currently under consideration by the county's planning department.

The commission's vote was 5-2. The two votes in favor of annexation were cast by the members of the county's Board of Supervisors: John Tavaglione and Bob Buster.

Although the vote didn't go her way, Temecula Mayor Maryann Edwards was smiling as she walked out of the Riverside administration building.

"Two supervisors plus our own," she said, referring to Supervisor Jeff Stone, Temecula's representative on the board.

If the quarry project is brought before the county supervisors, only three votes would be needed to defeat the proposal.

Temecula Councilman Jeff Comerchero said the votes by Tavaglione and Buster on Thursday don't necessarily mean they'll vote the same way if or when the quarry project comes before the county.

"But it's certainly encouraging," Comerchero said. "I think we were successful making the case that this is not the place for a mine."

Granite spokeswoman Karie Reuther said the commission's decision -- reached after a 10-hour meeting that was a sometimes fascinating clash of competing public interests -- was a "victory for taxpayers."

If a quarry is eventually approved by the county, the project will generate jobs, tax revenue for the county and millions of tons of aggregate material, the building blocks of homes, schools, commercial buildings and roads.

"Commissioners really echoed the need for aggregate and the need to finish the process we've already started," Reuther said, talking about the county's review of Granite's quarry application.

Before casting their votes, a few members of the commission took the time to explain their thinking for the audience, which numbered roughly 500 when the hearing started but had been considerably thinned by more than nine hours of testimony.

Buster spoke first, using his comments as a sort of a filibuster/sales pitch that seemed designed to convince the other members to join with him in voting for annexation.

When commission Chairman Russell Kitahara, a member of the Coachella Valley Water District, tried to cut his comments short, Buster shrugged him off.

He said that he wanted to say his piece on Thursday in an attempt to avoid having to say the same things if the quarry project comes before the county's Board of Supervisors.

Buster said much of the aggregate material produced at Granite's proposed quarry likely would be sent to San Diego County and he said there is a historical precedent of Riverside County's neighbors using it as a sort of dumping ground. But just because it's been done before doesn't mean that it's good planning, he argued.

"People in this county don't want to see it anymore," Buster said.

He was especially peeved by the state of California, which hasn't established any sort of cohesive or coordinated effort to identify important aggregate sites and work to slot them in a ranking system that would take out much of the reactive nature of the current system.

The supervisor said he understood why Temecula would want to try to annex the land and preserve it as open space.

Most of the acreage that had been sought by the city is within the boundaries of the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve, a field research station managed by San Diego State University.

Buster said that if there was some sort of ranking system in place for siting quarries, the location selected by Granite, 400 acres directly east of the reserve's boundaries, would be far down the list.

"It's one of the most fragile areas we've got," he said.

Toward the end of his monologue he offered unsolicited praise for Temecula and its leadership.

"It's not an elitist thing. The city of Temecula is a winner. And it's because they've had good planning," he said.

The other members of the commission offered less Temecula-centric takes on the annexation issue, with commission members Phil Williams and Terry Henderson arguing that annexation would serve to prematurely cut short the long-in-the-works review of the quarry that is being conducted by the county's planning staff.

Both Williams, a member of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, and Henderson, a La Quinta council member, ended up voting against annexation, which keeps the land in the county's jurisdiction.

"That doesn't stop Temecula from making their case at the county level," Williams said.

Henderson agreed in part with Buster, when she said the city of Temecula would have been remiss if it had not tried to annex the land on behalf of its residents, but she said it was preferable to allow the quarry project, which would have been effectively snuffed by the city, to move forward in the county's system.

Tavaglione's comments were some of the most interesting of the evening. During the speech, he joked about calling in sick on Thursday. He also complimented both sides of the debate -- singling out Temecula City Manager Shawn Nelson for praise -- and said that he found himself changing his mind about the issue during the hearing.

There were more people who spoke in favor of annexation, but the commission didn't seem to be swayed by the turnout or the broad range of people who spoke on behalf of the city's proposal.

Included in the group of allies Temecula counted on Thursday was San Diego State University, a group of doctors concerned about air pollution from the quarry, at least one self-described Granite shareholder, moms concerned about the health of their children, traffic engineers, geologists, air quality experts and residents of the Redhawk neighborhood and the communities of Rainbow, Fallbrook and De Luz.

Fred Bartz, president of a homeowners association near the proposed site of the quarry, used numbers in an attempt to sway the commission. He pointed out that 85 percent of the landowners within the proposed annexation area supported annexation.

Bartz's testimony was a direct counterpoint to long-standing Granite arguments that the city's annexation bid -- which included removing surface mining as a permitted use of the land -- was the equivalent of trampling on the rights of private property owners who want to sell their land to Granite.

"To deny annexation is to deny the rights of the majority," Bartz said.

Annexation foes countered the sometimes emotional arguments in favor of annexation with a collection of union leaders, businessmen and women, engineers and economists.

The arguments against annexation were generally more dispassionate taken as a whole and the picture painted by the opponents of annexation was one of the city of Temecula trying to squash a project that would benefit the entirety of the county and the state.

Gary Johnson, project manager for Granite, noted how Temecula has allegedly failed to meet the vast majority of the guidelines set by the state that commissioners are to consider when ruling on annexations.

Economist John Husing used a lot of numbers to show how the quarry would benefit the county and Southern California, but he said the economic impact wasn't the most important issue for the commission to consider.

"It's equity between communities," he said.

Husing said Temecula has benefited and grown at a fabulous rate in the last 20 years by using aggregate that it had imported from other communities that bore the brunt of supplying those raw materials.

One supporter of the quarry said he had never heard more misrepresented "facts" at any public meeting than he had Thursday. Another dismissed the concerns about animals in the reserve or the plight of avocado trees, saying that humans and the human element -- which meant jobs and employment in his context -- needed to be considered first.

During the city's rebuttal, Nelson said the clean air of Temecula was one of the primary engines driving the local economy, which includes a healthy tourism industry.

"Are we going to place these major economic sectors at risk for 100 jobs?" he said.

Granite has said the quarry will create about 100 full-time jobs and pump about $1.2 million into the county's coffers each year.

Call staff writer Aaron Claverie at 951-676-4315, ext. 2624.