In the midst of the gloom of this economic downturn something positive has happened ---- Temecula Valley has become a "go-to" destination for Southern California residents on "staycation."
Our wine country is attracting ever more visitors, and our festive Old Town, great restaurants and retail stores all combine to make Temecula Valley a very popular destination. Tourism continues to add to local employment, and keeps a floor under real estate values. But this positive development would be jeopardized if the proposed quarry were to start blasting rocks for aggregate on the hilltops overlooking the valley.
Quarry access roads 62 feet wide would be carved into the hills facing the Temecula Valley, so that scars 70 feet or higher would be easily visible to the casual eye.
Our good air quality would deteriorate, not to mention our quality of life, with daily blastings and 1,600 trucks lumbering up and down the hillsides and onto our local roads and freeways.
In sum, Temecula Valley’s desirability as a destination would decrease.
There are so many other great places to visit, so why go where the travel brochure would list attractions like, "Beautiful heavy industry, amazing firework displays, engaging truck traffic, possible exciting encounters with flying rocks on the roads, romantic scarred hillsides, and enchanting smog."
Strange as it may seem that’s usually not what visitors are looking for, and they would stay away in droves.
The proposed quarry lists San Diego County as the primary user of its aggregate. The San Diego Association of Governments has stated that the county has more high-quality granite available for quarrying than it could ever use, but San Diego County chooses not to permit gravel quarries because of the environmentally sensitive areas within the county.
Well, what about our environmentally sensitive areas?
The proposed quarry would be located upwind of more than 100,000 residents and wineries in Temecula Valley, less than a mile away from residences of De Luz, and adjacent to the pristine Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve. The quarry site is also within the watershed boundary of the Santa Margarita River (the last free-flowing river in Southern California), the drinking source for Camp Pendleton, and is the site of the Pechanga Indians' creation and origin.
But evidently that is not a sensitive environment to some.
If valuable aggregate resources need to be utilized, why not locate quarries where the end users would be ---- in San Diego County? Why do we get all the "negatives" of having yet another gravel quarry in Riverside County which, by the way, has the most aggregate mines in California. It is a fact that Riverside County actually exports aggregate to the surrounding counties, just as Liberty Quarry proposes to do.
Finally, I wonder if Mr. Rick Kellogg is a now medical expert or at least where he gets the facts to support his statement (Aug. 17 community forum) that: "There will be no negative health issues associated with the quarry."
Actual medical experts have already taken issue with that.
Mariann Byers is a Temecula resident.
