Claiming that county planners are stalling efforts to expand its surface mining activities, Lehigh Southwest Cement Company on Feb. 25 announced that it’s suing Santa Clara County for failing to process its application for expansion.
Lehigh in May 2019 submitted an application to amend its reclamation plan, approved by the county Board of Supervisors in 2012, to increase total mining production at its quarry in the Cupertino foothills by approximately 600,000 tons per year. The county accepted the application as complete in November 2019, but Lehigh’s complaint alleges that the county has failed to move forward in processing it.
“The county planning department’s failure to perform its legal obligation to process our application…may undermine the quarry’s ability to operate and to plan for the quarry’s future,” Lehigh director Erika Guerra said in a statement.
But Cupertino city officials worry that Lehigh’s plans will exacerbate longstanding issues between the cement company and residents. Lehigh locked horns with the city in August 2018 after grading a haul road that ran from its quarry property to the adjacent Stevens Creek Quarry, crossing through a corner of the city’s jurisdiction. The city maintains that Lehigh undertook the grading without proper permits, and city officials say that the company’s current expansion plans “would require more than 500 truck trips through Cupertino streets every day for years.”
While the Cupertino doesn’t have oversight over the quarry, Mayor Darcy Paul said in a statement that the city council is examining the lawsuit “to help ensure an outcome that respects the importance of public safety and responsible stewardship of the environment.”
City officials have expressed their concerns about Lehigh’s expansion plans to the county, saying that several of its components are outside of the company’s vested rights to conduct quarry surface mining operations on 13 of its parcels.
Guerra countered that in lieu of processing Lehigh’s application, the county “has chosen instead to obstruct the application and revisit settled vested rights.”
County Supervisor Joe Simitian, whose district includes the quarry, said the lawsuit is “a tempest in a teapot.”
“A vested right isn’t a blank check,” he added. “It comes with limitations on the nature and extent of the operation.”
As to Lehigh’s contention that the county is holding up its application to expand, Simitian said, “They certainly can’t be surprised that somebody has to determine whether those changes are consistent with the earlier determination on vested rights.”
