People of Petaluma Speak Out Against Supes Straw Vote on Dutra

80% of Respondents are Against Locating the Dutra Factory at Haystack Landing

Is anybody listening?
Poll: Supes made wrong decision on asphalt plant

by Pulse.Of.Petaluma

An overwhelming number of people who responded to the Argus-Courier's online poll October 21, 2010 feel that that the Board of Supervisors made the wrong decision on October 12 when it voted to approve a proposed asphalt plant south of town. More than 80 percent said it was a wrong decision and that the public did not have adequate time to review the 1,100 pages of documents describing the revised, reduced asphalt plant.

Here are some of the comments from those who responded to the poll. Read more comments at the pulse of Petaluma blog at Petaluma 360.

"I don't feel like the majority of the supervisors are listening to the citizens of Petaluma. To allow an asphalt plant in this beautiful and vulnerable area does not make sense. This is not something that can be reconstructed if it gets destroyed. This is one of the few remaining wetlands of its kind, something that we need to save for future generations. It is part of the fabric of Petaluma."

"I am offended and frustrated with this whole situation. Petaluma invested space and tax dollars to create a pleasant environment for wildlife and our citizens to enjoy, only to be compromised by the selfish interest of big business. Why would we want ugly forced upon our lives here in Petaluma? Would the people of Dutra want a view of their asphalt plant out their living room window?"

Last 8 Weeks of the Fight against Dutra in 2010

Next Step:

We’ll stop them in The Courts

Donate for the Legal Defense !

The Community vs. Dutra Materials and The County of Sonoma 2011

Dear Friends of Shollenberger Park,

The Board of Supervisors’ straw vote on October 12, 2010 is not the end of the line for our campaign. We WILL stop Dutra from locating next to our park. If not with a vote from the Supervisors then in the courts with a lawsuit proving the inadequacy of the EIR and the hearing process, exposing the lack of compliance with CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act).

It’s important to note our successes since this battle for our right to fresh air and well-being began:

1. We have exposed Dutra and their hired consulting engineer Al Cornwall, CSW Stueber Stroeh, as giving false map information on the location of the navigable channel and PG&E transmission pipes to the County and the US Coast Guard.

2. We have delayed final approval hearing of the project originally on the agenda from December 2008 to December 2010.

3. We have pressured Dutra into scaling back the project – eliminating Dutra’s ability to barge aggregate; eliminating the noisy and polluting recycling of asphalt on the property; lowering the towers 12 feet.

4. We have made public that the Dutra project is no longer a water dependent operation and is in reality a truck dependent project.

It’s important to thank our elected officials who have actively supported us and enabled us to achieve these victories:

Thank you to Mayor Pam Torliatt for leading the Petaluma City Council to defend Petaluma’s best interests by rallying unanimous City Council opposition to the Dutra Project and speaking out forcefully at all Sonoma County Board of Supervisors’ hearings on Dutra.

Thank you to Vice Mayor Dave Glass for representing the voice of the majority of the Petaluma community and speaking out at every Sonoma Board of Supervisors meeting on the Dutra asphalt plant. He has made it clear that this project is bad for business, bad for job creation, bad for the tourist driven economy of Petaluma and Southern Sonoma County.

Thank you to Council Member Teresa Barrett for supporting Friends of Shollenberger and encouraging the community to make their voices heard, and for being an outspoken advocate for clean air, preserving our environment, and protecting our city’s asset – Shollenberger Park.

What can you do? Send tax-deductible donations to O.W.L. Foundation, note that it is for the Shollenberger Legal Defense. This year, consider choosing Friends of Shollenberger (OWL) as your non-profit of choice for charitable donations, and make saving Shollenberger Park your priority. See the website: http://www.saveshollenberger.com/ for how and where to send your contributions.

Joan Cooper

Our Community Will Win

I am very disappointed with the 3 votes to support Dutra. The outcome seemed wired from the beginning of the meeting. The public had virtually no chance of providing new and corrected information and comments to the Supervisors, given both the extremely short timeline to review over 1100 pages of documents released just last week, and given the 3 minute limits of talking to the Supervisors.

We very much appreciate Supervisors Brown and Zane's understanding of core issues about the asphalt plant's damaging health and air quality impacts, among other issues. I am very proud of our community, both our old and new friends and allies, who continue to address these problems with vigor, creativity, intelligence, caring and good will.

We will be meeting to determine our next steps shortly. We believe strongly that our community will win, and prevent Dutra from building any asphalt plant at the entrance to our community and the Gateway to Sonoma County. It remains the wrong plant, in the wrong place, with the wrong company.

~ David Keller

Supervisors conduct straw vote 3-2 in favor of Dutra

Unfortunately, our Sonoma County Supervisors conducted a straw vote this afternoon 3-2 in favor of the Dutra Asphalt Factory.

Supervisors Shirlee Zane and Valerie Brown voted against the factory citing various concerns including Dutra's record of violations and the substantial health concerns.

Supervisors Mike Kerns, Paul Kelley & Efren Carrillo voted in favor of Dutra.

Stay tuned for our next steps on preventing this factory from being built in our community.

Kerns' Towers....Your Legacy

We Need You Tomorrow!

We need you tomorrow, Tuesday October 12th! If at all possible, please plan to attend this final hearing.

Your Sonoma County Board of Supervisors will decide the fate of the Dutra Asphalt Factory at Haystack Landing in Petaluma, right across the river from Shollenberger Park.

This could be our last opportunity to speak our minds to the Supervisors and show what kind of county we want. Please join us!!

TUESDAY OCTOBER 12TH
Supervisors Chambers
575 Administration Drive, Room 100A,
Santa Rosa, CA

The agenda item is scheduled for just after 2pm but arrive early (1pm) to ensure you get access to the chambers.

Bring friends and family...don't forget snacks, it could last hours. Arrive anytime between 1pm and 4pm as it will still be going on.

We will be carpooling at Noon from our Headquarters in Petaluma, located at 322 Western Avenue, next to the Tea Room Cafe.

Thank you for your support and we'll see you tomorrow!

Health Forum Video Clips

Following are excerpts from the September 30, 2010 Community Health Forum "Potential Health Impacts of the Proposed Dutra Asphalt Plant" sponsored by the Petaluma Health Care District

Friends of Shollenberger Park and Moms For Clean Air invited 2 speakers to this event. Dr. James Clark is a toxicologist with 20 years of experience researching the effects of environmental contaminants on human health. Dr. Brock-Utne is a pediatrician and is the Community and Primary Care Project Director of the Region 9 Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit at UCSF.

The complete health care forum will be broadcast on PCA soon. These are the first clips of this event to become available. They were posted to YouTube just last night!

Dr. Clark's presentation:





Dr. Brock-Utne presentation:

Response to Aimi Dutra's "Asphalt Magic"

Dutra would have us believe that they can make an asphalt factory without any releases of toxins or noxious fumes and dusts. Ms. Dutra’s p.r. pitch is ‘everything is wonderful’. Tragically, this is not the case.

Having visited Ms. Dutra’s earlier version of what she called their ‘state of the art, ideal Astec plant’ in Ontario, I know first hand of the leaks, the smells, the noise and the dusts coming from not only the plant itself, but also from the trucks hauling in rock and leaving with un-tarped asphalt loads. During peak production, when they are running 24/7 to fill government contracts, that means heavy trucks every 3-5 minutes, all day and night.

And if you want to get to Hwy 101 in the morning or afternoon rush hours, they predict stop and go traffic waiting for trucks at the Landing Way/Petaluma Boulevard So. intersection.

The Dutra Companies have a terrible legal and environmental record, stretching from the Port of Miami (FL) to the Gulf of the Farralones National Marine Sanctuary, filled with illegal dumping, dredging, huge fines and settlements, and bankruptcy. While Dutra has pitched their perfection to the community, the reality is unfortunately way short of their rosy pictures.

Now that Dutra’s fabrications here trying to hide their blocking of the Petaluma River’s navigational channel, and their having falsely mapped PG&E’s high pressure gas pipelines – the kind that just blew up in San Bruno – out of the way and onto their neighbor’s parcel (pipelines marked on Dutra’s parcels with 4×8 signs, “No anchoring. No dredging”), both of which we uncovered (no thanks to Sonoma County’s planning department), Dutra has eliminated their barging of materials.

The operations are not ‘river-dependent’, and Dutra will not bring one ounce of new shipping tonnage to our river. So much for their claims to help with river dredging.

In fact, had the county done their due diligence 6 years ago when Dutra proposed the barging scenario, we would have been able to move this operation to a more suitable location, away from Shollenberger Park, with the residences, businesses and tourists who use it and work near it.

All along, Dutra has fabricated information about their proposal. Why would they stop now?

Those who have recently posted here saying, ‘Petaluma has to take their share of asphalt pollution, and not increase pollution at Santa Rosa’s asphalt plants’ are just echoing Dutra’s perversion of environmental justice. You don’t spread pollution around. Instead, the right thing to do is to clean it up.
Dutra doesn’t get that.

This remains the wrong plant, in the wrong place.

The Public Deserves Better!

We have just received incomplete documentation from the Permit and Resource Management Department on Dutra's latest version (Revision II) of the proposal, less than 6 days before the October 12th, 2010 hearing for public comment.

Please email the Supervisors and demand a postponement (sample letter below):

1st District Supervisor Valerie Brown

2nd District Supervisor Mike Kerns

3rd District Supervisor Shirlee Zane

4th District Supervisor Paul Kelley

5th District Supervisor Efren Carrillo




Sample letter:

Oct. 6, 2010

Dear Chairman Valerie Brown
Sup. Zane, Sup. Kerns, Sup. Carrillo, Sup. Kelley:

Environmental reports on the Dutra Proposal (Revision II) are arriving piecemeal, incomplete and too late for the public to adequately review and respond to at the Tuesday, October 12th Hearing. Please consider re-scheduling the Dutra Hearing to allow the public reasonable time to receive and review the documents and all back-up data. There is no time for the public and decision makers to make an informed decision in public based on the merits and impacts of the project, as firmly required by CEQA law and case law. Email and printed versions of the documents should be mailed to all "persons of interest" who requested to be kept informed.

Respectfully,

Or click here for their phone, fax & address

The environmental reports and their back up data is late and incomplete. The public deserves better! We demand a continuance and that the hearing be rescheduled!

I just read PRMD Steve Padovan’s summary letter to the Board of Supervisors (OCT 4, 2010) reviewing Revision II, as they call the latest Dutra Asphalt Plant Proposal. In it he reviews for the Supervisors’ enlightenment, the two new options proposed by Dutra to replace their original plan to dock barges at their riverside parcel. Remember how green their plan pretended to be? They touted adding tonnage to the river to insure dredging by the Army Core of Engineers, and also taking trucks off the road. Not happening anymore. Now they are adding trucks (47,000+) and slipping in under Shamrock’s use permit for tonnage. No added tonnage. Definitely added traffic.

Dutra’s first plan to dock barges at Haystack Landing was based on falsified maps provided by Dutra to the County. Dutra’s version of the maps conveniently relocated the PG &E’s pipes to intersect with Shamrock’s riverside property and also drew the navigable channel beginning at the eastern bank of the river- not possible, too shallow. Both were lies engineered to make their proposal look possible. They wasted everybody’s time, five years of our time and the Supervisors’ time with a fake map. PG & E ‘s “No Mooring No Dredging” signs at the site indicate major 12-inch tandem high-pressure natural gas transmission pipes( Marin to Ukiah) that intersect Dutra’s originally proposed docking location. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the Dutras’ barging plan would never work, but Padovan’s team missed it. Or looked the other way?

The current proposal (Revision II), which will be the subject of TUESDAY OCTOBER 12TH 2 PM Supervisors’ Hearing in Santa Rosa, is summarized in Padovan’s memo. Dutra proposes two options to deliver 500,000 tons of aggregate from Shamrock‘s operation at Landing Way to Dutra’s Asphalt Factory at Haystack Landing (1/2mile south and part of the route is along our roads, Petaluma Blvd So):

OPTIONS:

1) To build a conveyor belt from Landing Way, across Shamrock’s mitigated wetlands (required by their Use Permit in 2004) across P G & E’s three safety and maintenance easements (Think San Bruno explosion) over the high pressure natural gas pipes, along the Petaluma River and into Dutra’s operational area (it will be elevated over the Smart Train right of way.)

OR

2) To truck the 500,000 tons of aggregate from Shamrock to Dutra :

“the trucking operation will result in 43,478 additional truck trips per year (500,000 tons/23 tons per truck x 2).” Steve Padovan

Or BOTH!

PRMD says Dutra would like the option to truck for several years until the conveyor option can be put in place or possibly use both means of transport ad infinitem. It’s unclear as Is the whole Project Description.

It is a confused and piecemeal description that does not meet CEQA’s requirements for the public to have a clear description of the project. Padovan’s letter, which is supposed to inform the Supervisors, so they can make an informed decision, refers to the Draft DEIR, “the first project revision”, Revision II, the various versions and computations of the BAAQMD and the OEHHA Health Risk Analyses and we are left knowing less, not more. He tries to conclude whether the new version (Revision II) is better or worse for our health than the old ones, and the answer is: Depends on whom you ask or what you include in the new description.

Padovan discusses diesel exhaust , NOx, ,particulate matter (PM 10 only, not PM 2.5), fugitive emissions, odors (Hydrogen Sulfide.). Whatever the number game, we know that all these toxic by-products are going to be added to our air. Whether or not they are above the legally acceptable limits, depends on which limits you apply.

In this case Dutra wants a “Get Out of Jail Free” card on emissions, because their project application predates the recently adopted by the BAAQMD in June 2010 CEQA standards. We are further confused by new DEIR air quality consultant Baseline, reviewing the previous BAAQMD analysis and including Environ’s analysis (Dutra’s private air quality consultant, which whined that original BAAQMD HRSA analysis was too conservative.)

Too conservative for whom? BAAQMD standards are dated 1999 and do not reflect current science on the link between disease and pollution. PM 2.5 is not analyzed at all and cumulative impacts of 101, Shamrock and other operations nearby are not included. However Padovan does state:

“NOx was previously significant.. and the truck option increases this.” Pg. 5

“As under the Original Project, the overall net increase in NOx from the operation of the revised project would continue to exceed BAAQMD’s 1999 CEQA Threshold of Significance of 80 per day (Note: The 80 pounds per day is an adopted threshold from the BAAQMD 1999 CEQA Guidelines. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) adopted revised CEQA thresholds by Resolution No. 2010-06 on June 2, 2010. Resolution No. 2010-06…” pg. 8


I will go through each section of the letter for you and give you highlights:
PLP04-0406 BOS Memo 10-12-10

First topic: Visual Impact:

Pg. 6
“Overall visual character of the site, with large aggregate stockpiles and an asphalt plant” will continue to dominate views.

Pg. 7
“The revised Project II would still result in significant and unavoidable impacts to scenic vistas and to the visual character of the project site and its surroundings.”

Stay tuned and mark your calendars: Attend the October 12 Meeting – take a personal day and protect our Shollenberger Park!

Joan Cooper

Asphalt Plant Center Of Debate In Petaluma

Click for news coverage on KTVU

Last night we had a pivotal meeting, "The Health Forum on the Potential Impacts of the Proposed Dutra Asphalt Plant," sponsored by the Petaluma Health Care District responsible for the health and well-being of Southern Sonoma County. There were about 175 people there. The evidence presented by Dr. James Clark and Dr. Alice Brock-Utne was sobering and blew away any health comfort level that the Dutra presenters tried to establish regarding diesel exhaust and asphalt by-products. Dr. Alice Brock-Utne basically presented how vulnerable children and developing fetuses are, how lungs continue to develop after birth and negative changes possible in actual lung structure and function through the teen years.

The diesel exhaust and associated 2.5 particulate matter which this project would bring to this currently healthy air space, would particularly affect our children who exercise there, the schools and their students which are located within a two mile radius and who play outside, and pregnant women and infants. Currently applied thresholds (BAAQMD Health Risk Analysis) to the project do not adequately reflect children, because children have not been included in the calculations of acceptable thresholds.

Each individual reacts differently, so even when talking about healthy adults or seniors, one person may be able tolerate added pollution with only a decreased lung capacity, while another may have an asthma attack. Some of a person's adult health and sensitivity is linked to ones history of exposure to pollution as a developing child, which impacts the ability of lungs to repair themselves and also may make adults and children more allergic or more sensitive. The growing incidence of allergies and asthma is linked to air pollution. Asthmais already at record high levels in Sonoma County. Today there was a study reported on linking 2.5 particulate matter, which is contained in diesel exhaust, to the rise in diabetes.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=73586&tsp=1

Dr.Brock-Utne urged caution and careful consideration of approval of any project: it requires a joint collaboration of decision makers including elected officials, government agencies, scientists and doctors, and the community. Dr. James Clark, toxicologist, urged consideration of the cumulative impacts of many smaller project. So if the Dutra Proposal would potentially increase cancer by 6 .7 people per million, and there are 10 projects of this size approved in the next few years, plus the permitted existing projects with their cancer risks, the community starts to have a significant rise incumulative cancers per million. In other words it all adds up. Also Dr. Clark pointed out that the direction in EPA tolerance of criteria pollutants is always moving downward as more science informs the link between pollutants and disease. He gave as an example the descending officially acceptable levels of lead over the past 30 years, which is now at zero tolerance for children. The Health Care Forum can be viewed in its entirety on PCA. Schedule to follow.

Joan Cooper

Friends of Shollenberger Park

County Hearing on October 12th!