Media Begins to Wake up to Jobe Quarry Threat

Jobe bulldozer cut through arroyo next to Franklin Mountains State Park

Last Thursday Hector Montes had Master Naturalist Sal Quintanilla and environmentalist Maria Trunk on his talk show on KHRO, 1150 AM. I had been invited to call in and inform the audience about the planned quarrying next to the State Park. It would seem from the follow-up calls that we got some good coverage.

Prior to the talk show, Robert Gray wrote an article for El Paso, Inc. Quarry next to the state park? No problem! Hector Castro authored an enlightening piece in El Diario de El Paso: Genera polémica cantera de gravilla.

Since Castro's article is in Spanish, Franklin Mountain Wilderness Coalition newsletter editor, Kathy McConaghie, with Castro's help translated it. Both she and Castro gave me permission to print the translation:

Gravel Quarry Generates Controversy

A deposit of gravel located on the western slope of the Franklin Mountains is the center of controversy. Several city environmental groups point out that Jobe Material’s company practice of extracting minerals from the soil can create serious environmental and health problems in addition to the deterioration of the local landscape.

The quarry operation, property of the magnate Stanley Jobe, has a 20 year lease contract on a 480 acre area that belongs to the Texas Permanent School Fund. The property is administered by the General Land Office (GLO). According to GLO press secretary Jim Suydam, the principal motive for leasing to Jobe is simply economic: the purpose of the lease was to collect funds for the School Fund.

Nevertheless, several non-governmental organizations of El Paso expressed their dissatisfaction with Jobe Materials, among them the Sierra Club, headed by Laurence Gibson, who states that the principal problem with this quarry is that Jobe Materials is working on land that is a cultural bastion of the city, besides the fact that there are no guarantees that the environment will not be affected by the excavation.

“The only one responsible is the GLO since this entity does not have any sense of belonging within our habitat and little worries about the local environment”, Gibson declared.

Other organizations such as the Franklin Mountains Wilderness Coalition are also opposed to the quarry and urge the local government and political leaders of the city to relocate Jobe Materials to an area where an important ecosystem will not be harmed.

“The GLO delivered an area that includes arroyo 41A, a treasure that links the Franklin Mountains to the Rio Grande which will logically be affected by the quarry. This property is part of the recreation and tourism plan of the city of El Paso, but now it is compromised for economic purposes,” said Jim Tolbert, a board member of the Franklin Mountains Wilderness Coalition, in a written statement.

El Diario of El Paso tried to obtain a statement from Stanley Jobe but received no response from his office up to the moment this edition closed.

Without Hope

Despite this disagreement with the location of the quarry, the possibility that it will be relocated are minimal at this time, and presently the only possible recourse is to exercise pressure on Jobe Materials to leave the area the way they found it after completing excavation.

“I am very disappointed by the location of the quarry, it is practically impossible that the area will remain intact, and little by little we are going to see pernicious consequences of this mistake. I believe that there is nothing which can be done and it is lamentable that our environment suffers because of the economic interests of a few”, stated Susie Byrd, District 2 representative of the city, in a telephone conversation.

Stanley Jobe met recently with some members of the Borderland Mountain Bike Association and offered to pay the costs to build new bike trails in the vicinity of the quarry, a move that generated disagreement among participants who think that moving the trail would turn into an ecological fault difficult to correct.

“The impact of this quarry to the environment and the landscape of El Paso is huge. Soon we will begin to see rock accumulation in the sector which will damage the image of our mountains. There is no benefit for the residents of the city. Jobe Materials is destroying the ecological system and nobody is doing anything to prevent it”, stated Dave Wilson, president of the cyclist’s association.