Forestville faction prepares to challenge local asphalt plant proposal
This is not the first time.
Ever since the Trappe family took over Canyon Rock, the quarry on the corner of Martinelli Road and Hwy. 116, in 1972, they have wanted to build an asphalt plant. For at least as many years, the company’s neighbors have fought against this plan.
Now, much to their neighbors’ dismay, the Trappe family is as close as they have ever been to obtaining approval from the county to build the asphalt plant.
“When you own a piece of property, I guess people are motivated to exploit it to the greatest extent possible for monetary gain,” says Sig Anderman, a leader of Russian River Community Cares (RRCC), an organization that has sprung up to oppose the plant. “But this is one operation, and, on the other hand, you have a community with wineries and restaurants and hotels and bicyclists, all of whom are impacted because one family wants to make more money. Don’t get me wrong—I'm a capitalist and entrepreneur, so I know how much fun it is to make money. But in my lifetime, I never tried to make money when somebody else had to really pay for it. That's the issue here.”
With Anderman’s financial backing, RRCC has “retained counsel” to challenge Canyon Rock’s asphalt facility proposal in the future. RRCC has stated they would likely be doing so on the grounds that Canyon Rock has already shown itself to be incapable of complying with environmental regulations and that the county has been incapable of proper enforcement.
“There are some big questions about what follow up Canyon Rock has done on provisions for their permits,” said Darek Trowbridge, another one of RRCC’s leaders.
This is not the first time a faction of the local community has embraced such a belief about Canyon Rock and has coalesced to block the company’s efforts. In 2010, Forestville Citizens for Sensible Growth (FCSG) settled with Canyon Rock after a years-long legal dispute that alleged a violation of the California Environmental Quality Act. A term of that settlement was that the petitioners reserved the “right to challenge…the adequacy of any permit” for an asphalt plant in the future. Thus many former FCSG members are current RRCC members.
The Trappes are taking that fact personally.
Wendel Trappe, the owner of Canyon Rock, recalls that when he first applied for an extension to his quarry in tandem with an asphalt facility proposal, a bunch of neighbors complained—so he made a compromise to only pursue an expansion to the quarry and to forget about the asphalt plant.
“I got together with them in one of their houses—people that were involved in the lawsuit later with [FCSG],” says Wendel. “We all sat down at the big table and agreed; and then when we went in for our permit, it took us 13 years and millions of dollars in studies; and then after that was done, they turned around and sued us. They broke that verbal agreement, and that is not the way I do things.”
Members of RRCC and other opponents of the asphalt plant insist it presents an existential danger to unincorporated Forestville.
They claim, among other things, that the plant will disperse toxic and smelly fumes through a premium wine-growing region and residential area; that it will add an additional risk of fire to an already vulnerable location; and that it will contaminate a tributary of the Russian River. (For more details about their concerns, visit asphaltstinks.org.)
“I think the biggest rational point though is that this is a bad location for something that everybody needs,” says Bob Rawson, a longtime wastewater management operator and consultant who has been opposed to Canyon Rock’s endeavors for three decades. Rawson believes that somewhere like Windsor, which has itself considered an asphalt plant, would be better since it is flatter and more industrial.
“We need the asphalt, and we probably need the rock and all that other stuff too, but it’s where it’s located,” he said. “It’s not a NIMBY issue so much as a good planning issue.”
To get a sense of Canyon Rock’s operation and the proposal, here’s a Google Earth image of Forestville from 2023. As you can see, Canyon Rock is to the north of Hwy. 116, across the street from BoDean quarry and about a mile west of Forestville’s downtown.
Canyon Rock is asking the county to rezone two parcels that make up around 20 acres on the southwest corner of its roughly 200-acre property. In addition, the plant would require the construction of several 75-foot-high silos, which Canyon Rock has said would be mostly shielded from Hwy. 116’s viewshed. They have also said that any noticeable smell or noise coming from the plant would be minimal.
To assuage the community’s concerns, Canyon Rock has held open houses and has created a website of their own, canyonrockproposal.com. They have promised that their facility will not increase the total amount of exported material from the quarry, but would decrease regional truck traffic by eliminating the trips that trucks have to take from the quarry site to a different asphalt facility. In other words, a certain percentage of the aggregate that they currently export will instead be made into asphalt onsite—some of which will be used to pave west county’s many dilapidated roads.
“I think there’s more to the story,” said Jonathan Trappe, Canyon Rock’s current operations manager and Wendel’s son. “Yeah, it’s like we live here. We’re not gonna do anything that we don’t feel like is what’s best for us.”
In spite of all this, some local families like the Martinellis, who, similarly to the Trappes, have lived in west county since the late 19th century, are apprehensive about the fumes that could reach their vineyards, which are down the street from the plant.
“They would affect [the grapes] and may over a period of weeks or months put some sort of a glaze or odor over them,” said Lee Martinelli Sr., the owner of Martinelli Winery, who has been farming the Russian River Valley since the age of six. “It is definitely a concern.”
Due to the plant’s proximity to Green Valley Creek, which runs for a quarter of a mile through Canyon Rock’s property, the proposal has also drawn the attention of conservationists like Sarah Nossaman Pierce of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association’s Restoration Center.
RRCC is concerned that particles from the plant could move through the air and settle in Green Valley Creek, polluting the water and making it less inhabitable for the already endangered Central California Coast coho salmon and threatened steelhead.
“For many years California Sea Grant and Sonoma Water have conducted fish monitoring activities in the reach of Green Valley Creek, immediately upstream of the proposed asphalt facility,” wrote Pierce in a memo obtained by Sebastopol Times. “It is essential that the integrity of their habitat is restored and preserved in order to recover this keystone species.”
“There is empirical evidence to show that coho salmon overwintering in Green Valley Creek are notably larger at outmigration than those observed in other life cycle monitoring streams within the Russian River watershed,” Pierce continued. “Because larger smolts are more likely to survive in the ocean and return to the stream environment as adult fish to spawn, biologists believe that Green Valley Creek may play a particularly important role in recovering native salmon populations.”
That being said, the asphalt plant would be on the opposite side of the Canyon Rock property, several hundred feet away from Green Valley Creek. Canyon Rock has already installed a concrete buffer and has planted vegetation, which they say stops any runoff from going into Green Valley Creek and keeps local wildlife thriving.
“You know how the old adage goes,” said Jonathan Trappe. “If you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”
The Trappes also claim their mitigations make them better stewards of the local environment than just about anyone else.
“We keep the creek cleaner than some of our neighbors,” Jonathan said. “Most of the community supports what we do because they know what we do.”
The violations that Canyon Rock has had in the past—violations which RRCC would seek to highlight in its suit—are attributed by the Trappes to miscommunications between them and Permit Sonoma. While RRCC claims those equate to the “abuse of public lands,” Permit Sonoma says that their regulations ensure that the local environment is never threatened.
“The amount of fines imposed for noncompliance should reflect the amounts of aggregate and profit gained from the violation and/or the significance of the related environmental impacts,” Genevieve Barton, Outreach Program Manager for Permit Sonoma, wrote in an email to the Sebastopol Times. “Upon making a finding of public danger or emergency or serious threat to life and property, the director shall require the operator to stop work until such conditions no longer exist. Given the complexity of operations at many mining sites, the general practice is for Permit Sonoma to issue a Notice of Correction and work with the operator to return to compliance in a reasonable amount of time, although under the rule quoted above, there is always the option to escalate enforcement.”
In March of this year, the county issued a Notice of Correction about a drainage feature on the west side of the property. Both the county and Canyon Rock have said they are in constant communication to ensure progress is being made, though the Trappes have expressed concerns about county staff.
“You used to have the same person come here for many years, and now you got somebody every couple years that’s new and random,” says Wendel Trappe. “I think what they did with the county employees is they made them do too many different things sometimes.”
Furthermore, assertions that Canyon Rock might exploit their property to the harm of neighboring businesses is made all the more contentious by the many ways in which the Trappes and Canyon Rock contribute to the community.
As a part of Canyon Rock’s 2010 settlement with FCSG, the Trappes agreed to donate $16,000 annually to what would be a new “Community Fund,” organized by the Forestville Planning Association. But the Trappes say they have given back to the community dating back to before the FCSG settlement.
Over the years, they’ve helped put out fires, they’ve erected the annual downtown Holiday Tree, they’ve maintained the parking lot that supports Forestville’s Downtown Oaks Park, and they've donated to the Little League. They also have children enrolled in Forestville Elementary.
“I just don’t think some of these people realize what we do for the community because they don’t do stuff in community,” says Wendel Trappe, referring to members of RRCC who work against him. “Like I say, you don’t see a lot of these people make their time working. They’ve spent too much time playing on the computer, sending emails and all that stuff.”
This has become a hot issue in Forestville.
A month ago, Elissa Van Deursen, a member of the RRCC and Sig Anderman’s daughter, was asked to leave Forestville Youth Park, a private community park that the Trappes support, by its board president, Matt McDermott, after she was seen distributing flyers pointing people to RRCC’s website.
Shortly after this incident, the Forestville Chamber of Commerce sent out an email with the following instruction for chamber members and market vendors: “Please, if anyone is trying to have you post informational/political flyers at your booth, tell them no, you are not allowed to do this…We want to be sure our market is a place for all to have a good time and relax.”
Canyon Rock’s proposal is currently in the Environmental Impact Review (EIR) stage of its process, which will be completed in a few months. The EIR will propose mitigations for the asphalt facility before a likely Board of Supervisors vote that would determine the fate of the project.
“Visual impacts, biological resource impacts, noise impacts, transportation impacts, air quality/GHG impacts and wildfire impacts seem to be consistent concerns we’ve heard from the community,” says Robert Aguero, Senior Environmental Specialist with Permit Sonoma, “which we will be analyzing in the EIR.”
