CASE STUDIES

VULCAN MATERIALS COMPANY

Austin Quarry

EXPERTISE APPLIED TO:

  • Lobbying to Local, County, State and Tribal Government Agencies.
  • Local community outreach
  • Program development

The Client

Vulcan Materials Company (Vulcan) is an international construction materials company based out of Alabama and is listed as a Fortune 1000 company.

Vulcan has secured a 1,000-acre parcel in rural Madera County at the southeastern intersection of Highways 145 and 41 for the purposes of developing a hard rock quarry that could produce 2.5 million tons of material extraction per year.

The Project

The project had languished under CEQA review with Madera County for approximately 5 years with no movement. In 2009 the California High Speed Rail project certified the first section of rail track and the Austin Quarry could produce the necessary quality of hard rock for the High-Speed Rail ballast along the tracks.

Catalyst worked on the Quarry project from 2014 to the approval in 2018 and remained on the project team ensuring compliance and continued governmental relations until 2020 when the project construction was started.

The Scenario

Vulcan faced substantial opposition to the project from various community, neighborhood, environmental and special interest groups. In addition, a competing quarry project was also in opposition.

Project Details

Catalyst was responsible for all the community outreach efforts and lobbying to Madera County, State of California (Division of Mines and Geology), Caltrans, affected State Agencies and Native American Tribal Governments.

Catalyst successfully through exhaustive community outreach and effective counter arguments was able to address and mitigate the concerns of the NIMBY (not in my back yard) groups, as well as, negotiate mitigation measures with Madera County and Caltrans.

Catalyst developed several programs for Vulcan to present to Madera County and Caltrans that addressed the impacts of heavy rock transport trucks to the State Highway System and the local roadway network.

Catalyst presented to the Vulcan Board of Director an innovative concept of creating an infrastructure improvement loan of 20 million dollars to Madera County and Caltrans for the improvement and widening of both Highways 145 and 41 to address the increased traffic concerns.

The Vulcan “revolving fund highway loan” would allow the County of Madera to begin the improvements and repay Vulcan over time as development impact fees for traffic mitigation were received.  Catalyst used the example of this program as a P3 – Public-Private-Partnership to accelerate growth and economic development.

The second measure to address local impacts to roadways was that Vulcan would pay a 5 cents per ton of rock transported from the Quarry to Madera County to establish a local roadway improvement fund – again a P3 program.

The Madera County Board of Supervisor approved the Quarry project in 2018 with the P3 transportation programs as conditions of approval.

At the Board of Supervisors hearing – Supervisor Tom Wheeler Chairman of the Board expressed comments on the innovation and ingenuity of the P3 Transportation Programs and credited Catalyst with the development of those programs.