surveyor, this specific project was two competing interests not just a case of nimby. The tourism industry has quietly exploded up here and this was a threat to that, it had very little to do with the residents (other than those who work in that industry or a related one).
A few stats, Temecula visitors spend an estimated 600 million dollars annually in a town of 100k.
Temecula has 6,600 people employed in the tourism industry directly.
San Diego County visitors spend 7 billion annually and it is in the top 5 vacation destinations in the U.S., San Diego has about 2.3 or so million people. It has 23x the inhabitants but only 11x the tourism, it may sound funny, but Temecula has twice the per capita tourism of San Diego. Temecula’s hotels and other tourism related industries have grown 5 fold in six years, they have shown double digit growth monthly for the last eleven months, during a recession and outperform california hotels by 4x in month over month gains.
Casinos, resorts, 30+ wineries, restaurants, hotels and golf courses, they’ve worked hard and they have made it more than just a bedroom community in an exurb. Is that really something to risk for 100 jobs and gravel that can be 20 miles closer to a project in San Diego? You’ve got hills in S.D., dig up your own hills. Maybe it wouldn’t ruin it, maybe it wouldn’t even hurt it at all, but unless they can say that they will shut down their 100 jobs if they cause more than 100 job losses in another industry, then I don’t care. It’s about net gain.
Same argument could be made for why they don’t drill for oil in Mission bay or the San Diego harbor on a large scale, because the added 100 jobs and few thousand barrels of oil they could get, would cost millions upon millions of dollars lost to the industry that sells the beauty of that area, it’s a cost benefit analysis, in this case those 100 jobs were not worth it and there is gravel in plenty of other places. Another example would be sewage treatment plant in the gaslamp district, sure the treatment plant is needed, but if it put out a foul odor and caused more job and tax losses than it brought in, is it really wise to put it there? And the gaslamp doesn’t bring in 600 million annually.
BG, I’ve written before about how Sempra energy tried to run power lines through this town about ten years ago and this same group defeated them, at every hearing, at every appeal and in every court. Public utilities have more power and laws than a private company. Sempra eventually gave up and that is why the Sunrise Powerlink is being built where it is, that was the Plan B.
Sempra got nothing, the board and pechanga and the locals never paid them, in fact I probably need to research it, but I think the loser had to pay the winner’s legal fees in that case, might happen here too, not the other way around, but if it does, pechanga’s pockets are fine, I see to that personally on occasion. I’m surprised granite even tried, I would think they would have had at least one lawyer research the past case and see how that turned out, then just decided it’s not worth it.
