This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
The San Joaquin River, one of California’s most beleaguered waterways, has endured over a century of exploitation. The river’s flow reduced by 97%, its salmon runs were erased by dams, its wetlands stripped by decades of mining, and its floodplain in the heart of Fresno carved into barren pits.
Now, global mining giant CEMEX wants to blast a massive new crater along its banks – a hole roughly twice as deep as Millerton Lake. The project, the international company claims, is critical to address Fresno’s gravel supply chain.
But a Fresnoland investigation, based on thousands of pages of technical documents, environmental reports, and state geological records, reveals the project is a needless assault on the San Joaquin River to extract materials the region already has in surplus. The San Joaquin River Conservancy, a state agency charged with protecting the river, now faces scrutiny for its refusal to publicly oppose a project that would sabotage its own stalled parkway plans for another century.
CEMEX’s plan targets a 300-acre stretch of the San Joaquin River – already ranked among America’s most polluted waterways – where decades of extraction have left virtually no surface gravel intact, according to reporting by The Fresno Bee. The company aims to use unprecedented explosives near Lost Lake Park to dig a pit deep enough to hold two football fields stacked vertically, insisting the operation is vital for construction materials.
“If the project isn’t approved, the Fresno region will lose the economic and environmental benefits of locally sourced materials,” CEMEX said in a statement to Fresnoland.
This is not true.
State records reveal that the Fresno area already has a staggering surplus of locally sourced gravel – one of the largest in the state.
According to the California Geological Survey, the Fresno metro area currently has nearly 200% more gravel than is needed for the next 50 years coming from local mines. The Kings River has roughly 2 billion tons of easily available surface gravel – enough for 500 years at Fresno’s current 4 million-ton annual rate.
Since 2011, according to CGS, the Fresno area has increased its permitted gravel reserves to service Fresno’s construction needs by a staggering 1,109% – the largest jump in California.
Mining giant’s controversial track record
So why is CEMEX targeting the San Joaquin, a river already scraped clean of surface gravel after a century of mining, to service an already overcrowded gravel market?
Competitors like Vulcan Materials have spent the last 20 years moving away from the San Joaquin River, opting for less contentious sites along the Kings River or remote tracts near new Madera subdivisions off Highway 41. There, a mine already approved by Madera County officials now produces roughly the same amount of gravel as CEMEX’s contested proposal.
After claiming the region would lose locally sourced gravel, CEMEX refused to answer follow-up questions. The international company, based in Mexico, has a history of pursuing controversial mining projects in Fresno County.
In the 2010s, the company proposed to blast open Jesse Morrow Mountain — a sacred Native American burial ground near Sanger — over readily available Kings River sites only a quarter mile away. As it turned out, CEMEX, according to the company’s EIR from 2009, was targeting Morrow Mountain because it contained rich veins of Gabbro, a mineral the company said could be used to manufacture high-grade products.
The Morrow Mountain proposal was ultimately rejected by the county in 2012, triggering the start of the company’s hard rock drilling experiments near the San Joaquin River three years later. These experimental drillings in 2015 laid the groundwork for the current blast mine proposal.
If the Board of Supervisors approve the mine, the asset value claimed by the company would skyrocket. At current gravel prices ($10-$50 per ton), the total gravel forecasted by CEMEX to come from the site could be valued at $2 billion to $10 billion. Fresno County Assessor Paul Dictos confirmed the potential valuation based on CEMEX’s estimated yields from the blast mine.
With unclear benefits to public greenspace and private industry, critics say the project appears to serve only corporate balance sheets. Yet the San Joaquin River Conservancy Board — the agency charged with stewarding a 22-mile stretch of the river for recreation and conservation — has refused to publicly address the project, including executive director Kari Daniska, even as deadlines loom and residents demand answers.
When asked about CEMEX’s plans, Bobby Macaulay, chair of the San Joaquin River Conservancy Board and Madera County supervisor, declined to comment. “That’s not my position – the chair is not to take positions on behalf of the Conservancy,” Macaulay said.
A river without a voice, a city without greenspace
Along Fresno’s main riverfront, salmon once ran so thick that their splashing and spawning would keep riverside residents awake through the night. Today, what’s left of the river after 95% of its wetlands were destroyed is hidden from public view.
Look beyond the knotted barbed wire and wall of McMansions and you see rust-colored algae blooming at right angles of the rims of old mining pits called Sycamore Island. Branches of dead Valley Oaks rest over abandoned pipelines. Stands of invasive eucalyptus have seized the hollowed-out riverbed. In an attempt to rehabilitate the area, a local agency stocks the pits with trout for fishermen. The fish that manage to survive past the spring die of heat exhaustion every summer.
“The river has been massively transformed – some might say damaged – by human impacts. Isn’t it time we start working to make it better, healthier, and cleaner, rather than continuing to extract resources from it?” said Sharon Weaver, executive director of the San Joaquin River Parkway Trust.
“When do we say, ‘We’ve done enough?’” she asked about the CEMEX blast mine.
The old mines on Sycamore Island, along with the remaining 1,400 acres of abandoned pits that line Fresno’s waterfront, were approved by Fresno County in the city’s go-go years after World War II. The CEMEX blast mine currently on the County’s planning docket will be next door to a grove of Valley Oaks that have remained untouched from the river’s devastation over the last 175 years.
Discussing the blast mine or how it would entrench a legacy of extraction along the river has been a touchy subject with the San Joaquin River Conservancy – and anyone whose job is environmental protection.
Along with Conservancy Executive Director Kari Daniska, Joshua Newcom, the Bureau of Reclamation’s public affairs officer for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program, declined to comment. The Department of Water Resources also declined to comment.
The River Conservancy board declined to even put CEMEX’s proposal on its January meeting agenda, despite requests from the public and some of its own board members, according to four people familiar with the situation, including board chairman Macaulay. This refusal came during the board’s final opportunity to discuss the project before the public comment period on the EIR closes on Monday, March 10.
Macaulay acknowledged the board’s inaction, saying they probably couldn’t reach a consensus on whether the river area should be subject to blasting anyways.
“I don’t know how productive a discussion among 16 members with different political perspectives would really be,” he said.
Critics say the board’s silence raises a troubling question: What is the point of the San Joaquin River Conservancy if it won’t publicly weigh in on an unprecedented blast mine along the river it was created to protect? Agency leaders insist they will submit formal comments during the environmental review process, but their refusal to openly debate the project – or even acknowledge its risks to the river and parkway plans – has drawn sharp criticism from advocates and local officials.
Critics say the board’s inaction on CEMEX’s project puts into doubt whether the state agency is fulfilling its original mandates – or whether it has become just another layer of bureaucracy in a region where environmental protection often takes a backseat to development.
Sandra Celedon, who has worked on increasing park access along the river over the last decade, said that the board’s failure to take a stance on the project is a dereliction of its public mission, because the blast mine would create another generational delay in restoring the riverfront.
“This is typical corporate greed – pillage the Earth until we extract everything possible,” said Celedon, executive director of Fresno Building Healthy Communities.
“If the board doesn’t want to step into this very public issue, they shouldn’t be serving on the board to begin with.”
If approved, CEMEX’s project would double its gravel output, sending an estimated 400,000 trucks down Friant Road annually — up from 100,000 in the 1980s and 250,000 in 2023. Each truck causes wear equivalent to 5,000 cars, meaning the project would add the impact of 2 billion car trips to north Fresno’s streets every year in a region already deadlocked over how to pay for its existing road quality crisis. The operation would employ about 100 people, according to CEMEX, who have rallied in support of previous county votes to extend the lifespan of the company’s existing mining operations.
The Conservancy’s inertia stands in contrast to state agencies in Monterey, where officials at the state coastal commission in 2017 aggressively shut down the last sand mine in Monterey Bay, branding the CEMEX operation as a public nuisance and forcing a restoration deal. Even Bakersfield finished its Kern River parkway years ago.
Fresno’s feeble protection of what remains of the river comes as the Trump administration has proposed to fire 40% of the local Fresno office of the Bureau of Reclamation after years of backsliding to restore the San Joaquin river’s near-extinct salmon run. After a hopeful sign in 2019 of over 200 salmon in the spawning season, the number of mature fish on the river dwindled down to 5 and 6 in 2022 and 2023. Even after a once-in-a-century “freak” water year in 2023, the number of salmon observed in 2024’s spawning season rose to a whopping 13, according to a congressional report submitted last year.
County Supervisor Nathan Magsig, who will be a key decision-maker for the blast mine, declined to address questions about whether Fresno’s gravel surplus undercuts the purpose of CEMEX’s project. Since 2017, CEMEX has given $10,000 in campaign donations to a majority of the current Board of Supervisors, including Magsig ($3,000), Buddy Mendes ($2,500), Brian Pacheco ($3,000) and Garry Bredefeld ($1,500). Bredefeld said he later gave the money back, citing potential conflict of interests on future votes.
“The Kings River, San Joaquin River, to me, are of equal importance. They are incredible, beautiful waterways, and we need to be good stewards of both,” Magsig said. “Why CEMEX continues to pursue the San Joaquin River? That’s one they have to answer.”
This article first appeared on Fresnoland and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
