Jail Time Does What Court Order Couldn’t; Mine Site Now Clean

Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Rempel isn’t bad as far as minor prophets go.

Two weeks ago, Rempel predicted that, if Sylvester and Reginald Marron were jailed, there would be a “miraculous removal of debris and equipment and restoration” of their sand-mining operation along the San Luis Rey River, something a court order had not been able to accomplish in the previous 14 months.

Four days later, Vista Municipal Judge Victor E. Ramirez sentenced the Marron brothers to 11 months in jail and fined each $11,000 for failing to comply with his order.

On Friday, 10 nights in jail later, the Marron brothers were released after their family and friends had cleared the site of all equipment and structures, except for a small building that had been there before the mining. They still must pay the fine.

Also, the site was sown with oat and rye seed in an attempt to help the area heal after Marron Brothers Inc. grossly over-excavated the site between 1982 and 1990 in one of the county’s most egregious cases of its kind, Rempel said.

County land use officials contend that the over-excavation robbed eroding North County beaches of much-needed sand, and may have changed land configurations both upstream and downstream from the site. It is still unclear how much it will cost to repair the area or how much erosion damage has been done.

“Just as I expected, a little reality therapy allowed the miracle to be performed,” Rempel said Monday, referring to the Marrons’ jail stay. “Things that were too difficult to be done in a year, once they got to jail, we found that they could all be done in a week.”

Reginald Marron said the jail time was unnecessary and that the forced cleanup cost him and his 64-year-old brother more than $300,000 in equipment and materials that were either sold as scrap or given away.

“We were doing the cleanup at the time (of the sentencing), and we asked the judge for four more days, and he wouldn’t give it to us,” said the 67-year-old co-owner of the 125-by-50-foot mine in Bonsall.

“We were getting it done as fast as we could,” Marron said. “We got a lot of stuff away,” including conveyors and screens and a 140-foot underground tubing tunnel.

Indeed, the Marron brothers had begun to clear the site earlier this month, but the prosecutor said that was only because they knew they faced the imminent threat of jail.

Marron holds no grudges against Ramirez for sending them to jail.

“The judge was pretty fair with us, and he did what he had to do,” Marron said.

His attitude toward Rempel is distinctly different.

“I can’t say anything, but I think he’s a you-know-what,” said the elder Marron, who shook his fist and made a slicing gesture along his throat at Rempel when the brothers were taken to jail.

“The district attorney doesn’t know anything about the mining business. That guy must be pretty smart if he can know river mining as well as the law,” Marron said.

The county shut down Marron Brothers Inc.’s mining operation in 1990 after discovering that it had excavated more than eight times the amount allowed under its permit.

Reginald Marron contends that the county is unfairly dictating the use of the Marrons’ land.

“It’s our property, it’s our sand, and we have the right to do with it what we want. Now the county has taken our livelihood away,” Marron said.

Later in 1990, the two brothers pleaded guilty to 11 misdemeanor permit violations at the site they own along the banks of the San Luis Rey River near Bonsall, including exceeding the limit of sand they were allowed to take and going beyond their property lines to mine.

In March, 1991, they received a suspended sentence after promising to clean up the mine and reclaim the area’s lost sand. Originally, the county had sought to have the sand brought back, but the damage has been left for so long that authorities have given up that idea and instead are seeking to prevent further erosion and bring back natural wildlife.

“They waited so long to correct the gashes in the river that natural plant and animal life has crept back, and, to do the correction at this stage would probably destroy some of the earth’s efforts to heal itself,” Rempel said.

The Marrons are scheduled to be back in court in September and November for hearings on the progress of the reseeding.