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A longstanding dispute between the city of San Juan Bautista and Midnight Express Transportation concerning unauthorized modifications to a Hollister Road property has taken a significant step toward resolution.
At its May 20 meeting, the San Juan Bautista City Council approved a remediation and restoration plan for the trucking company’s site.
The property at 451 San Juan Hollister Road was purchased in 2018 by Cynthia Orozco, owner of Midnight Express Transportation. It was intended as an agricultural transfer warehouse station and for vehicle and pallet storage to support the company’s refrigerated truck business. The property is surrounded by homes, industrial operations and agricultural fields, and is near Mission Farm RV Park.
The city says that work done on the site including the introduction of landfill and grading along San Juan Creek was not covered by a grading permit obtained by Orozco in 2020, resulting in “potential impacts to the property conditions.”
The city conducted a site visit in March 2022 and declared the work to be a public nuisance. It issued a violation, which required Orozco to detail the amount of grading and the contents of the fill and to develop a remediation program, including “the restoration of the creek’s hydraulic capacity and biological habitat.”
Orozco submitted the required plan in January. Prepared by EMC Planning and Kelley Engineering, it incorporated revisions recommended by city consultants, including David J. Powers, H. T. Harvey and Albion, Schaaf and Wheeler.
In his presentation to the council, City Attorney Jon Giffen said the area specified in the plan comprises almost two acres of the 18-acre property. The plan requires that loose dirt be returned to the restoration areas and that the ground be hydroseeded and stabilized. Riparian vegetation would be replaced and wildlife, including the San Joaquin kit fox, burrowing owls and other birds and bats, would be protected.
A qualified professional and a member of a local Native American Tribe would be needed to act as observers during the work, and the city would monitor the site for five years following completion. Fees will be negotiated as part of the ongoing lawsuit filed by Orozco against the city.
Before the vote, several residents gave statements critical of Midnight Express during the public comment period.
Adjoining property owner Josh Masten accused the company of bringing in 50 bottom-load semi-trucks of dirt and building a berm that partially filled in the waterway.
“They built it against San Juan Creek,” he said, “and it caused problems with the natural water flow. If you look, besides the dirt they pushed from their property, there’s concrete and everything else.”
Masten also said that he considered the property to be a wrecking yard, not a truck storage yard.
“There are more broken-down trucks and parts around there than there are running vehicles,” he said. “All these old broken-down trucks—are they leaking fuel? Are they leaking oil into our groundwater?”
Mission Vineyard Road resident James Dassel said that he had no objections to Orozco trying to conduct a business on the site, but said that he thought the city needed to make sure the company honored the conditional use permits that have been issued. He described the site as having “considerable blight” and in need of weed abatement.
Orozco’s attorney, Alicia Guerra, said that previous hydrology studies demonstrated that her client had not caused any damage to the floodplain that resulted in flooding. She said the flooding was the result of prior work that the city and county had engaged in with respect to changing the flood flows.
“That is what altered what would happen in the floodplain,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Orozco, however, moved some dirt up against the existing berm within the floodplain because of the severe flood events in 2022 and 2023.”
The plan was approved by a 3-0 vote, with Mayor Leslie Jordan and councilmembers Jose Aranda and Jackie Morris-Lopez present, and councilmembers Scott Freels and E. J. Sabathia absent. The vote lifts the stop-work order that has been in place since May 2022.
Public concern about the use of the property began soon after Orozco purchased it in 2018. Adjoining and nearby property owners, including Kazuko Kurasaki, owner of Mission Farm RV Park, Chalmer and Jacqueline Raymer, George Dias and Jeffrey Moore submitted their concerns to the San Juan Bautista Planning Commission in March 2018.
Damage to the floodplain, late-night hours of operation, light and noise pollution and additional truck traffic were among the objections raised in the comments.
Orozco did not speak during the meeting but spoke with BenitoLink afterwards. She said that the property was the first one her company had purchased, and she was unfamiliar with land use regulations at the time.
“It’s far different when you’re buying a property for industrial use, which we didn’t know,” she said. “And we also didn’t know that we had several features on our property, like a floodplain, and an earthquake fault running right across it.”
Orozco said that when she first approached then-city manager Roger Grimsley after purchasing the property, he provided her with an outline of what could be done and told her, “everything was cool” as far as her intentions. However, when her architect brought the faultline to Grimsley’s attention, he required them to conduct a geological investigation, which cost around $125,000.
Orozco estimated she had spent over $200,000 in permit costs, environmental and architectural studies. Her architects and engineers had assured her that the amount of safeguards for the waterway was “overkill.”
She said her grading permits stated that she wanted to elevate her property and that she could bring in 30,000 yards of dirt. Orozco said that the city never told her about restrictions on where the dirt could be used on the property.
“I gave them everything they needed,” Orozco said. “They gave me a permit. So, I started bringing in dirt. My neighbors started complaining and went to the city. The city came out and red-tagged me because they said I put it in the wrong area.”
She said that all of the studies she had commissioned indicated that “it wasn’t such a big impact that they are thinking it was.”
“My neighbors claim that their properties flooded out because of my property,” Orozco said. “It’s absurd because there’s absolutely no way that that even happened. And the studies that we performed and the ones that the city performed also indicate that that’s not what happened.”
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