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Residents and Jamestown citizens urge supervisors to halt proposed wood-pellet project
Summary
Multiple residents and community members urged the Board to push the Golden State Natural Resources / RCRC panel to hold in-person meetings in Tuolumne County and oppose a proposed international wood-pellet project. Commenters raised health, transparency and process concerns and called for the company to meet locally.
A series of speakers during the meeting’s oral-communications period urged the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors to press regional partners and the Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR) nonprofit to hold in-person meetings and reconsider a proposed international wood-pellet project.
Several Jamestown-area residents and community members described the project as “not a local pellet project” and warned it could raise air-pollution and public-health risks. Erana Ross, who identified herself as a Jamestown citizen, said GSNR previously canceled local in-person meetings and moved sessions online; she told the board that the cancellations increased local suspicion of the project and asked supervisors to press GSNR to return for an in-person hearing in Sonora.
Renee Orth, a Tuolumne County resident and organizer, said the project “will exceed our California environmental limits on cancer risk by over five times” even with proposed mitigation, and asked supervisors to insist that GSNR show up in Tuolumne County to meet residents in person. Other citizens urged the board to ask RCRC (the Rural County Representatives of California) to ensure local hearings and to oppose any handoff of forest jurisdiction that would lock local communities into long-term contracts.
The board’s RCRC representative clarified that GSNR and the RCRC had moved some of their meetings online because of representative scheduling and the need to gather county reps from across 40 jurisdictions. Supervisors said they would follow up and that staff would convey local concerns to RCRC representatives and GSNR.
Several speakers requested that the board treat the conversion as a regional, not a purely local, project because GSNR’s plan would move product off-site for export. Commenters asked for fuller public notice and for the board to confirm whether county air-quality and health modeling had been completed and shared publicly.
No formal vote or regulatory action on the pellet project occurred at the meeting; public comments were directed to the board as part of the oral-communications segment and the supervisors asked staff to follow up with RCRC and GSNR on questions of public notice and in-person hearings.
