Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
The Forde Files No 91
Above, shelves of a small portion of the Rio Tinto mine in Boron are etched in the afternoon light on March 12, 2015. The view is from the Rio Tinto Visitor Center, which is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week. There's a charge for parking. See [email protected]. The mine is two miles long and 1.75 miles wide and extends to a depth of 755 feet. The mine employs 770 people.
'It's a beautiful business.' – Brassard
Isabelle Brassard, general manager of the Rio Tinto Boron operations, told the March 5, 2015 meeting of the East Kern Economic Alliance at the Borax Visitor Center that business is good.
"Twenty-fourteen was a great year for us," said Brassard, a native of Montreal. "We are doing the right things to keep this business in good shape."
The Boron plant produced more than a million pounds of borates, Brassard said, and at the same time decreased water consumption 15 percent.
Sixty-eight percent of the plant's business is outside the United States, she said. Borates are essential in the manufacture of numerous modern products, including cell phones and computers.
"It's a beautiful business," she said.
The Boron mine "is one of two main players in the industry," she said, and the competition is intense. (The other big borate mine is in Turkey.)
Many of Rio Tinto's shipping containers holding product remain delayed in ports due to the recent union difficulty, she said.
In October 2014, Brassard succeeded Tehachapi resident Dean Gehring, who was named president and CEO of Rio Tinto Minerals, headquartered in Denver.
Also at the alliance meeting, Bill Taylor, resource development manager of Granite Construction, said that lack of sufficient funding for transportation infrastructure "is the unspoken crisis in our state."
Transportation is not exciting, he said. "It's not very exciting until a bridge falls down."
The federal highway transportation fund is due to expire soon, he said, and the regulatory environment is a challenge as well as availability of materials, which is exacerbated by the slow permitting process.
"Kern has less than one-third of its 50-year demand permitted," he said.
Granite, which provides aggregate (rocks) for construction, is closing its Arvin facility and will be opening a larger facility, named Solari, farther south in the Central Valley, adjacent to Tejon Ranch.
Taylor said California has been a pioneer in transportation.
"The world came to California to learn how to build roads."
