Public RelationsStrategic CommunicationsCommunity Engagement

Unanimous 5-0 Approval for California's First Greenfield Quarry in Nearly a Decade

Hat Creek Construction logo over a Northern California roadway and reservoir at dusk

Unanimous 5-0 Board of Supervisors approval (August 25, 2026) for Hat Creek Construction & Materials’ Skyline Aggregate & Recycling Facility: a 460-acre, 50-year quarry on a new footprint in Lassen County.

How Hat Creek Construction & Materials won 5-0 approval for a new 460-acre, 50-year quarry in California

A unanimous vote at every level, a signed tribal agreement, and a community that showed up in support, in a state where new aggregate sites at this scale have not been approved in nearly a decade.

At a glance

Client
Hat Creek Construction & Materials, family-owned since 1972, Burney and Susanville, California
Agency
MKTNG, strategic communications and PR
Project
Skyline Aggregate & Recycling Facility, a 460-acre quarry, asphalt plant, and concrete operation on a new site outside Susanville
Ask
A 50-year use permit and certification of a full Environmental Impact Report
Timeframe
Engagement began June 2023; approval August 2026
Result
Unanimous Planning Commission recommendation (August 4, 2026) and unanimous 5-0 Board of Supervisors approval (August 25, 2026), with a signed Memorandum of Agreement with the Susanville Indian Rancheria and a 183-signature community support letter in the record

Executive summary

When a county loses its newspaper, a contested land-use vote doesn’t get easier. It gets decided in Facebook comments, with no one in the middle.

New quarry permits in California are rare. The state’s aggregate approvals are typically expansions and extensions of legacy sites, where baseline impacts are already established. State mining and minerals records show no greenfield construction-aggregate quarry of comparable scale approved anywhere in California in nearly ten years.

Hat Creek Construction & Materials (Hat Creek) set out to permit one: 460 acres, a 50-year term, on a new footprint next to a community college, in a county with no newspaper to carry the story. On August 25, 2026, the Lassen County Board of Supervisors approved it 5-0 at a hearing so well attended it was moved to the county fairgrounds.

Opposition testimony was heard in full. The vote was unanimous.

Hat Creek and MKTNG earned the approval over three years with a communications program built on three decisions. First, create the media channels the county no longer had. Second, reduce the entire case to four commitments. Third, repeat them without variation across every channel and every employee.

The client

Hat Creek is a known and trusted neighbor, serving the North State for more than five decades. Its safety record includes a 2023 Caltrans Partnering Gold Award and a 2021 MSHA Certificate of Achievement for 13,200 employee hours without injury.

It is the largest buyer of FFA and 4-H livestock at the county fair, with the animals processed by a local butcher and the meat given to employees. It sponsors youth sports, the Christmas parade, the Fourth of July program, and the chamber. It spent two years helping Lassen Community College build a trucking program that puts local young people into a commercial license in under six months, debt-free, qualified for jobs starting around $80,000.

The challenge

Skyline was the company’s next 50-year investment in Lassen County. Its existing pits could not meet the region’s demand for another fifty years. The alternative was to import aggregate, crews, and wages from Reno, with payroll and taxes flowing out with them.

The obstacles were structural.

California’s process

A new footprint means starting the environmental review from scratch: a full EIR, a Planning Commission hearing, and a Board of Supervisors vote, with litigation as the usual outcome. The Draft EIR’s 45-day review in May 2026 drew a detailed technical challenge from residents and a rigorous review from the state wildlife agency.

The site

Skyline sits beside Lassen Community College and contains tribal cultural resources. Opponents would raise views, dust, truck traffic, water, and cultural disruption, and they did.

The media vacuum

Lassen County’s newspaper of record, the Lassen County Times, printed its last edition on April 7, 2020, when its publisher suspended it along with five sister weeklies. It has not returned to print. Hat Creek’s Susanville office now occupies the paper’s former headquarters. No television station is licensed to Susanville. For a county of about 32,000 residents, what remains is a country station, an AM talk station, and a community website. Local news moves through social media with no institution in the middle.

The first question MKTNG asked at the start of the engagement was about that media environment. The answer set the strategy: there was no press to pitch, so the campaign would have to build the channel.

The approach

1. Build the media channel the county no longer had

Radio came first, at almost no cost. Hat Creek was already a longtime youth sports sponsor of the Susanville station, so within months of kickoff MKTNG developed a drive-time interview series featuring CEO Perry Thompson.

Perry preferred not to speak about himself or the company, and that preference became the editorial formula. He interviewed the people behind the programs Hat Creek supports, beginning with the coordinator of the county fair and its livestock auctions, then the parade, the Fourth of July program, and the trucking program.

Radio proved the format. The following year, it went long-form. MKTNG launched North State Rocks as a podcast, and it became a regional platform in its own right. Guests included growers and ranchers, the founder of Black Bear Diner, a flight instructor from the Susanville airport, and the president of Lassen Community College. A two-part series on the wolves affecting livestock across the region brought the sheriff, wildlife professionals, and ranchers to the same table. Community members began asking to be featured. Each episode produced a transcribed landing page for search, a clip package for social, and templated guest outreach.

Two of the supporters who spoke at the Board hearing, people with long ties to Hat Creek and Perry Thompson, had also been guests on North State Rocks.

2. Four commitments, one message, every channel

When Skyline entered the approval process, MKTNG built the entire campaign on four commitments to Lassen County. Every presentation, handout, web page, and talking point followed the same order and used the same figures.

Economic growth and job creation. 100 to 125 direct jobs with full benefits, $7M+ in annual payroll, $25M+ in annual spending with local vendors, and $1.8M+ in annual sales tax, in a county whose population has declined roughly 20 percent since its 2010 peak.

A reliable, local supply of aggregate. About 90 percent of processed material stays on nearby job sites. A single 100,000-ton project sourced locally rather than from Reno saves $2.2 million and more than 1,400 metric tons of CO2. The facility will recycle roughly 40,000 tons of asphalt and aggregate a year.

Exceeding California’s environmental standards. The completed EIR and its 78 mitigation requirements across 10 categories were presented as a credential rather than a burden. Technical data was translated into terms anyone could check. The water budget, for example, equals one 10-gallon-per-minute garden hose running 24 hours, just over 1 percent of what an equivalent irrigated crop would use.

Worker safety and minimal neighborhood impact. Noise berms, dust suppression, daytime-only blasting with advance notice, and a 300-acre conservation buffer between operations and the nearest neighbors.

The campaign made the alternative explicit: without Skyline, the jobs, the payroll, and the vendor spending accrue to Reno for another generation.

The same four commitments were given to Hat Creek’s employees as talking points, so a question at the county fair received the same accurate answer as the fact sheet on the website. Printed handouts at public meetings matched the slides and the website word for word.

Paid social was geo-fenced to Susanville. SusanvilleRocks.com, which MKTNG built as the project site, served as the single source of truth: project data, the full EIR, every mitigation requirement, and the meeting schedule.

3. Restraint

The proactive channels carried the affirmative case in a phased eight-week sequence: heritage and origin first, then economics, then environmental and recycling benefits, then safety. The Myths & Facts document and the detailed mitigation data were held in reserve for direct, one-on-one responses to specific objections.

When the Draft EIR comments arrived, the response was to sharpen language for precision and make the technical record available quickly, without amplifying the objections in the campaign’s own channels.

Through the stretches when project documentation stalled, the community program continued. No gap was left for opponents to fill.

Hat Creek commissioned archaeological studies before committing to the site, met with the Susanville Indian Rancheria, and signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Rancheria.

What happened at the hearing

Ahead of the decisive hearing, an online petition let supporters go on the record. It was filed into the Board packet on August 20 with 183 signatures, 117 from Lassen County. At the hearing itself, Hat Creek was joined at the microphone by local contractors, business owners, education leaders, and county community leaders.

Results

  • Unanimous Planning Commission recommendation, August 4, 2026
  • Unanimous 5-0 Board of Supervisors approval, August 25, 2026, at a hearing moved to the fairgrounds to accommodate attendance
  • 50-year use permit issued; Final EIR certified with 78 mitigation requirements across 10 categories
  • Signed Memorandum of Agreement with the Susanville Indian Rancheria
  • 183-signature community support letter in the board packet, 117 from Lassen County residents
  • Third-party speakers in support at the decisive hearing, including the county’s former highest-ranking official and two former North State Rocks guests
  • North State Rocks established as an ongoing regional platform, with community members requesting to appear
  • Construction on the first phase scheduled for 2027; permit runs to 2076

In the client’s words

"We've been part of this community for fifty years, but changing public sentiment towards large-scale infrastructure projects required educating the public, and there was minimal local press left to help us do it. They understood that right away. They built us a way to tell our story; they told it with real creativity, and they kept every piece of it honest. The podcast, the radio, the website, the materials our own people carried around town, it all said the same thing, and it all held up. When we walked into that hearing, the county already knew who we were and what we were promising. I don't think we get to 5-0 without that."

Perry Thompson, CEO, Hat Creek Construction & Materials

What made the difference

The best defense is a strong offense: start before you need anything. The radio series and the podcast ran for more than two years before the first hearing. By the time the county was asked to decide, the applicant’s CEO had spent that time giving the region a platform for its own stories.

When there is no press, build it. Where earned media does not exist, an owned channel does the same job, as long as it is run with editorial discipline rather than as a company mouthpiece.

Reduce the case to what a community can hold. Four commitments, in the same order, with the same numbers, from the CEO to the newest employee to the handout on the chair.

Hold the rebuttals in reserve. Address objections directly and quickly as they arise. Do not seed them.

Let the record do the work. Over-engineered mitigation, a public EIR, a signed tribal agreement, and a fifty-year safety and community history gave supporters something they could verify and defend.

For companies facing a contested approval

If your project needs a public vote in California, or anywhere the local press has thinned out, the approval will not be won in the hearing room. It will be won in the years before: in the channel you build, in the discipline of the message, and in whether the community already knows, on your own terms, who is asking.

MKTNG runs strategic communications and community engagement for infrastructure, construction, and land-use projects across Northern California. See our infrastructure communications work. More on how we work with rural companies. Talk to us about your approval.

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