The first tipoff something was critically amiss at last night’s heavily promoted meeting of the oil field-centric Community Advisory Panel was authored, ironically, by the program headliner himself, County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, owner of a copyrighted stentorian style.
Born to preach and spellbind, he could lecture from second base at Dodger Stadium — without a microphone — and mesmerize an audience from the Academy for the Deaf.
Yet, in the capacity-taxed Community Room on a thinly lighted hilltop in Kenny Hahn State Park, Mr. Ridley-Thomas chose such a uniquely restrained tone that someone in the first row asked him to elevate his voice.
A curious, sophisticated, enthused, remarkably well-informed crowd of oil field-adjacent residents that lined the walls and wound out the door was starved for hard news developments surrounding the Supervisor’s year and a half old pledge to severely tighten oil drilling regulations.
Why So Hushed?
The evident reasons for Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s acute reversal of oratorical form — scarcity of progress in negotiations, absence of tangible results in a dense, sometimes arcane process — became clear during the hour and a half he held the floor.
He resisted the notion that the glass still was empty on his August 2009 vow to sharply tilt drilling regulations by PXP toward a more compassionate understanding of residents’ health and safety concerns.
Repeatedly, he themed his long-sought response to homeowners around their merited right to peer through a window at the exact state of four pending lawsuits against the County and PXP.
The tense present battle was born in the autumn of 2008 downtown at the County Board of Supervisors, just at a point when long-worried residents were hoping to rein in PXP’s accelerated drilling strategy for a generation.
After Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s predecessor, the retired Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, seemed to rush through a set of controversial, perceived pro-PXP regulations in her final hours, the new Supervisor almost instantly seemed to ride to the rescue of exasperated, angry homeowners. Mr. Ridley-Thomas swore fast, effective relief to his new constituents, promising to virtually overturn the newly passed regulations that PXP had immediately and happily embraced.
Simultaneously, a cluster of homeowner-based lawsuits was brought as soon as the more liberal regulations flew unanimously through the Board of Supervisors.
Last night, though, Mr. Ridley-Thomas blamed the undeniably slow forward motion of his pledge on the nagging inability of these four sets of residential petitioners to agree on how/whether to go public in revealing where they are in dragged-out, frequently dormant settlement negotiations with the County and PXP.
Departing from Tradition
He took the unusual step of asking the parties to waive the confidentiality clause that traditionally cloaks in-progress settlement talks.
He was doubly frustrated, by the lawsuit parties’ refusal to tell him where they are and by the crawling pace.
Turns out the parties have had only a single face-to-face settlement discussion, last May. Unofficially, it appears little or nothing has occurred since. Four times court hearings have been postponed. The judge has told the litigants they should be able to work it out among themselves.
Mr. Ridley-Thomas made that assertion several times with thumping emphasis, and finally it ignited the most important drama of the emotional evening.
Open conflict actually lies at the core of the recent urge to create sudden transparency.
The Supervisor’s accusation brought Ken Kutcher, a sedate gentleman, to his feet to deliver a sharp contradiction. Friends said he was fuming. Not merely an attorney and Culver Crest resident, the multi-layered Mr. Kutcher is an original driving force in the campaign — from five years ago — to muscularize oil field guidelines, and he also represents one-fourth of the criticized petitioners.
Here Is Why
Primed for a reason he would reveal later, he responded firmly to Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s charge that lack of coordination among the plaintiffs was preventing residents of the Baldwin Hills/View Park/Windsor Hills/Leimert Park/Ladera Heights/Culver Crest from learning the truth about protracted settlement talks.
Undisclosed at the meeting was a high-stakes drama, fired by a sense of accelerated urgency, that had begun only this week, according to Mr. Kutcher. He believes Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s pledge largely had remained in a quiescent state until virtually the eve of the heralded meeting.
Referring to the Supervisor’s office, Mr. Kutcher told the newspaper this morning:
“Two days before the meeting, they came up with this theory asking us waive the confidentiality clause as a way of pressuring us.
“We got an (inspecific) email Tuesday afternoon from Elaine Lemke, the County counsel, requesting of all parties, including PXP, the Attorney General’s office and all the petitioners that the confidentiality clause be waived.
“In response, I sent a very general email asking, ‘What exactly are you suggesting be waived?’ There are discussions between some parties and other parties, amongst the petitioners, there are writings and emails about the draft settlement agreement. What is it you want to know?
“In response, the Attorney General’s office indicated it was not supportive of any waiver of conversations between parties in the A.G.’s office because they have been acting as a voluntary mediator, trying to facilitate a settlement. They feel they can’t act as an effective mediator if people talk to them in confidence, they react in confidence, and later those talks no longer are held in confidence.
“If people know these conversations will not be held in confidence, they may not share their feelings as frankly with their mediator, and that could make it more difficult to settle the case.”
(To be continued)
