[Editor’s Note: The County Regional Planning Commission’s next meeting on oil drilling will be in downtown Los Angeles at 9 a.m., Wednesday, at the Hall of Administration, Room 150, 320 W. Temple St.]
One of the two main architects of the organized citizen pushback against expanded drilling in the Baldwin Hills oil field said this morning he is “cautiously optimistic” that Los Angeles County officials will digest, fairly assess the thousands of resident comments, and will return, around Labor Day, with redacted documents deemed satisfactory by the opposing parties.
Attorney John Kuechle allowed that he may yet alter his sunny but restrained views toward County government’s approach to oil drilling that is expected to resume in late October.
He said the County Regional Planning Commission’s denial this week of an extension of the 60-day public comment period was of secondary importance.
“I have been pushing less for an extension and more for a recirculation” of the environmental impact report and the Community Standards District,” Mr. Kuechle said.
Even if the comment period had been lengthened into September, “I am not going to be any smarter in two weeks.”
Value of Recirculation
He believes it is more important for the flood of criticisms and suggestions to be factored into the two voluminous documents, and then have the revised versions returned to the public for further review and comment.
“If the County does that,” Mr. Kuechle said, “we will have a good chance of getting the science and the CSD right.”
The vast landscape of paperwork that is traveling from the County and the drilling company, Plains Exploration & Production, PXP, to the public, back to the halls of government, and then back out into the community and then back to the government, is staggering.
Monstrous numbers. Mr. Kuechle estimates he put in 80 hours recently combing the hundreds of pages of the Community Standards District, suggesting “thousands” of changes.”
How would they be evaluated?
“Many of the changes were linguistic and many were substantive,” he said. Pressed for citations, he said that “I can’t point to two or three or 10 that were more important than others.”
The Long but Not the Short of It
At the same time that his co-architect, attorney Ken Kutcher, was dispatching his latest lengthy letter to County planning officials — 13,783 words — Mr. Kuechle was writing a letter to the same destination that was even lengthier.
“I have gone through the CSD and I have incorporated every (change) I could think of,” Mr. Kuechle said.
From the start, Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Kuechle have opted for moderation, a middle road, maintaining that while no further drilling would be optimal, it also is widely regarded as unrealistic.
An End to Drilling?
Some people in the small no-drilling camp “think that I have sold out, that I should be pushing for no drilling at all,” Mr. Kuechle said.
One reason for eschewing that alternative is “I don’t think we will ever win that way.”
However, he added, even though it seems like “ a thousand-to-one shot,” if he feels the two documents fail to reflect a sufficient amount of public concerns and remedies, Mr. Kuechle said “I am not ruling out” siding with the anti-drilling partisans.
