With oil drilling soon to resume within view of their hilltop properties, more than 100 grim-visaged residents, mostly from the Culver Crest neighborhood, marched into a parlor meeting with Los Angeles County officials last night to learn how the ultimate decision-makers were going to treat their concerns about air quality conditions and the health and safety of their families.
Their hunger for candor, in the form of firm enlightening answers to penetrating, worry-based questions, was marginally acknowledged, some said, but hardly fulfilled.
This was just the first public step in an arduous, pressurized 60-day campaign, the prescribed comment period (that ends Aug. 19) for the one million persons living/working within range of the Baldwin Hills oil field to declare their fears and suggested regulations for governing the heavily expanded oil drilling plans of Plains Exploration & Production, PXP.
The second step in the campaign occurs tonight at 7, a carbon-copy informational meeting scheduled at 3731 Stocker St., Suite 201, office of the Community Health Councils, also within sight of said oil field.
A more widely based community workshop is planned for 7 next Thursday evening at the Vets Auditorium.
Perhaps the crown jewel in this necklace of urgently framed meetings is Saturday, Aug. 2, 12 noon, at West Los Angeles College, where the County Planning Commission will be convening. This date has been called the most accessible occasion yet for ordinary voices to make an imprint on influential persons. The commissioners, however, are not the ultimate authority, or hope. The supreme power rests with the traditionally mysterious, remote and soon to change 5-person County Board of Supervisors.
One crucial figure in this complex, truncated drama was missing. Numerous residents were disappointed that the much-admired County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who carries the weight of their hopes on the regulatory vote before she retires in late autumn, not only was absent but not represented. However, the next Supervisor was. State Sen. Mark-Ridley Thomas (D-Culver City), who is favored to succeed her in the Nov. 4 election, participated in the meeting. So was a delegate from the team of L.A. City Councilman Bernard Parks, the senator’s rival in the race.
Fatigue in the Sky
Deep into the evening, for upwards of 3 hours, well after the moon had begun to yawn, informed, frustrated, strongly inquisitive neighbors grilled one Jon Pierson, the face of the County, the answer man for the night. No one came to praise him. Considering that he was one against all, he absorbed the blows of his inquisitors fairly well. In evaluating Mr. Pierson’s responses to a non-stop barrage of confrontational questions, some residents said they felt let down, as if they had been served rhetorical hamburger when they had been expecting steak.
A sturdy-voiced but sometimes bobbing and weaving environment maven, Mr. Pierson is the man behind the much-disputed— some say leaky — draft environmental impact report that, along with a companion document known as the Baldwin Hills Community Standard District, which lies at the heart of the bitter, but emphatically civilized, wrangling.
Since his sphere of authority is restricted, other savvy neighbors said he did the best he could in attempting to placate vivid fears of neighbors hoping to avoid a repeat of the spectacular middle-of-the-night gas leakage in January of ‘06 that singlehandedly converted a passive community into a den of activists.
Although there was a broad range of inquiries, the enduring themes concerned air quality and the health of families in the 500 households on Culver Crest. From the patio of the private home that hosted the parlor gathering, oil wells were starkly visible, as permanent reminders of a nightmare. Many neighbors remain haunted by the gas leakage that drove them from the sleep 2 1/2 years ago, and they went away unconvinced that the County is committed to taking measures to try at least to prevent a recurrence.
Wrong Emphasis?
John Kuechle is one of two principal architects, along with fellow resident Ken Kutcher, of a rival, citizens-centric Community Standards Document document intended to correct shortcomings in the County document. Both are land use attorneys. Especially in view of the memories of two gas leakages late in the winter of ’06, and given PXP’s history of lax to absent governmental regulation, plus the fact that PXP itself has written the proposed guidelines, the lawyers fear the County is missing a critical point. Mr. Kuechle said it appears that instead of studying the entirety of PXP’s history in the Baldwin Hills oil field, the County has preferred a narrow focus, using the present as a starting point, only trying to prevent conditions from worsening rather than correcting an original problem.
One factor in making the evening valuable was that most residents were of similar minds. The differences in their attitudes and concerns were scant. Like a bully gone wild in a school yard, many neighbors are convinced that PXP — impatiently awaiting a green light from the County to begin drilling 1,075 wells — has operated with an air of unfettered arrogance, independence and freedom from monitoring, much less enforcement, throughout the years it has been plumbing the Baldwin Hills oil field.
When the crowd wanted to know what Mr. Pierson and Los Angeles County were going to do about tightening a regulatory belt around PXP, he reminded his listeners several times of his narrow role. “My job is not to enforce but just to make recommendations,” he said. Another repeated remark was, “I can’t force that to happen.”
The audience was a blend of sophisticated semi-professional/professional environmentalists and newcomers to the science. As generalists, audience members were seeking comprehensive responses to broad questions affectingtheir home lives 24 hours a day. Mr. Pierson, who does this for a living, honed in on smaller areas of specificity.
Who Is in Charge?
Several neighbors said they entered and left with the understanding that they had no personal beef with Mr. Pierson. When pressed to identify, more than vaguely, who is responsible or certain regulatory responses, Mr. Pierson retreated a number of times into an answer that sounded dismissive to some and dead-on to others. He said that multiple government agencies in the County, in Southern California and in Sacramento are charged with enforcing separate aspects of the oil drilling, complicating the task for inquiring or worried residents.
One cynical man snorted, “I have always been taught that if everybody is in charge, nobody is in charge.” But he was outnumbered by neighbors who agreed with Mr. Pierson’s observation, “You know how government is.”
Billed as an “informational meeting,” many residents said they came, not in search of new data, but rather in quest of assurance that the County will listen to them between now and Aug. 19, assess their worries and suggestions, and insert appropriate mitigations into the final regulatory document.
One consensus of the stimulating evening was that residents made progress in seeking to influence the final form of regulations that will govern PXP’s drilling, but no one dared call the outing a victory.
