In the less than crystallized run-up to the County Board of Supervisors’ vote-of-last-resort in October on the Baldwin Hills oil field, a regular meeting of the County Regional Planning Commission is the next stop for opponents of expanded drilling.
Set for 9 o’clock on Wednesday morning at the Hall of Records, 320 W. Temple St., Room 150, downtown Los Angeles, this time residents of Culver Crest and other drilling-affected neighborhoods will know what they are getting into.
As attorney Ken Kutcher, co-leader of one of the most effective citizen groups, noted, the parameters are clear — scores of residents will want to speak, but public response will have to be shoehorned into a likely three-hour meeting time limit.
The Entire Meeting
Concerns of Culver City area residents will monopolize the agenda of a body that Westside residents generally are not aware of.
Two thick, textually dense documents, the environmental impact report and the County’s Community Standards District form the entire agenda.
Mr. Kutcher, along with his colleague John Kuechle, has put in some of the most strenuous hours of his life in the last 75 days in an attempt to tilt the dead-final County regulations governing drilling in a slightly more resident-sensitive direction.
Although he believes Wednesday’s meeting is ill-timed because of traditional late-summer, pre-Labor Day vacation schedules, Mr. Kutcher has urged residents to descend on the downtown meeting. (Indeed, Mr. Kuechle will be missing, on holiday.)
Vacation Time for Many
It will be their last and best chance, he says, to more vividly acquaint the Planning Commission with the health and safety worries that one million Baldwin Hills-adjacent residents residents have about greatly increased drilling.
Partisans say that to have a deep public discussion on the much-debated EIR and the equally criticized CSD more than a week after the public comment period closed seems odd.
Nearly a month ago, about 400 Culver Crest area residents and a depleted Planning Commission — which will make a crucial recommendation to the final authority —came face to face for the first time.
But residents were strongly critical of the format and operation of the meeting that was far shorter than they had anticipated. Their slice of comment time was greatly reduced from what they had been led to expect, annoyed residents said later.
Significance of Meeting
From Mr. Kutcher’s viewpoint, the Wednesday meeting serves two purposes:
To educate the five-member Commission about the residents’ main worries, and to satisfy requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act.
“To pass muster with CEQA,” said Mr. Kutcher, “I believe the CSD will have to be revised and recirculated.”
The volume of work, rhetoric, written and spoken comment and criticism has been staggering this summer, between County officials and Westsiders.
The problem, says Mr. Kutcher, is that all of the principal parties have not been in one room at one time. Information is being exchanged at hurricane rates. But it remains questionable whether the recommending authority (the Planning Commission) has heard/seen sufficient public input to make an objective recommendation to the County Board of Supervisors for its Oct. 21 vote.
