Part V
[Editor’s Note: Following Los Angeles County’s release last month of a draft environmental impact report on the effects of soon-to-resume drilling in the nearby Baldwin Hills oil field, this is the fourth in a series of articles on the efforts of Culver Crest residents to influence the tone of regulations that the County will impose on the drilling company. See Part IV, ‘Crest Residents Have a Problem with Supposedly Impartial PXP Drafting Own Regulations,’ July 3. Keywords: PXP, Kuechle, Kutcher.]
Since the first in a 6-week series of community meetings on Baldwin Hills oil field drilling does not start until tonight at 7 o’clock (see The Lowdown), it is too early to tell how seriously County planners and the oil drilling company will take worried residents.
No forecasts are available.
Many of the active neighbors are apprehensive about how they will be treated, asserting that oil drilling has been loosely regulated throughout the 84-year history of the oil field.
But everybody’s world changed on a night in January two years ago. A gas leak around 2 in the morning drove numerous Crest residents out of their homes, and that sparked a cozy activist revolution.
Without the gas leak, there might not have been a community meeting tonight.
Weeks after the leak, the drilling company, Plains Exploration & Petroleum, or PXP, announced a 20-year plan to almost double the cumulative scope of drilling that has gone on since the 1920s, 1400 wells vs. 1,0075 new ones.
Crest residents, already aroused, swung into action.
Be Prepared
The leaders of the well-organized Culver Crest neighborhood, John Kuechle and Ken Kutcher, do not know what to expect this evening — but they have taken precautions.
They are hoping for a huge turnout of residents to demonstrate to the County and to PXCP that they are a force demanding recognition.
Unsure whether the County, and eventually PXP, will soberly address, implement and enforce their health and safety concerns, Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Kuechle did the next best thing. They wrote their own book of regulations, the better to prepare them to do mind-to-mind combat, if that is what it will take, to become a muscular player.
Said Mr. Kuechle: “My view is that when you start with a (book of proposed regulations) that is so onesided, and is, in fact, drafted by the person it is supposed to regulate, you never are going to get to a final acceptable result.
“You need to start from scratch with a neutral document.
They Covered the State
“That is why the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance (representing the 500 households of Culver Crest) prepared this document. We said the Community Standards District that is in the EIR, that is being studied by the EIR, that was drafted by PXP, is such a poor starting point that you will never get to a reasonable final result.
“You need to start someplace else. We, therefore, researched oilfield regulation statutes from dozens of other cities and counties in California. Basically, we stole language from many of them to come up with what we view as an acceptable starting point.
“We maintain that we should be working from this document to try to get to a final result everybody agrees with.”
Stay tuned.
