Turns out that the leadership of the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance will go into Wednesday’s 9 a.m. Last Roundup-style of public hearing in downtown Los Angeles with the County Regional Planning Commission better armed than previously believed.
Thanks to the California version of the federal Freedom of Information Act, attorney Ken Kutcher has been obtaining a relative treasure trove of emails and pertinent documents exchanged by the parties his group is sparring with in the Inglewood oil field drilling controversy.
One recent round of emails centers on correspondence between the oil drilling company’s lead attorney, Charles J. Moore, and persons of varying degrees of importance in and around the County planners apparatus.
The emails seem to portray a level of comfort, possibly even coziness, between the party at the vortex of the debate — Plains, Exploration & Production Co., PXP — and the presumably neutral referee, as the County planners’ network has been described.
Are They Too Intimate?
The newspaper asked Mr. Kutcher whether he believes the friendly relationship between PXP and County officials was unhealthily tight.
“In my mind,” he said, “it was not necessarily too cozy. The problem was, they were being exclusionary toward us.”
The Culver Crest area activists spent the entire summer season — notably the 60-day public comment period — playing catch-up, trying to compensate for months of denial of access to documents they felt would help them attain even footing with PXP and the County in determining the final shape of regulations.
As the public hearings piled up, they have spoken of increasing pressure to gain a measure of influence on the outcome.
A Moderate View
They said they were not trying to block accelerated oil drilling but wanted a voice in approving what they call reasonable regulations.
“We would not be in the kind of time predicament we are facing and working through lots of technical draft issues if we had been more integrated into the drafting and evaluation process all along,” Mr. Kutcher said. . “Fortunately, we had the skills to contribute to the process.”
A public records request was how the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance group last spring acquired a copy of the crucial Community Standards District that had been drafted, controversially, by the drilling company, PXP.
“It was a coup for us to get the CSD early,” Mr. Kutcher said, “because we had been told ‘You will see it when the EIR comes out on June 19.’
How It Helped
“Because we got to see it early, we decided it needed lots of work. The CSD talked a lot about soft subjects such as landscaping but not the hard issues, the impact issues. That led to the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance writing its own CSD.”
Mr. Kutcher also went through public records requests to obtain a screen draft, or preliminary version, of the Environmental Impact Report after being denied access by government authorities.
Once the oil drilling expansion plans of PXP became known a couple of years ago, community activists in Culver Crest and other neighborhoods organized to make sure the health and safety of their families would be satisfactorily covered in presumably stringent new rules drawn up to govern the stepped-up drilling.
Do-It-Yourself Approach
Their peace of mind took a hit when they learned PXP was writing its own rules.
Some activists have felt they were not taken seriously by the state, the County and PXP. They constantly have complained that they have been unfairly denied access to crucial information.
Whether or not there is a smoking gun among the public records revelations, Mr. Kutcher is confident that perceptive insights have been gained. Besides obtaining previously denied documents, correspondence exchanges have illumined nuanced tendencies of parties that are, or have been perceived as, rivals.
The lawyer is a passionate detail-person who has invested hundreds of hours since last spring poring over data and information that others might regard as hopelessly arcane.
Reversal of Trend Espied
These findings have been helpful in permitting Mr. Kutcher to organize letters thousands of words long and staggeringly deep, probing, beseeching and recommending alterations, ranging from small to large, in the two documents that will govern the oil drilling expansion by PXP over the next 20 years.
After long, exasperating months of contentiousness between citizen groups and the government/PXP side, Mr. Kutcher and others recently have detected an attitudinal change on the County’s part.
They are hopeful this will result in a representative portion of their recommendations being adopted next week by the County Regional Planning Commission. The regional body then will pass along its more or less ironclad recommendations to the County Board of Supervisors.
It Is About Timing
The Supervisors are scheduled to vote on finalizing the recommendations on Oct. 21, a date carefully chosen by Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke — strategically just ahead of her retirement and, equally important, before the Nov. 4 election to choose her successor.
While the final form of these closely watched regulations has been billboarded by Ms. Brathwaite Burke’s camp as the crowning point in her legacy, the Supervisor herself has been invisible throughout the process.
She has not attended a single public hearing, not an unusual practice for her even though throughout her four terms in office she commonly has been described as “beloved” and “wildly popular.”
