Second in a series
Re “A Different Ridley-Thomas at Oil Field Update Meeting”
[Editor’s Note: County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas will issue his next update on drilling in the Baldwin Hills oil field at a Community Advisory Panel meeting, Wednesday, Feb. 23, probably at 7 o’clock, probably at the Vets Auditorium.]
The warm relationship that has grown up between attorney/Culver Crest resident Ken Kutcher and County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas as both seek to cinch the rules tighter for the oil drilling company PXP, was sharply tested last Thursday night.
Surprisingly to the overcrowded room but not to the principals themselves, they were at contentiously opposing poles.
The frustrated Supervisor sought to demonstrate to homeowners near the Baldwin Hills oil field he is making progress in a year-and-a-half-old official pledge to toughen the regulations that will guide PXP’s controversial drilling for the next decade.
And then he inserted the rub:
Even though it was not particularly evident to the well-informed crowd, Mr. Ridley-Thomas said one reason his Board of Supervisors-approved motion has not been completed is that four sets of residents/plaintiffs are being stubborn. They cannot agree on settlement terms in their separate suits against the County and PXP, Mr. Ridley-Thomas said.
Up popped the quiet-spoken Mr. Kutcher, lawyer for one set of plaintiffs, to voice a rigorous objection to the charge that he felt was just plain unfair.
Common Goal, Different Pathways
Remembering, however, that there is a tomorrow, that they have a common goal and that they value their relationship, both leaders soon stepped carefully, even warily.
Since each man believes he is correct, they also moved emphatically during and after the meeting to declare the preciseness of their contentions.
In an attempt to display concrete evidence of progress, Mr. Ridley-Thomas lasered in on a foundational principle of law. He asked the lawyers for the teams of petitioners to put aside their confidentiality pledges and reveal what they have agreed on in settlement talks and what points have stalled them.
This notion scratched Mr. Kutcher the lawyer a very wrong way.
Confidentiality is a cornerstone of his land-use law practice, and every attorney’s practice. In an already dense collection of lawsuits jammed with arcanities and complexities, he saw the notion of opening the window of private talks to the rest of the world as fundamentally offensive. Besides that, getting four plaintiff teams with separate and sometimes competing objectives to agree on going public at a sensitive juncture bore a resemblance to herding cats.
Is It Unbreaking a Window?
“It is very difficult to unwind confidentiality going backwards,” Mr. Kutcher told the newspaper.
“There are all kinds of degrees of comments that have been made” by the plaintiffs when they knew their words would remain off the public record.
“At some point, petitioners have talked to other petitioners. Are those confidential conversations to be waived, too? Petitioners have talked to the County about what they think strategically about PXP — and so the County is going to share that with PXP?
“There are so many permutations to this.”
Mr. Kutcher knew nothing of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s desire to overturn the confidentiality principle until Tuesday, 48 hours before last week’s emotional community meeting at Kenny Hahn State Park. That made the email proposal he received from the County counsel, Elaine Lemke, look suspiciously like a hurry-up last-moment bid to catch up.
“Then the County came back Wednesday with a different proposal,” Mr. Kutcher said. “I assume this was in anticipation of (last Thursday’s) meeting although nobody said that. They were sort of scrambling to find an approach.
“Then she came back with a third different alternative, to release the draft settlement agreements.
“From my standpoint, there have been a lot of internal draft settlement agreements. We have been working on draft settlement agreements since May and June of last year.
“That generated more questions. If you get a settlement agreement but you don’t have the email or cover letter that goes with it, then what?”
(To be continued)
