Speaking with caution, the activists Ken Kutcher and John Kuechle tried to recapitulate with objectivity and sensitivity what they saw at Saturday’s meeting at West L.A. College to review the public’s oil drilling concerns in the nearby Baldwin Hills field.
As closely as they guarded their word selection, both attorneys, who live in Culver Crest and are spearheading a residents’ campaign, felt strongly that the meeting did not work, did not come close to achieving its stated objective. One reason was that too narrow of a section of the community was allowed to ask questions or give opinions.
It seemed to some in the audience that the format greatly reducing the general public’s role “was a setup for failure.”
“Look at the situation the County had,” Mr. Kutcher said. “They had a large room where the community could gather at 12 o’clock. The word was, invite everybody who can come. And then the commissioners are burned out because they started the day much earlier than usual, at 8:30 (see below). They have given up their Saturday to be here, spending 3 (extra) hours (in the morning) that I don’t think were that revealing. The tour of the oil field should have been done differently with the commissioners being given directions and they could travel there privately, when they have time.
Not Representative?
“Nobody told us the meeting was ending at 3 o’clock. At a meeting earlier last week, Jon Pierson (who wrote the environmental impact report) said, ‘I am expecting to be there until midnight.’ The neighbors all made a real effort to be there. They also did outreach to make sure others knew about it.
“But the afternoon ended up being very disheartening for people. Except for a handful of residents, none of them got a chance to speak,” including Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Kuechle, who were shut out from the commentary process.
It seems that a tour of the spacious, rambling, 2-mile-long Baldwin Hills oil field had been planned with a rendezvous set for 8:30 on Saturday morning. Instead of spreading the gathering of information over several days, County officials stuffed it all into a single outing, 3 1/2 hours before the community meeting.
The tour misfired as badly as a race car that struck a retaining wall at 250 miles an hour. Since the tour ostensibly was conducted for the benefit of the 4 members of the County Regional Planning Commission, the commissioners’ lawyers quickly and belatedly determined that the event should be open to the public. One commissioner was badly hobbled by a physical condition, slowing the very tardy-starting tour.
To condense a long story, the commissioners may have been worn out —beyond immediate recovery — even before the noon-time meeting got under way.
Here’s a Rule, There’s a Rule
Mr. Kuechle and Mr. Kutcher were put off by the sudden, previously unknown, rules that kept bobbing up.
While it is a common practice at community forums for speakers to stand in a queue to save time, this was not allowed at the Saturday afternoon meeting. Two County employees roamed through the audience and randomly selected so-called “pro” and “con” speakers. This upset Mr. Kutcher. His Culver Crest neighbors, he said, are far from a monolithic group. He himself is “pro” in some areas, “con” in others.
Neither Mr. Kutcher nor Mr. Kuechle has figured out yet, 48 hours later, how the speakers were chosen. But Mr. Kuechle added that “the pro-PXP people somehow managed to get themselves known, and they spoke. It was made clear that only the pro-PXP people got to sit in the ‘Pro’ chair to speak.”
Almost as if they were speaking of family members, Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Kuechle praised the behavior of a capacity crowd of about 400, especially after learning its presumed allotment of comment time was being hacked from most of the 3 hours to a corner of the meeting.
The only criticism anyone could find, said Mr. Kutcher, came when the audience was warned several times not to applaud because it interrupted the flow of the dialogue and consumed precious time that could not be regained.
The biggest surprise/disappointment of the afternoon was the mid-meeting moment it was announced that the finally opened public portion would not be open ended. Residents would neither shopped til they dropped nor would they speak until the day was exhausted. One commissioner, it seemed, had to leave at 3 o’clock. And so, there would be one “pro” comment, one “con” comment to the Planning Commission panel, which soon was down to 3 members long before 3 o’clock. “For” and “against” evidently meant favoring the oil drilling company, Plains, Exploration & Production Co., PXP, and opposing it.
PXP knew, in advance, what was coming. The hundreds of residents did not.
To some in the audience, that may have smacked of a setup. No such charge, however, has been publicly leveled.
One Side Was Heard
Mr. Kuechle picks up the narrative here. “Turns out,” he said, “that PXP had brought a bunch of employees to ‘testify.’ And so they spent every other 3 minutes getting up to the microphone and saying, ‘We work for PXP. They really are a bunch of nice guys. We like PXP.’”
Mr. Kutcher said the oil drilling company’s workers delivered other stentorian points with ringing clarity. “They said ‘we generate revenue. We spend the money in this neighborhood. And there are taxes (accruing to local government).’”
Probably no more than 10 or 12 neighbors were invited to comment for the entirety of the meeting. “Then 3 o’clock came,” said Mr. Kuechle, “and we were told to go home.”
