Re “X-raying the PXP Settlement — Favorably”
Surely the last has not been heard of the Baldwin Hills Oil Field settlement agreement, even though perhaps 20 attorneys, a bevy of faceless County officials plus, separately, County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and in a remote sense the state, have been thrashing out an ocean full of thorny complaints from neighbors and community activists for the last 2½ years.
Somebody is bound to uncover an alleged shortcoming, though it may be beneath a rock miles away.
But for now, this will do.
At last Thursday’s meeting of the Culver City Democratic Club, Culver City Planning Commissioner John Kuechle and Karly Katona, the most knowledgeable member of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s staff almost agreed this is as close as the combatants will come to a perfect truce.
Having lived in Culver Crest, one of the closest neighborhoods, since 1976, Mr. Kuechle estimates 80 percent of resident concerns — mainly healthy and safety — have been satisfied.
He judged that the two most critical among 15 mitigations to be resolved by last month’s settlement agreement were:
• Increasing the incentives for PXP to abandon oil wells as they go, a complex task that has been one of the most bitterly contested disputes, and
• Sweetening incentives for PXP to shift its drilling foci from oil wells on the perimeter to the center of the gaping field, farther away from residents.
Ms. Katona, who probably knows more about the oil field and sustainability matters than Dem Club members do about their spouses, projected 90 percent.
“Essentially the core elements of what this agreement achieves,” she said, “are the concerns about sight, sounds, smells and safety.”
Transparency and monitoring are two fairly amorphous conditions of the agreement whose effectiveness only can be determined with the passage of time.
Regardless of how many agreements are pursued, settled and monitored, one principal in this marathon scenario is immutable:
Residents relatively adjacent to the oil field and the drilling company, Plains Exploration & Production, are destined to remain eternal adversaries, whether PXP bales out in 2028, at the end of the present agreement, as some expect, or not until the world ends.
For detailed information on the settlement, see ridleythomas.lacounty.gov
