Encircled by unbashful residents with sometimes-competing objectives over the conduction of drilling habits in the never-ending Baldwin Hills oil field feud, County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas last night found himself in the position of the centipede who repeatedly was warned, “Don’t step on anything.”
About 125 worried, informed, curious, loquacious, hard-line, skeptical homeowners answered Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s summons to the Garden Room at the Vets Auditorium — a fire marshal’s nightmare — for a promised update on settlement talks by the four separate resident-side lawsuits against the oil drilling company, PXP.
He stated at the outset and revisited the assertion several times: Peace table talks (which do not necessarily mean all parties) have resumed, seem to be heading toward a favorable outcome. If they stall again, the next court date to duel with the Plains Exploration & Production Co., is March 29. The Supervisor declared about 10 times that negotiation is far preferable to a court-imposed verdict, and indeed the judge himself has so told the litigants.
Tough Crowd to Impress
On a non-cuddly evening, a shrug greeted Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s tidily packaged good news although the audience did embrace his intention to convene every month and roundly answer all community questions. Facing a disparate audience whose shaky commonality lies in generic goals not specific ones, perhaps the main or only news to emerge was:
The Supervisor’s revelation that marathon mediation on a Nobody Leaves the Room Until We Have a Settlement basis begins on Monday. However, no one, including Mr. Ridley-Thomas, knows if the most crucial player, PXP, will report to the table.
City Hall is one of the litigants seeking to redress the supposedly PXP-favorable oil drilling regulations rushed through the Board of Supervisors in the final hours Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s predecessor was in office, and City Councilman Andy Weissman was asked later if the Garden Room meeting worked.
After a hesitation, he said: “It was successful from the standpoint of being in a position to answer questions raised by the community. I don’t know whether the community was satisfied, though, with the responses they heard.”
Acknowledging that Mr. Ridley-Thomas is in a near no-win predicament because of the rival diversity of communal goals, the analytical Mr. Weissman said the crowd’s competing interests “are disparate the way the four lawsuits are. They range from one extreme to the other, from the people who want to stop any current oil drilling and prevent any new oil drilling, all the way to the other side, those who say ‘We don’t need any more regulations. Everything is fine.’
“In the middle, you probably have a larger group willing to allow oil drilling to continue but under tighter regulations and stronger protection.”
Mr. Weissman indicated his takeaway was a fairly hollow cup.
Profiting from the Last Meeting
One month after being severely criticized at a Community Advisory Panel meeting for alleged lack of either progress or involvement in nudging along — by lawsuit or otherwise — a plan for strengthening drilling regulations with emphasis on health and safety, Mr. Ridley-Thomas walked into the lions den this time armed for combat.
No longer willing to play a lone wolf at target practice, a healthy portion of the Supervisor’s ammunition consisted of three perceived experts, a risky strategy that received a mixed, negative-leaning review from a crowd hungering to go one-on-one with Mr. Ridley-Thomas not a faceless, panned panel.
The best received, or least contested, of the guest marksmen was Richard Bruckner, candid, plain-talking Director of Regional Planning downtown. The gentleman on the warmest griddle was Mohsen Nazemi, Deputy Executive Officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, who barely gave a single response about air quality that more than vaguely mollified the crowd. Near the end of the extended evening, he sparred unsmilingly, unbendingly with one of the chief activists and most knowledgeable members of the community who has been battling PXP and the County, Gary Gless. Confronted with a pledge that Mr. Gless said had been made, Mr. Nazemi explained that he personally did not issue the promise, and besides, he couldn’t respond to certain inquiries or charges because even though he has logged 35 years with the AQMD, his expertise lies in engineering.
Last Place Got Crowded
After Mr. Ridley-Thomas, trying to be congenial, had expanded the planned 90-minute program into 2 hours, 15 minutes because of the crush of questions, the fraying process was moving at a rapid pace.
The crowd’s most unfavorite marksman was, by far, the youngest member at the table, the gentleman from the state, Derek Chernow, Interim Director of DOGGR, so known because its full name is the Dept. of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources. Mr. Chernow seemed unhappy to be there, gave clipped, unilluminating responses. Further, by the end, he was snapping at the audience and was eager to bolt.
For no apparent reason, the names of state Sen. Curren D. Price Jr. (D-Culver City) and Assemblyperson Holly J. Mitchell (D-Culver City) were invoked by Mr. Ridley-Thomas. They have not played any known role in this drama, nor did they last night. They signed off on a bland six-paragraph letter that was shorn of insights or interest in this virtually daily controversy.
At that, they formed a three-way tie for least participating party with PXP’s delegate to the meeting, Lisa Paillet, the drilling company’s ombudsperson. She sat anonymously in the second row until the closing minutes even though PXCP constantly was mentioned in blushingly unflattering terms.
