In the last year politicians who have overstepped their authority have been losing several challenges to their deliberate missteps in court. Could our three South Coast Santa Barbara county supervisors be next?
Only pending litigation will determine if they indeed made a bad decision to reward their supporters.
It has long been known that monied environmental activists have always supported the First, Second and Third District candidates to advance their agenda and drive oil production out of our county.
ExxonMobil alleges that three South Coast members of the BOS, who strongly support the get-oil-out coalition, “improperly treated the consideration of the (ExxonMobil) project as a referendum on offshore production as well as the transportation and use of crude oil in the county” when they rejected a permit to truck oil to out-of-county refineries.
The logic behind this denial was the theoretical adverse environmental impact of trucking the oil on public roads.
These three supervisors seemed to ignore the fact that large trucks move everything that’s grown or manufactured in this county to markets all over the U.S., that virtually everything we use is trucked into the county, and that hazardous materials are trucked on highways daily to support aerospace and commercial manufacturing.
Supervisors Das Williams, Gregg Hart and Joan Hartmann are all beholden to environmental activists without any thought to the consequences of their goal to end to the use of fossil fuels.
On its face, this is an absurd position to hold considering that everything that people use in their daily lives, including electric vehicles, cell phones, and the clothing they wear, relies on the reliable production of oil.
Past action by their predecessors have almost shut down oil production in this county.
But ExxonMobil still operates in our county, and as Noozhawk reported wants a “restart of its Santa Ynez Unit, including three offshore platforms and its Las Flores Canyon processing facility on the Gaviota Coast, which stopped operating in 2015 shortly after the Refugio oil spill.”
Why were these operations shut down? Well, an onshore pipeline failed and released hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude.
The pipeline operator cleaned up the mess, has paid for the damage and applied for a permit to restore it.
But true to form, the Santa Barbara County bureaucracy, including the three South Coast supervisors, saluted smartly, and following the direction of the get-oil-out coalition, denied every permit application related to replacing the pipeline and restarting oil production.
The short-term impact was a dramatic loss of General Fund revenue, and the loss of hundreds of well-paying jobs for county residents.
The long-term impacts are seen today at the pump when we are paying heretofore unheard-of prices for a gallon of gas or diesel.
ExxonMobil says restarting production would bring back 200-250 well-paid employees and contractors for jobs in offshore operations and Las Flores Canyon, and the company would pay about $1 million more in property taxes to the county, on top of the $1 million it pays now while the facilities are shut down.
The get-oil-out coalition and the elected officials they support really don’t care about the hundreds of thousands of low/moderate and fixed-income families in our county or anywhere else that are paying the price for their actions.
Two of the supervisors who voted to deny this permit are running unopposed in this election. The third, Gregg Hart, wants a promotion to the state Assembly.
Since he has clearly demonstrated that he lacks a clear vision of what it takes to properly evaluate a project before he votes, and because he has also demonstrated a lack of concern for his constituents, he is unsuited for a state level or any other political position.
If we keep electing the same type of politician to represent us, why should we expect a different outcome?
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry. He has been following Lompoc politics since 1992, and after serving for 23 years appointed to various Lompoc commissions, retired from public service. The opinions expressed are his own.
