Oil Company Claims County Planning Commission Decision a ‘Prejudicial Abuse of Discretion’
Santa Barbara County’s Planning Commission may have effectively pulled the plug on offshore oil development in South Coast waters for the foreseeable future this past week, rejecting a bid by ExxonMobil to truck oil initially pumped off the coast of Gaviota and processed at its Las Flores Canyon until stretches of two pipelines — deemed unsafe after the 2015 pipeline rupture by Refugio Canyon — can be replaced.
The Planning Commission voted 3-2 that the increased risk of oil spills from tanker-trucking — particularly to nearby creeks and streams — so outweighed any potential benefits that they could not make the legally required “findings of overriding consideration” needed to approve the project, given the Class I negative environmental impact associated with the proposal. Class I impacts are defined as those that cannot be mitigated, and findings of overriding consideration must be made for such projects to be approved.
In a letter, ExxonMobil decried the vote as “a prejudicial abuse of discretion,” contending that the commissioners gave undue weight to the comments of “a few non-expert witnesses” about the probability of “aggressive drivers” who might pass oil-laden trucks carrying the company’s cargo along steep, narrow, and winding stretches of Highway 166 on their way from Las Flores Canyon to the Pentland processing plant in the San Joaquin Valley.
ExxonMobil Denied Trucking Permits in Santa Barbara County
The oil company claims the County Planning Commission’s decision is a “prejudicial abuse of discretion.”
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