With surgical swiftness and tidiness, the County Board of Supervisors, behind the strong lead of Board Chair Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, completed this afternoon what it started last week.
They completed the job in less than 30 minutes.
Setting the stage for Plains, Exploration & Production Co., PXP, to resume drilling in the next few weeks, the Supervisors predictably voted 4 to 0 to certify the Community Standards District, the second and final document regulating greatly widened drilling in the Inglewood oilfield, whose odors, noise and residue filter into Culver City.
The vote served the retiring Ms. Brathwaite Burke’s expressed goal of ducking under the finish line, ahead of next Tuesday’s election, which allows her, not her successor, to claim full credit for engineering what are purported to be the most progressive set of oilfield regulations in America.
For months, hundreds of residents faithfully have been peppering the County Regional Planning Commission and other County officials with urgently suggested safety upgrades to the original documents.
Accurate quantification of these somewhat liquid regulations is difficult to gauge at this point, but one of the leading protestors, Dr. Suzanne DeBenedittis, said the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance did not get nearly as much tightening of the guidelines as it had sought.
The body of her opprobrium was reserved for Ms. Brathwaite Burke, a four-term Supervisor who will retire after the election. “Once again,” Dr. DeBenedittis said, “they made a mockery out of democracy. Yvonne was running those Supervisors like a puppet show, just the way she did last week” when they passed the Final Environmental Impact Report on drilling.
During her testimony, Dr. DeBenedittis emphasized a safety theme that the seven other residents who spoke, including the erudite activist Gary Gless, all underscored.
“I am not against oil drilling,” Dr. DeBenedittis said. “I am for drilling safety.”
She characterized the perceived docility of Ms. Brathwaite Burke’s colleagues as “the Silence of the Lambs.”
Many neighbors have conducted months of research into dense scientific areas well beyond the ken of general public comprehension, but there was no acknowledgement of the uncommonly high quality of technical information that residents relayed to the Board.
Going into today’s meeting, bristlingly unhappy residents of Culver Crest and neighborhoods surrounding the two-mile long oilfield had threatened to file lawsuits if the Supervisors failed to order satisfactory health and safety regulations to be included.
Not only did that not happen in the brief time the Supervisors considered the matter, Ms. Brathwaite Burke apologized to the oil interests for the conduct of some protesting residents.