A stunning turnaround early this afternoon by the County Regional Planning Commission may result in a huge longshot victory for Culver Crest/Baldwin Hills area residents.

Equally significant, the decision may deal a devastating defeat to County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke who has been banking heavily on a plottingly-timed home run moment in the final hours of her gilded political career to carry her into retirement.

The Planning Commission’s much anticipated — but widely dreaded —vote, on Sept. 10, in the form of a recommendation to the ultimate authority, the County Board of Supervisors, on renewed oil drilling by Plains, Exploration & Production, PXP, in the Inglewood oil field in the Baldwin Hills may be delayed.

Considerably.

A final determination will not be made until the Planning Commission’s next meeting, on that date, at 2 o’clock, at 500 W. Temple St., Room 381-B, site of today’s 3 1/2-hour meeting.

Their Reasoning

Too much important, complicated information for even mavens to digest in too restricted of a time period — that was the unanimous opinion of the five commissioners, chair Harold Helsley, and members Pat Modugno, Wayne Rew, Lesley Bellamy and Esther Valadez.

However, with County planning staffers muscularly resisting a schedule upheaval, the denouement is not predictable.

The timing, residents have claimed from the start, not only is cockeyed but unfairly truncated.

While the draft environmental impact report on expanded oil drilling — which could resume as soon as late October — was released in late June, its companion document, the County version of a Community Standards District, was not made available until 13 days ago.

How to Overwhelm Experts

Evaluating the enormous — but far from perfect, it seemed agreed — data within those two documents, plus factoring in thousands of richly detailed public comments, and then digesting the edited contents, was a punch to the solar plexus even for experts, commissioners said.

Tantalizingly, Mr. Helsley, the leader of the commission, raised what he said was the logical spectre of iverturning the supposedly immutable calendar to insert a new 60-day public comment period for the revised versions of the CSD and the EIR.

He argued that with hundreds of revisions to be incorporated into the reshaped CSD on Sept. 10, how would the community, much less the commissioners, have time to re-evaluate, revise and react.

Such a radical departure from the present master plan — recommendation vote by the Planning Commission, Sept. 10, with a final-form vote by the County Board of Sups on Oct. 21 — conceivably could kill off Ms. Brathwaite Burke’s scrupulously arranged intent to singlehandedly turn this occasion into a coronation moment at the close of her much praised career.

PXP Ready to Return

Another argument legislating against a schedule change in the face of powerful logic is that PXP may revert to what critics call its bad-penny role.

Drilling again.

With a measure of fanfare in the spring, it was announced that PXP would give residents a break while the kids were home from school.

The oil drilling company voluntarily was foregoing profits and taking a summer vacation from drilling — dating from the third week in June to the third week in October — to give the County and the highly critical, skeptical public time to formulate and presumably implement a yawning array of new, if somewhat mysterious, partially completed, regulations.

Would those two fears — some said threats — scare off the Planning Commission from deviating from its implacable schedule?

Is the Path Clear?

The Planning Commission moved this morning’s meeting across the street to roomier quarters, the Temple Street nesting place of the commissioners’ big brother, the County Board of Supervisors. They did not really need the roomy substitute chamber because the turnout was cozy, 35 to 50 speakers/spectators.

Whether the Board of Sups — not to mention planning staffers — will let the Planning Commission get away with a potentially drastic schedule change, remains unclear.

Finally though, it seems, a summer’s worth of skyscraper-tall diligence and research by scores of dedicated persons — particularly by the lawyerly leaders of the Culver Crest neighbors, Ken Kutcher and John Kuechle — may be rewarded.

Freshly amazed by the late turnaround, Mr. Kutcher fairly glowed when he stood up from his mid-chambers seat a little after 12:30 today.

Sounds as if the vote is going to be delayed? a visitor said in approaching Mr. Kutcher.

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “The commission has asserted its control, and the staff I think will continue to push back. But the commission wants to be an integral part of the process. They are not going to let staff roll over them. That is great news.”

The Quality of the Testimony

Commissioners admitted they were staggered by two jammed hours of breathtakingly voluminous and scholarly testimony from residents worried that certification of greatly widened drilling in the Inglewood oil field, virtually in the backyards of one million persons, is being rushed through channels at an un-natural, unnecessary rate of speed.
They were impressed, perhaps even knocked off stride, by the professionally etched scope of research accomplished by 29 ordinary persons.

(In a fascinating contrast to the Planning Commission’s strongly criticized public hearing format on Saturday, Aug. 2, on the campus of West Los Angeles College, where the oil company, PXP, was given as much or more testimony time in front of the commissioners, the roles were more than reversed this time. Of 31 speakers, only two presented PXP’s perspective of hurried events that have a permanent eye cocked on Ms. Brathwaite Burke’s retirement date and the Nov. 4 election when she will be replaced.)

To the shock of protesting Culver City area community members near the end of an all-morning public hearing, first Mr. Modugno and then Mr. Helsley galloped to their rescue in the supposedly flagging, kickback moments of a long meeting.

Just as the lightning bolt crackled from the skies, the Planning Commission made its move with the least amount of drama imaginable.

He Said What?

While Mr. Modugno and Mr. Helsley were encouraging their agreeable colleagues to pause, mop their brows and catch their breaths, a number of persons in the pocket-sized audience were distracted, milling around, quietly shmoozing, preparing for the drive back to the Westside. No loud voices, no emotion. It took a second-look to realize that something remarkable was unfolding.