County Planning and Development staff reports supported the drilling of more than 750 new oil wells in Cat Canyon. They proved to be poorly drafted and replete with error. The proposed projects threatened the quality of our drinking water and the water used by growers.
The Oct. 1 Huntington Beach oil pipeline accident has underscored the questionable judgment expressed by Planning and Development just last week at a Planning Commission hearing. There, staff supported the massive trucking of oil on our roads.
The Huntington Beach disaster is larger than the 2015 Refugio State Beach incident that continues to impact us. Yet the county transportation planner defends a scheme that would permit, for up to seven years, 70 oil trucks per day on our roads, each loaded with 450,000 gallons of combustible oil … this, while knowing that moving oil by truck is even riskier than via pipeline. Thanks to the wisdom of planning commissioners, the truck plan was denied approval.
And now the planner lends critical support to a lot-split in Los Alamos that would result in a housing development endangering townsfolk. It would lead to too much additional traffic on a small neighborhood road, and, with only half of the new homes having a garage, reduced access by emergency vehicles due to illegal parking on the fire lane.
The county planner has put forward traffic estimates based on formulas in an engineering manual rather than doing an actual traffic study. And he has ignored, and then minimized, the impact of a one-lane bottleneck on the safety of pedestrians, vehicles, and drivers.
Planning and Development staff reports are supposed to be written with an eye to protect public health and safety and not to maximize the profits of land developers and private companies. We should not have to depend on the sagacity of the Planning Commission to set things right.
Seth Steiner
Los Alamos
This article appears in Oct 14-21, 2021.