• Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) joined her West Coast colleagues in introducing legislation to permanently ban offshore drilling on the Pacific Coast. The West Coast Ocean Protection Act would permanently protect the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts by amending the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to prohibit new oil or natural gas leases in each state’s outer continental shelves and permanently protect the $44 billion coastal economies of the three states, which support nearly 650,000 jobs.
“Oil drilling is inherently a dirty and dangerous business; it is a matter of when an accident will occur not if,” Capps said in a statement. “The Plains oil spill near Santa Barbara this year served as a stark reminder of the dangers associated with transporting and drilling for oil. These spills and accidents endanger public health, poison local marine systems and wildlife, and inflict serious harm on our economy.”
The West Coast Ocean Protection Act was authored by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) and cosponsored by
16 members of Congress including Capps.
Capps has introduced her own legislation, the California Ocean and Coastal Protection Act (H.R. 1952) to permanently ban new offshore drilling off the California Coast. She has introduced this legislation every Congress since 2006.
On Nov. 5 Capps hailed the House passage of a comprehensive transportation bill (H.R. 22) that included language from her bipartisan bill, the Raechel and Jacqueline Houck Safe Rental Car Act (H.R. 2198).
The rental car safety legislation, which Capps spoke on the House Floor in support of, is named in honor of sisters Raechel and Jacqueline Houck of Ojai, Calif. Both sisters were tragically killed while driving a recalled Chrysler PT Cruiser rented from Enterprise in 2004. Roughly one month before the Houck sisters were killed, Enterprise received a recall notice that the PT Cruiser had a defective steering component that was prone to catching fire and that it would be repaired by Chrysler free of charge. Despite the warning, Enterprise didn’t get the vehicle repaired and rented it out to three other customers before renting it to the Houck sisters. The defect caused the car to catch fire and crash head-on into a tractor-trailer, killing both sisters.
This article appears in Nov 12-19, 2015.