Nine months after a stalemate prevented Santa Barbara County officials from taking action on a controversial oil pipeline’s proposed restart, 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino moved from one side of the vote to the other.
In February, Lavagnino supported Sable Offshore’s pursuit of the permit transfers needed to revive the Santa Ynez Unit, which includes the pipeline system that caused 2015’s Refugio oil spill.
Although the Texas-based oil producer currently owns the unit, the county permits to resume production operations at the site are under the name of previous owner ExxonMobil.
Lavagnino’s recent shift in stance on Sable “caught most people by surprise,” he told the Sun.
“I have, my entire career, supported the oil industry. And I still do,” Lavagnino said. “I support all the jobs that they create and the revenue they generate, but at the end of the day, they still have to follow the rules that these guys [at Sable] just blatantly disregard.”
On Nov. 4, Lavagnino was part of the 4-1 vote that directed Santa Barbara County staff to draft what’s needed for the Board of Supervisors to formally deny the permit transfers, which the board will revisit at its Dec. 16 meeting.
Lavagnino, who volunteered to speak first during the board’s deliberations, described a promise he once made to his wife, to “never back down to a crowded hearing room,” and “simply do what I thought was right.”
“And in February, that’s what I did. I voted to approve the transfer of permits to Sable. I’m going to vote my conscience again today, but the landscape has changed dramatically since February,” he said during the hearing. “To me, the following are facts, not emotions: Since February, Sable has been charged criminally 21 times, with five of those charges being felonies.”
He clarified that although September’s charges from the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office have not been adjudicated, “they are still part of the evidence” that puts Sable’s ability to comply with county standards while operating the Santa Ynez Unit into question.
Among the 21 criminal counts, the five felony violations are centered on three waterways—Asphaltum Creek, Nojoqui Creek, and Arroyo Quemado—which the county District Attorney accused Sable of knowingly polluting during excavation and repair work tied to its Santa Ynez Unit efforts.
“I have many friends in the oil industry, and I will continue to support efforts to access our natural resources, but it has to be done responsibly by operators who put safety above profits,” Lavagnino said. “The evidence in this case is overwhelming. There is something wrong with the strategy of Sable’s leadership. Trying to simply bulldoze through the permitting process has not been helpful and is not the way we expect businesses in Santa Barbara County to conduct themselves.”
Lavagnino’s flipped vote wasn’t the only big difference between February and November’s board meetings. Nov. 4 was 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann’s first opportunity to weigh in on the matter, months after voluntarily recusing herself from voting.
“The pipeline runs through the northeast corner of my property,” Hartmann said before gathering her things and exiting the dais at the Feb. 25 meeting.
That hearing ended with two failed motions: one to deny the permit transfers (2-2, with Lavagnino and 4th District Supervisor Bob Nelson dissenting) and the other to approve them (2-2, with 1st District Supervisor Roy Lee and 2nd District Supervisor Laura Capps dissenting).
In June, the California Fair Political Practices Commission reviewed Hartmann’s circumstances and concluded that she was fit to vote on the permit transfers. With November’s 4-1 vote, Nelson upheld his original standpoint.
“I’ll be the contrarian today,” Nelson said at the meeting. “As for my colleagues, I feel for them because I think they’ve also been painted somewhat into a corner here, as though this might be some type of litmus test on whether they care about the environment or not.
“Unfortunately, I believe, as I did back in February, that this is political theater,” Nelson continued. “The public has been led to believe that this denial today will somehow stop the restart. … I believe it will not.”
Sable Offshore doesn’t believe the Board of Supervisors’ vote will impact its restart plans either, according to a Nov. 5 statement from Environmental and Governmental Affairs Vice President Steve Rusch.
“Sable will continue to defend our vested rights to pursue domestic energy supplies that are critically needed to make California more affordable and prevent our state’s energy infrastructure from collapse,” Rusch said in an email to the Sun.
Rusch attended the board’s Nov. 4 hearing, which attracted dozens of public speakers on both sides of the debate.
Those advocating for the county to deny the permit transfers included the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit headquartered in Arizona with offices across multiple states and one in Mexico.
One of the center’s senior attorneys, Rachel Mathews, said that she flew in from Virginia to attend both the February and November hearings in person.
“It’s not often that local county decisions have national importance. But in this case, it absolutely does,” Mathews told the Sun. “In general, our position is that all offshore drilling needs to stop, and we need to move away from fossil fuels and move toward climate-friendly, wildlife-friendly solutions as fast as possible.”
Mathews described Sable’s reboot plan for the Las Flores pipeline system as inconsistent with the Board of Supervisors’ recent directive for staff to develop an ordinance to phase out oil and gas operations throughout the county.
“Restarting the Santa Ynez Unit and continuing to drill for oil only keeps us on the path that we’re on, committed to fossil fuels long into the future,” Mathews said. “We should be investing our time, and our resources, and our energy, and our brain power into the sustainable solutions that can carry us into the future.”
Lavagnino described the likelihood of a countywide phaseout as “more rhetoric than reality.” He and Nelson dissented in October’s 3-2 vote for staff to begin developing the ordinance, which Lavagnino doesn’t believe will move forward.
“At the end of the day, when we get a report back that tells us how many millions of dollars it’s going to cost to do that, nobody’s going to be interested in that,” he told the Sun. “Staff’s trying to go and put all that together. … It’s going to be months and months. That’s not coming back anytime soon.”
Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 13 – Nov 20, 2025.
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