The dominos are finally beginning to visibly fall for Big Oil on the Central Coast. Dinosaurs like the Phillips 66 refinery in Nipomo are on their last legs—thanks in part to massive environmental outcry over the projects proposed to keep them humming.
SLO County’s 2017 decision to deny P66 a rail spur extension on its Santa Maria Refinery property—due to residents’ concerns over the potential increase in oil-carrying rail cars and the hypothetical explosions that could have resulted—was the nail in the proverbial coffin. It followed 2015’s Refugio oil spill, which shut down offshore crude oil supplies that were pumped up the coast to Nipomo.
The oil company might want you to think the Nipomo closure has everything to do with the changes it made to its Contra Costa County refinery, which may have made the decision to shutter a little easier, but it wasn’t the only issue.
Although operations officially stopped and the refinery shuttered in 2023, demolition activities are about to kick it up a notch. That is, if there isn’t too much outcry over the potential environmental impacts of razing a refinery to the ground and the decision about how best to move forward with the land—which is going to need remediation due to leaks, spills, chemicals, oil, etc.
At least P66 is doing its due diligence to clean up the mess it made and bring the land as close to the way it was before 1955 as possible. That’s more than we can say for others, such as Greka, aka HVI Cat Canyon, aka doesn’t clean up its messes.
Santa Ynez Valley Union High School District is hoping that the mess that 2023 wrought on its school and community will soon be in the rearview. The district finally hired a replacement for Principal Michael Niehoff, who resigned before the end of the last school year due to hullabaloo over LGBTQ-plus associated decisions. He was the fourth principal to quit in almost as many years.
The district’s superintendent, Andrew Schwab, left in March. The new principal, Kimberly Sheehan, will also be the new superintendent, which seems like a smart move for the district, which was paying two different people to lead what amounts to one main high school and a much smaller second one.
Maybe the rub for all those principals wasn’t with the parents at all. Perhaps it was that there were too many leaders. Acting Superintendent Elysia Lewis alluded to that in her comments about the issue.
“The principal and superintendent are on the same property; it makes it difficult because people would circumvent the principal and go to the superintendent,” Lewis said.
Like a bunch of children who didn’t like what dad said, so they went to ask mom with crossed fingers, hoping their parents hadn’t discussed the issue yet.
Most importantly, Sheehan plans to put students at the center of her decisions, something that the Sun’s past reporting has shown can ruffle feathers. But it’s important to allow students to speak and be heard as they head into adulthood, something Sheehan gets.
“I want to make sure that I give to students everything and every opportunity that I received because schools changed the trajectory of my life,” she said.
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