At the board of supervisors meeting on June 13, a statement was made saying that oil production lowers your property value. In my case, this is false, and I have the tax assessment documents to prove it. The only thing that lowered my property value was the real estate bust in 2008.
Another statement was made that oil and agriculture don’t mix. This is also false, as I am a native Santa Marian, and my closest neighbor was the Unocal Battles Oil and Gas Plant, which was a short walk across the field my father farmed. Fact is, I grew up in the middle of an oil field. Our ranch had 12 oil wells on it, as well as many of our neighbors’ ranches did. My father farmed the land next to many of those wells with a great relationship with Union Oil Company.
My neighbors grow strawberries, lettuce, broccoli, celery, cauliflower, and other row crops with oil wells in the middle of their ranches today. Those wells produced oil from the 1930s through the 1980s with the technology they had at the time. With today’s technology, there is an oil company that wants to re-drill the ranch and neighboring ranches (without fracking) to produce the oil that was not produced in the past years. I own the surface and the mineral rights, and I have the right to hire an oil company that I approve of to drill and produce them.
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 3, 2014.