For everyone who’s yammering on about how California is such a strict state to do business in, we sure are lax when it comes to holding oil companies accountable for their messes.
Texas has stronger laws than California does. Texas. The state all the RINO’s are leaving us for. Texas state law requires oil field operators to plug and abandon inactive wells within a year after drilling or operations cease, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.
What do we do? Oh, we’ll just do it for them. We’ll just walk right into that abandoned oil field that was left behind and take care of it with taxpayer money.
Awesome!
Existing California state law requires operators to submit an idle well management plan and plug 4 to 6 percent of their oldest idle wells per year, according to a statement from Assemblymember Gregg Hart’s office. Operators also have the option to pay $150 in order to avoid submitting a plan.
Hey! Even I could afford that, and I live on birdseed.
One of Hart’s bills would take that $150 avoidance fee out of the picture and requires operators to address their idle wells within 10 years. That still seems a little lax. Can’t we just do what Texas did? WWTD?
Meanwhile, we’re paying out of pocket to clean up the mess of one of the most notorious polluters in Santa Barbara County oil industry history: HVI Cat Canyon, formerly known as Greka—aka, the poster child for gross negligence of environmental regulations, so negligent that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally sued it.
Then the company filed for bankruptcy. So here we are.
We’re a year into the California Department of Conservation, Geologic Energy Management Division’s (CalGEM) largest project to plug and abandon orphaned oil wells (that’s a cute name for them, right?). The project aimed to tackle 171 oil wells that once belonged to HVI Cat Canyon, 160 of them are plugged with more work to do, and 16 have work fully completed on them.
At a cool $200,000 or so a pop, according to the Sierra Club, we had $34 million in state and federal funds to get ’er done. I guess we’re on our way!
Only 5,100 more wells to go in the state! Well, actually, the state received $125 million more to address nearly 700 wells statewide—so, after that, only 4,400 wells to go. I hope they don’t raise my cage taxes to pay for any of it.
Santa Barbara County isn’t going to raise your property taxes this year, so we’ve got that going for us! While the county was thinking about three different tax measures—including a
1 cent sales tax for the general fund and a special quarter-cent sales tax and $60 per parcel tax increase to pay for libraries—survey responses from county residents weren’t very supportive.
Cost of living and financial insecurity are driving folks to keep their wallets shut.
“What’s interesting in some of our research, the people who are normally the most supportive of these kinds of measures—younger voters under 45—are also the ones feeling more economically stressed and uncertain right now,” a project manager from FM3 Research told supervisors.
Duh! You can’t find a studio apartment for under $1,400 in Santa Maria!
The Canary believes in taxing the rich. Send ZIP codes to [email protected].
