Anonymous
Source: Office of Sen. Limón
Senator Monique Limon (D- Santa Barbara) and Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) presented a check of $1,050,000 to the City of Carpinteria and Santa Barbara County to decommission the abandoned Venoco oil and gas pipelines.
Venoco owned the pipelines before they filed for bankruptcy in 2017. In the absence of an owner, the Office of the State Fire Marshall turned to the County of Santa Barbara and the City of Carpinteria to pay for adequately abandoning these facilities.
Senator Limón worked diligently with colleagues in the Legislature and successfully got the approval of over 1 million dollars for the City of Carpinteria and the County of Santa Barbara to decommission abandoned pipelines safely.
“This is important investment will ensure these pipelines are correctly decommissioned, protecting the health and safety of the surrounding communities and our local environment,” said Limón. “The bankruptcy of oil companies and abandonment of their infrastructure has been a focus in a lot of my work in the California Legislature, not only ensuring taxpayers don’t bear the brunt of the cost, but most importantly the environmental and health consequences it brings.”
Senator Limón is hopeful that recent changes in the law will ensure that oil companies do not continue to leave local municipalities responsible for their abandoned infrastructure.
“The responsibility to remove the aging oil infrastructure in the Central Coast has been shifted for far too long. It is time to restore our coastline and surrounding environments as we work to end these threats and protect our natural resources. I am pleased to work with Senator Limón on this decommissioning of the abandoned Venoco oil and gas facilities.”
Last week, Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 47 (Limón), allowing the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) to collect and spend up to 5 million dollars a year on plugging and abandoning deserted oil wells. SB 47 prevents potentially high taxpayer costs by creating an industry-funded mechanism to employ workers to plug deserted wells.
So you prevent a business from maintaining and replacing its infrastructure, the business becomes unable to operate and goes bankrupt, and then you blame the business for going bankrupt. This was a predictable result of a government policy decision to effectively shut down and bankrupt the company. I would say that is the opposite of a subsidy for the industry.
No doubt you would, but your claims are false.
That would have been an excellent idea, but these companies have the politicians in their back pocket, even here in in solid blue CA. If I recall there was a bond or similar but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the actual cost.
Noozhawk is not a very objective source. Every day on their pages you can find some sort of rant against immigrants or environmental concerns.
“My Prius only wants Saudi Crude…”
Everyday several, 1000+ foot long, oil tankers arrive full of oil from Saudi Arabia to US ports to feed US automobiles. Meanwhile California’s say “No” to good paying local oil jobs with stringent environmental regulations, with muddled feel-good legislation.
Looking past the environmental issues, most Californians haven’t a clue about the very serious slavery and human rights violations which occur daily in Saudi Arabia. 9-11 mean anything to you self-righteous tree huggers?? Etc.
HARBOR SEAL – stick to the water…. “9-11” has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia’s “slavery and human rights violations.”
I’ve been to the Middle East..
In uniform..Harborseal is correct on all points.
NOSTRA – ok great, so how does 9-11 have anything to do slavery and human rights violations regarding oil? The 2 issues are distinct.
You actually believe the propaganda that the jobs here in the oil industry were “good-paying”? Any well-paid jobs were in the past, and were for the petrogeologists, who, of course, were promptly laid off. The other jobs were menial, and also temporary. Their contribution to our tax base was far smaller than the costs we incurred because of their disregard for regulations.
HARBOR – also, I think you don’t know your fellow Californians very well, especially the “tree huggers.” Any self respecting liberal is WELL aware of the horrendous human rights issues in SA. You really think we have no idea about how women or homosexuals are treated? Great thing about progressives is they’re pretty darn aware of stuff like that.
You’ve got to be kidding about this check is about saving the CA taxpayers money. Where the hell do you think the money came from? Maybe from Limon’s slush fund account, haha.