The Marin County Board of Supervisors will consider an ordinance on Tuesday that would require voter approval before any onshore oil and gas facilities could be constructed.
The county’s existing zoning regulations already ban facilities that would support offshore oil and gas drilling operations. Supervisors Kate Sears and Dennis Rodoni, who proposed the ordinance, said voter approval will add a layer of protection that several counties up and down the coast have already adopted.
“It really puts voters in the driver’s seat for any future decision-making with respect to those kinds of facilities and provides that additional layer of protection that I think is very important for our county,” Sears said during the first reading of the ordinance this week.
“Any sort of oil activity or gas activity would be devastating to our coastline and our current users of our coastline,” Rodoni said, “including our local residents and our communities. I’m really happy to see this moving to the next stage.”
Under the ordinance, a simple majority of voters would have to approve a zoning change that would reverse the existing county ban on onshore oil and gas facilities.
California already prohibits offshore oil and gas extraction within 3 miles of the coastline. In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown signed two laws to ban the construction of pipelines that would carry gas and oil in state waters.
The Trump administration has proposed to offer six offshore oil drilling leases further off the California coast along the continental shelf, two of which would be located off the Bay Area coastline.
Ashley Eagle-Gibbs, conservation director of Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, urged the board to approve the ordinance, noting the Trump administration’s approval on Monday of an oil drilling leasing plan on the coastal plains of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“We cannot allow even one spill into the vibrant coastal ecosystem and the oil unfortunately always spills,” Eagle-Gibbs told the board. “So the adoption of this ordinance is critical, we feel, at this time when the federal administration is relentless in its efforts to pursue onshore and offshore oil and gas.”
The ocean off Marin County’s coast includes nine state marine protected areas and two national marine sanctuaries: the Greater Farallones and Monterey Bay. In addition to supporting a diversity of wildlife, including the largest seabird breeding colony in the continental U.S., these waters also provide recreational opportunities for thousands of people each year, Eagle-Gibbs said.
“We cannot emphasize enough the need to protect our uniquely vulnerable, highly biodiverse, economically vibrant and heavily recreated public coastline from offshore oil and gas,” she said.
Several coastal counties — including San Francisco, Sonoma, San Mateo, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Humboldt, San Diego and Mendocino — have adopted similar ordinances to the one Marin is considering, according to Marin County Counsel Brian Washington.
If Marin adopts the new rules, it would create a “seamless band of protection” from offshore drilling support facilities along much of the state coast, said Richard Charter, a senior fellow of the Ocean Foundation and a member of the Greater Farallones advisory council.
“This ordinance is the most important step that any local coastal locality can take to ensure that local voters maintain full discretionary authority over what happens on your coastlines,” Charter told the board.
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Marin prepares new check against oil, gas projects - Marin Independent Journal
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