Anti-drilling sentiment unanimous at Bay Area hearing on Trump oil plan

SAUSALITO - Lynda Hopkins, a Sonoma County supervisor and mother of two young daughters, said she has two red lines: “Don’t mess with my kids, and don’t mess with my ocean.”

Hopkins, who said she seeks solace and comfort from her busy life by visiting the scenic Sonoma Coast, was one of nine panelists who testified Tuesday at a congressional district hearing on the Trump administration’s plan to include California in the most expansive sale of offshore oil and gas development rights in U.S. history.

About 200 people packed the lobby of the Bay Model Visitor Center for a hearing conducted by Reps. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, and Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, that produced an unbroken chorus of condemnation for the plan announced by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in January.

State and local officials also have been united in opposition to the plan that includes 47 potential leases in every ocean that touches the United States, with six along the California coast.

Zinke was invited to attend the hearing, but he did not show up or respond to the invitation, officials said.

For Sonoma County, the proposed drilling plan represents “a very real economic threat” to what Hopkins called the coast’s “regenerative economy” based on tourism and rather than resource extraction.

The oil industry, she added, is “a dying relic of the past.”

Also testifying were a UC Davis oceanographer, a Stanford University legal expert, a commercial fisherman from Eureka, a Sonoma County tourism promoter, a veterinarian at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito and Richard Charter, an offshore oil drilling opponent since the 1970s.

“We’ve saved this coast before,” said Charter, senior fellow with The Ocean Foundation

Among the dozen audience members who spoke was Seth Weinfield, 13, of San Mateo, a member of Heirs to Our Oceans, an environmental youth group founded in 2016.

Huffman, whose district covers the entire North Coast, said he was “glad to know there’s a new generation coming along” to protect the world’s oceans.

Tuesday’s hearing was called in response to an Interior Department public meeting in Sacramento last month that did not give people a chance to address agency officials but prompted a boisterous anti-oil rally by about 700 people on the Capitol steps.

Thompson said he was ?“100 percent against any drilling off our coast,” noting that if there was an oil spill “it would never be cleaned up.”

Huffman said the Trump administration is “pushing a fossil fuel agenda more aggressive than anything we’ve seen.” On encountering Zinke in the House barbershop, Huffman said he told the Interior secretary that California’s defense will be “just as aggressive as he is.”

Speier suggested a political motive behind the wide-open drilling plan, saying “there is never a day in the White House that the president of this country doesn’t want to stick it to California.”

Another panelist, Half Moon Bay Mayor Deborah Penrose, said her community attracted 4.1 million visitors last year, contributing millions of dollars in tax revenues.

“If we lose our tourist industry our town goes under,” she said.

John Largier, an oceanography professor at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, said oil wells would jeopardize the biologically rich and often rough waters off the North Coast.

“Things will break,” he said, predicting a mishap during storms with waves up to 30 feet high. “When you spill oil, it’s gonna ?go everywhere.”

Deborah Sivas, a Stanford environmental law expert, also said accidents will occur.

Nearly 50 years after the calamitous Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, Sivas said “the oil industry still hasn’t figured out how to stop spills from happening.”

Claudia Vecchio, president and CEO of Sonoma County Tourism, said an oil spill would create a lasting impression that the county’s coast is tainted. Her tourism marketing organization is spending heavily to combat the perception that the entire county was burned by the October wildfires, she said.

Noting that 4,000 sea otters died in the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, Frances Gulland of The Marine Mammal Center said one oil spill could destroy all of California’s otters, which number about 3,000.

Whales surfacing to breathe would inhale fumes from the oil, she said.

Sanctuaries protect a large swath of the North and Central Coast from oil drilling, but the White House still has under wraps a plan that could rescind some of those protections, perhaps reopening parts of the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts to energy development. Areas north of Point Arena and south of Cambria on the Central Coast remain unprotected by sanctuaries.

During public comments, Kenneth King, a city planner and environmentalist, asked if California could buy up oil leases to prevent drilling. Huffman said there was no way the state should spend money on leases “that should never happen.”

Thompson drew a laugh from the crowd by calling that “the Stormy Daniels approach,” referring to the adult film star’s assertion she was paid to keep quiet about an alleged affair with President Donald Trump.

Dave Bitts, a Humboldt County fisherman and president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said the Interior Department’s oil leasing plan asserts there is no commercial fishing in Northern and Central California.

“If they get their way that could come true,” he said, noting the government says he and hundreds of other fishers don’t exist.

After the hearing, Bitts said he was not surprised by the one-sided debate.

Sausalito, he said, may be home to the world’s largest “hotbed of opposition” to oil drilling.