By Doug Keeler
Kern County is taking the long approach to enacting its oil permitting ordinance. Despite two setbacks in court, the most recent in March, the county is going to continue to fight for the streamlined ordinance first passed almost a decade ago.
“We will continue to review our legal options but we won’t quit,” Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner told the Taft Rotary club recently.
The county is just going to amend the ordinance to comply with the court rulings and try again.
Scrivner said the planning and natural resources department is working right now to address whatever the court wanted and circulate it again and bring it back to the Board of Supervisors.
The county’s ordinance is opposed by a coalition of environmental groups and some farmers and those groups have taken the county to court twice and won and vow to keeping fighting from their side as well.
Scrivner said the Fifth District Court of Appeal ruled in the county’s favor on three issues and against it on three others.
The county has to come with an ordinance that addresses requiring agricultural easements, address the impact of water use on disadvantaged communities and a health risk assessment to used as evidence for setbacks from homes and businesses.
Scrivner said the court changed its mind on a couple of the issues cited.
We did it right …(the court)…changed their mind on agricultural easements and wants more analysis,” he said.
Scrivner said the county is planning to continue to fight until there are no more issues to settle in court.
“Our support for the oil and gas industry includes pushing back on the courts that side with the “keep in the ground” viewpoint and they are running out of things to criticize on the most environmentally protective permitting in California.”
The environmental groups plan to keep fighting as well.
“The codependence between Kern and the oil and gas industry may persist in other ways, but we will continue to be thorns in their sides, fighting for the clean air, water and land that we deserve,” said Anabel Marquez, president of Committee for a Better Shafter.
During his remark to the Rotary on March 20, Scrivner talked about the county’s continued efforts to diversify the economy and bring in new business.
He said supervisors approved two large solar projects and a new steel mill in Mojave that will bring in 400 new jobs.
