Pacific Outer Continental Shelf Region

U.S. Department of the Interior

Minerals Management Service

Pacific OCS Region

OCS Study

MMS 96-0036

Santa Barbara County: Two Paths

Final Report
Pacific Outer Continental Shelf Region

OCS Study

MMS 96-0036

Santa Barbara County: Two Paths

Final Report

Edited by:

Harvey Molotch, Marine Science Institute, UCSB

William Freudenburg, Department of Rural Sociology,

University of Wisconsin

Madison, WI 53706

Research Assistants and Associated Authors

Leonard Nevarez, Krista Paulsen

Jane Ward, Hugh Louch

Sally Knight, Dawnel Moreno

Judith Taylor

Submitted by:

Ocean and Coastal Policy Center

Marine Science Institute

University of Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

For:

U.S. Department of the Interior

Minerals Management Service

Pacific OCS Region

770 Paseo Camarillo

Camarillo, CA 93010

Under Contract No. 14-35-0001-30663

Minerals Management Service

Pacific OCS Region July 19
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments iv

Summary v

Introduction 1

L Before the Americans and Before World War I 5

The mission and ranchero era 5

Early "quality of life" migrations 8

Early oil development 10

Early oil in the North County 12

North County life accommodates to oil 15

II. Between the Wars (1919-1945) 19

The North County: Only problem with oil

is there's not enough 27

World War II and the North County 29

Oil in civic life 32

ifi. The Postwar Era (1946-1968) 35

North County and postwar defense activities 41

Oil development, postwar 41

The South Coast, postwar 42

Offshore oil again 46

The Environmentalist Era (1969-Present) 50

The great spill and immediate aftermath 60

New community mobilizations 68

A new generation of land-use regulations 69

Public sentiments: Evidence from surveys, votes,

and hearings 75

Specific bones of contention: Local government vs. oil 80

Today, Tomorrow, and Trajectories of Local History 86

Organizations, organizations, organizations 87

Local scenes 94

Synergy, locality, and the Santa Barbara County factors 97

Appendix A: Santa Barbara County Timeline 104

Appendix B: Federal O5 Lease Sale hearings -- a case study 125

1
Chart 4. The extract/intact ratio: Santa Barbara County

compared to state and region 40

Chart 5. Santa Barbara County population, 1969-1992 51

Chart 6. Santa Barbara County oil industry payroll, 1969-1990 55

Chart 7. The first ten days of the oil spill:

Coverage in the tn-counties 63

Chart 8. Organizational density of tn-counties 89

Chart 9. Arts and cultural organizations in tn-county communities...... 90

Chart 10. Health and human services organizations

in tn-county communities 91

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Forecast and actual impacts of OCS development,

Santa Barbara County 85

LIST OF PHOTOS

Photo 1. Summenland oil derricks (1930) 22

Photo 2. Santa Barbara oceanfront 22

Photo 3. The shopping arcade at Santa Barbara's "El Paseo" 25

Photo 4. Santa Barbara County Courthouse 25

Photo 5. La Mesa oil field (1934) 64

Photo 6. Santa Barbara Channel oil spill clean-up 64

Photo 7. Santa Maria's Town Center Mall 96

Photo 8. Site of Town Center Mall, showing prior usage 96

111
V

ACCESS NUMBER: 30663

STUDY TITLE: "Social, Economic, and Historic Characterization of San Luis Obispo,

Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties."

REPORT lIlLE: "Santa Barbara County: Two Paths."

CONTRACT NUMBER(S): MMS 14-35-0001-30663.

SPONSORING REGION: Pacific

APPUCABLE PLANNING AREA(S): Southern California

FISCAL YEAR(S) OF PROJECT FUND]NG: 1994, 1995, 1996.

COMPLETION DATE OF REPORT: October 1, 1996

COST(S): FY 1: $ 175,906; FY 2: $ 112,286; Fi'3: $ 127,018;

CUMtJLATIVE PROJECT COST: $415,210.

PROJECT MANAGER(S): H. Molotch

AFFILIATION: Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, Marine Science Institute, University

of California, Santa Barbara.

ADDRESS: University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: H. Molotch (P1), W. Freudenburg (Co-Fl).

KEY WORDS: Santa Barbara; Southern California; oil development; socioeconomics;

local history; place character; voluntary associations; tourism; newspapers; Santa Maria;

Montecito; Unocal; environmentalism.

BACKGROUND: MMS requested a historic analysis of three California Coastal

counties in terms of how their individual "character' evolved over the generations in

relation to the oil industry. This report on Santa Barbara County is one of three

volumes produced in response; the other two reports consist of one pertaining to

Ventura County ("Ventura County: Oil, Fruit, Commune and Commute") and one to

San Luis Obispo County ("San Luis Obispo County: A Major Switching"). There is also

a data base on diskette simultaneously provided which contains a large assemblage of

socioeconomic data on each county and its constituent cities. Drafts of scholarly papers

are also being provided (see Study Products below).
amenities, in turn, helped lure the campus of the University of California

(among other institutions) which reinforced, in turn, the same set of

orientations. One of the results has been a robust environmentalism with

support across ethnic groups, income levels, and to a remarkable degree,

political party allegiance. Pollution from the 1969 oil spill, in particular,

impacted the South Coast directly, leading to lasting political and attitudinal

consequences.

By contrast, oil played a dominant economic and social role in the North

County, both in rural and urban areas. The major alternative industry of

agriculture, especially ranching, was not inconsistent with oil development,

nor was the later coming of the military at Vandenburg Air Force Base. This

early alignment of ranching and oil (and later with military) has been

recapitulated over the generations, even as the components of the North

County's economic base has changed. As in the past, today's North County is

far more receptive to the industry than the South Coast.

As the significance of oil declines in both parts of the county (given continued

growth in other sectors), we anticipate local scrutiny of the industry by both

county government and constituent local jurisdictions to persist, although

the traditional split of the two sections of the county may abate.

STUDY RESULTS:

In those areas of the county dependent on tourism and retirement (the South

Coast), the need to control oil has been paramount, as has been the desire to

control development generally. Locals have allowed oil both on land and

offshore, but made efforts to limit its precise locations and the conditions of

its development Facilitating these efforts has been the capacity to raise local

funds to support environment-oriented political candidates and referenda.

The South Coast also has an extraordinary density of community

organizations, environmentalist as well as of other types, which provide

mechanisms of communication and interaction among activists. There is a

robust tradition of community self-consciousness, as. evidenced for example

by frequent testimony at official oil-related hearings about the need to

preserve "our way of life." Much local media coverage has been strongly

opposed to oil development, although recent shifts have been more

accepting. While oil revenues have been, at times, a significant portion of the

tax base, this has not been consistently the case because revenues from other

sources have grown so strongly.

The North County has been receptive to oil development, just as it has been

more receptive to development overall. Early on1 there were cooperative

relations between ranchers and oil companies, with mutual benefits on a

number of fronts. In part because North County communities are

geographically distant from the ocean (separated by Vandenburg Air Force

vii
The purpose of this document is to indicate how the distinctive qualifies of

Santa Barbara County evolved in relation to the oil industry and explain how the

county's settlement pattern and cultural traditions, economy and politics, responded

to the coming of petroleum, thus shaping that industry's development within its

borders. This means understanding the "character" of this place as it has evolved

over time, including distinctions among the towns and cities within it.

We lay out our findings and observations in roughly chronological order.

Our observations and conclusions rest on approximately 70 interviews, as well as

extensive use of historical archives, government documents, media reports, and

previous studies. Whenever feasible, we checked information against more than

one source and tried to assemble reliable indicators, including quantitative ones, of

trends and patterns we set forth. Each section contains by way of introduction,

relevant demographic data for the period under discussion. The report ends with a

brief summary of the factors that have shaped the county's responses to offshore oil

drilling and the oil industry. * Santa Barbara County can claim two traditions that go back almost to its

founding, two traditions that represent opposite visions of how the earth should be

developed, economies constructed, and communities built. Because of its natural

endowments, this county has one of the longest histories of oil development in the

world - including the site of the earth's first exploitation of petroleum off-shore.

Additionally, because of its natural endowments (topography and climate), but also

its particular cultural evolution, it has attributes that create special tensions with

any activities perceived to threaten residents' quality of life.

To a significant degree, these two traditions also correspond to the two

different regions of the county. The southern portion of the county, or "South

Coast," as it is often called, has always been the governmental center as well as more

significant area in terms of population, economic activity, and scale of cultural

institutions. It has also been especially oriented toward quality of life issues, and it

has posed challenges to many forms of development, especially oil. It includes the

cities of Santa Barbara and Carpintena, as well as the localities of Summerland,

Montecito, Goleta and Isla Vista (see Map 1).

The contrasting North County, historically more sparsely populated, less well

connected to the Los Angeles metropolis or indeed to urban centers generally, has

played a secondary role in most regards. Compared to the South Coast, its formative

development as an agricultural center has been a more dominating function over

time. Its other major industry has been oil, and its citizens and political leaders

have consistently tended to support this industry, just as they have been

sympathetic to development in general. The major settlements in the North

County are the City of Santa Maria (the largest town), along with Lompoc, Orcutt,

and Guadalupe.

I
Santa Barbara County contains a population of approximately 370,000 (1990

Census) in an area of 2,774 square miles. Nearly half of the county is rugged,

mountainous terrain which is part of the Los Padres National Forest.1 Three

mountain ranges, the Santa Ynez, the San Rafael, and the Sierra Madre, form the

county's principal drainage basins: the Santa Ynez Valley and the Santa Maria

Valley. From their rivers flow most of the county's current agricultural and urban

water supplies (although change may be in the offing as a desalinization plant has

been constructed and the county has also joined, in 1991, the State Water Project).

The population is concentrated along the coastal plain in the southern part of the

county and in urbanized valleys in the northern section of the county.

The county's greatest natural resources, both in economic and cultural terms,

are its climate, scenic beauty, and access to both mountains and ocean. It has the

longest coastline of any California county, with expansive sand beaches lining most

of it. With the assistance of irrigation (average annual rainfall, extremely variable

from year to year, is 17.5 inches), fertile soils produce rich abundance of crops, now

including broccoli, strawberries, lettuce, wine grapes, avocado, lemon, and

decorative flowers.

The Santa Barbara Channel, between the California mainland and a chain of

five islands about 25 miles offshore, is home to a rich array of wildlife, including the

largest seal rookery in North America. Just off Point Conception in Santa Barbara

County, the two climactic zones merge, dividing the nearshore zone into subtropical

and subarctic regions - thus providing the Channel with an extraordinary range of

fish and water animal species (e.g. tuna to the south and salmon to the north).2

Rich forests of kelp further enhance fertffity, providing food and shelter for an

extraordinarily bountiful array of other species. Before they were overharvested, the

Channel was a major provider of sardines (McEvoy 1986), then abalone. As with the

current largest commercial catch (sea urchins), abalone is harvested by divers,

usually using "very fast vessels" (Kieding 1995).

The most important mineral deposit is oil; 1980 estimates placed remaining

recoverable reserves of oil and natural gas beneath the mainland and ocean floor of

the Santa Barbara Channel (which is not, technically, "in" the county), at 1.5 trillion

barrels of crude oil and 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.3 Estimates fluctuate up

and down (mostly down) as geological information develops, but also because the

'This account of the county's topological structure and resource base is taken from Graves and

Simon (1980: 11) which relies, in turn, on Eisner (1963).

2This description is taken from McEvoy (1986: 3).

3Estimate provided by Dev Vrat, Santa Barbara County Department of Environmental

Resources to Graves and Simon (1980). Updated estimates are expected from the MMSsponsored California Offshore Oil and Gas Energy Resources (COOGER) study; they were not

available in time for indusion in this report.

3
I. Before the Americans and Before World War I.

Table 1: County socio demographic characteristics, 1890-1920

Source: U.S. Census.

* Indicates data not available

Elements of the two traditions can be found even in the earliest historic

evidence regarding the life of the native peoples who populated the coastal plains,

the Chumash.. Compared to other peoples of the continent, the Chumash are often

described as distinctive in quality of life terms. Along with the Gabrielino people

adjacent to the South, the Chumash have been called 9the wealthiest, most

populous, and most powerful ethnic nationality in aboriginal southern California"

(Bean and Smith 1978: 538; see also Kroeber 1976: 550; all as cited in McEvoy 1986: 27,

28). They had an advanced state of craft and artistic work (as evidenced in surviving

basketry and cave paintings) and other indications of a sophisticated subsistence

strategy which relied on bountiful local conditions. The mild climate meant

clothing and shelter needs could be easily satisfied; other natural benefits provided

foodstuffs to fulfill basic wants.

Part of the local prosperity was supported by oil tars from natural seeps on

beaches and offshore (that continue surfacing to this day). The tars were used as

canoe sealant, yielding durable and waterproof vessels allowing the Chumash to

work a wider range of fishing grounds, and also gain access to the resources of the

Channel Islands located just off the coast (see Map 1).

The mission and ranchero era

The invading Spaniards could similarly take advantage of the natural

amenities of the region. Santa Barbara was headquarters of the Spanish military

district, at Santa Barbara's Presidio, founded in 1782. Beginning four years later, the

Franciscans established three missions in what is now Santa Barbara County:

Mission Santa Barbara, the largest mission in Father Junipero Serra's chain from

San Diego to Sonoma, La Purisima Concepcion in what is now the Lompoc area of

the North County and Mission Santa Ines in the valley of that name.

5

1890 1900 1910 1920

Total Population 15,745 18,934 27,738 41,097

Percent Foreign Born 18.00 19.96 * * Percent Nonwhite 18.63 3.58 5.25 3.86

Percent Males 54.86 56.46 54.84 52.17

Household Size 4.71 4.33 4.15 4.13
regard to the ordinary Mexican people, their language was straightforwardly racist

and earned them the enmity not only of the general Mexican population1 but of the

ranchero elite as well. The Yankees organized vigilante groups when they

considered the local legal system insufficiently tough on Mexicans; there were

violent confrontations between the two groups (O'Neill 1939: 177).

While the inexorable flow of American influence would likely have had the

same eventual result, the great drought of 1862-1864 was the proximate cause of the

collapse of the rancho system. Drought decimated cattle herds, with the county's

livestock falling from over 200,000 head to 5,000 within two years (Krieger 1990: 66).

Facing ruin, the rancheros turned to Yankee creditors who charged exorbitant

interest rates (e.g. 5 percent compounded monthly). Debts grew and foreclosures

became common. Some lands ended up in the hands of Yankee squatters -

"wandering, worthless American 'squatters," as Brewer's travel journal described

them in 1860 (Farquhar 1974: 74), but able to press their case in a setting in which the

legal system was increasingly prone to sympathize with their bogus daims (Pitt

1966). Stifi another mechanism of wealth transfer was intermarriage, typically a

wealthy Californio bride and Yankee groom (Almaguer 1994). Once in control of

land, some Yankees remained in cattle ranching or sheep (feasible again when the

rains returned), but subdivision and diversification gave rise to sharp increases in

land devoted to agriculture. Major crops were grains, beans, and - especially in the

North County - sugar beets; almond, walnut and perishable fruit trees became large

scale crops m the late 1870s

The collapse of the ranchero system, combined with continued Anglo inmigration, devastated the political and economic circumstances of the CalifornioMexican population. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had become

laborers in agriculture, construction, and domestic work, with women and children

pushed into the labor force for the first time. This pattern of employment would

foretell the future into the next century. As the city platted a street grid, the

Californio adobe dwellings and establishments were removed or concentrated in the

pueblo adjacent to the old Presidio (in what became downtown Santa Barbara)

(Schultz 1993). As Yankees built homes and businesses nearby, the contrast grew

between the crumbling barrio and the well-maintained wood and brick Anglo

structures. While some Anglo voices spoke of the romance of the red tile roofs,

most dismissed the "Spanish" quarter, both physically and socially, as a disagreeable

element.

A similar attitude held toward the Chinese in the area, who occupied low

level jobs in railroad gangs in the 1880s and in the emerging tourist industry, as well

as small-scale farming operations and laundries. Most of the county's Chinese were

residentially concentrated adjacent to the barrio. Part of the wave of anti-Chineseprejudice that swept California during the period, they were subjected to an intense

harassment that crested in the late 1870s. Their numbers declined from a high of

about 400 in the mid 1870s to about half that number at the end of the decade

(Camarillo 1979: 82).
sickly son. In terms of the built environment, the houses were not only large but

often of architectural significance. A leading authority has said flatly: 'Montedto is

where the finest houses in Southern California are" (Turk 1995: E4).6 The rich

staged large entertainments for their many guests, sometimes at more than one

house at a time (a cottage at the beach was common along with an estate upland),

thus bringing in still more celebrity and near-celebrity immigrants.

While in numeric1 terms, a good number (perhaps a majority) of migrants

to Santa Barbara were ordinary people trying to find a better way to support

themselves, an atypically large number were different. These were not "huddled

masses" escaping famine, oppression1 or poverty. There is at least a grain of truth in

a 1995 contrast in an ALlaniicMonthly artide: 'The way that Poles and Lithuanians

settled Pittsburgh, rich people with enormous trust funds settled Santa Barbara.

They didn't want a better life; they wanted a perfect life" (Plunket 1995: 38).

Not surprisingly, a high level of self-consciousness about local amenities was

taking hold, reflected in the views and strategies of at least some of the local

business and real estate entrepreneurs. Thomas Storke, heir to ranchero wealth,

and arguably the most important business and civic leader in the county's history,

wrote in the first editorial of his newspaper on January 1, 1900:

...Santa Barbara has natural advantages which few cities possess... Its equable

climate.., the blend of mountains and sea, the semi-tropical sun and the ocean

breezes, unite to make it the choicest residential spot in the known world. It

only remains for its citizens to do what is theirs to do, and the future of Santa

Barbara is assured.

He went on to urge improvements in the city's appearance and facilities, including

the construction of a bath house, and pledged the "full support of this paper" to

citizens who will bring about "all that is desirable here" (Storke 1958: 115).

Southern California's first "Opera House," The Lobero, was built in Santa

Barbara in 1872 (remaining in continuous use to the present, although the building

was demolished and a new one built in 1924). The Yacht Club was also founded in

1872, making it the second oldest yacht club in California "and the beginning of a

long and unique history of fine yachts visiting our shores," according to a

contemporary enthusiast (Kieding 1995: G3). Efforts to rationalize city street

designations with letters and numbers was successfully fought; hence street names

continue to designate historical figures, events, and topographical features, using

Spanish and Chumash words.

Santa Barbaras claims of "specialness" were echoed locally and widely with a

consistent series of portrayals. Attention was drawn to the tranquillity of the

&This remark was made by Tim Street-Porter in explaining why he "cheated" to include distant

Montecito in his celebrated book called 'The Los Angeles House."

9
spread up the coast toward the city "should be met with united resistance on the part

of the people" (Sollen 1994: 28). At one point, in the summer of 1899, wealthy

Montecito property owners took direct action when oil drilling moved up the coast

from Summerland. Here is the lead from a front-page news story at the time:

That the property owners on the sea front are determined that no unsightly

oil derrick shall disfigure the beautiful views of land and sea was

demonstrated last night, when a party of the best known society men of Santa

Barbara armed to meet any resistance, and with workmen employed for the

purpose, utterly demolished a new oil derrick that was erected yesterday at

Miramar (Sm!a BathanzMorningPress, August 3, 1899).

In this lead sentence are themes that are to continue marking the Santa

Barbara story: the beauty of the coast, a sense of entitlement felt by coastal

landowners, the social character of the area, and a self-justified - indeed vigilante -

determination to protect their quality of life. The Thest known society men of

Montecito" included a son of the owner of the beachfront land and publisher of the

MorningPress (Reginald Fernald). There was also, to be sure, criticism of men taking

the law into their own hands. A story in a competing afternoon newspaper, the lily

Independent (August 3, 1899), struck a different note: 'The morning paper says four

gentlemen laid the derrick low. In a work of destruction all men are alike, because

all are actuated with animal instinct." The DzthjIndependent went on to mock the

aesthetic concerns of the Fernald vigilantes by suggesting the derrick be decorated

like a barber pole (Eanla Bathani Tthlylndependen4 August 7, 1899). This sort of ridicule

of an overly-fussy Santa Barbara also presages a theme that would continue over the

generations - sometimes even emanating from within the South Coast precincts

themselves.

position to oil development was to surface again and again. In an early

move in the decades-long see-saw battle over the city wharf (Stearns Wharf), the

Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce in 1908 went on record against access to it for

oil development - the initial quarrel was over a pipeline to the wharf that would

transfer oil to ships. Stifi, a good deal of oil development did take place and at

distances not very far from the locations where the aristocrats lived and played.

Large scale and, certainly by today's standards, truly unsightly oil installations9 were

developed at Summerland(see Photo 1), just adjacent to Montecito. In his memoirs,

Thomas Storke (later a strong opponent of off-shore oil) recalled that the derricks at

Summerland beach were a tourist attraction, with no hint of irony or resentment in

his tone (Storke 1958:208).

9A view of the Summerlartd platforms did make it to at least one "scenic postcard" hailing it as

one of the "1,000 wonders" of the Calif orriia north-south highway.

11
a whole during the late 1800s, subsistence and commercial agriculture constituted

the bulk of the economy.13

The wharf built at Point Sal to serve Santa Maria was regularly wrecked by

storms; the poor condition of the road linking it to Santa Maria Valley proved the

worst obstacle (Carison 1957: 104-105). A second attempt at a North County port was

made in 1880, two and a half miles south of Point Sal at Chute Landing (Carlson

1957: 107-108). Finally, in 1882 the Pacific Coast Railway linked the Santa Maria

Valley (via the town of La Graciosa) to the Avila wharf m San Luis Obispo County

providing the first railway to port connection for the region.. This event was

announced in the first issue of the SantaMaiia Times, April 22, 1882 (Carlson 1957:

117). As one valley citizen (of Orcutt) remembers, the Pacific Coast railway provided

"the lone link between Orcutt and the outside world" (Nelson 1987: 89; Simon 1990:

18).

Santa Maria's population in 1887 was about 200. The valley's first bank

(created in 1888) in Santa Maria was a branch of the Commercial Bank of San Luis

Obispo, another evidence of close links with the county to the north The second

bank was also a branch of a different San Luis Obispo institution; the two were

eventually merged as the Bank of Santa Maria in 1890 (CarLson 1957: 152). This bank

came to serve as one focal point for a small but active business leadership group -

individuals active in finance, real estate, agriculture, and, as it would turn out, oil.

The first recorded use of oil drilling rigs in the county occurred in 1888 in

Santa Maria (Franks and Lambert 1985:21).1 A first big strike (2900 barrels) in the

valley was made by Union Oil (then a Ventura County company, prior to its later

move to Los Angeles and eventual name change to Unocal). It was preceded by a

pioneering effort of Warren Orcutt, a fresh graduate of Stanford with a degree in the

new field of "civil engineering" to map the surface geology of the entire Santa Maria

Valley field in search of oil. Thus scientific expertise replaced "doodlebugging," and

the subsequent good fortunes helped make Orcutt the "dean of petroleum

geologists" (Frank and Lambert 1985: 21).' Another Union Oil innovation was its

"aggressive policy for acquiring oil lands," resulting in the purchase within one year

of 72,000 acres ("at practically farm prices"), with more leases and more massive land

purchases to follow (Welty and Taylor 1957: 236; see also Simon 1990: 21). Union

also performed, in. 1903 at Lompoc, the industry's first deep-hole cementing (to keep

'35rewer described his 1864 crossing of the ten or twelve miles of the Santa Maria Valley on

either side of the river's dry bed as "a most tedious ride," quite in contrast to descriptions of

travel before and after as passing among hills "covered with pasture, or grass, with a great

profusion of flowers," although all of it eventually "tired us with their abundance and their

sameness" (Brewer 1974: 77, 78).

'For additional details on finds and their locations, see also Simon (1990: 22) and Nelson (1987:

15).

' He was also the discoverer of the La Brea tar pits paleontological treasure in 1901 - at what

became the Los Angeles County museum complex. (Welty and Taylor 1958: 90).

13
world" at the time (Sm Fnzndsw Call, July 7, 1905), sparked national interest in the oil

industry and opened up the pockets of lenders and investors who previously had

been reluctant to back so highly a speculative enterprise (see Welty and Taylor 1957:

99). Developments in the valley helped not only secure the fortunes of Union Oil,

but to create the states oil industry - by 1903, California was the nation's largest oil

producer (Johnson and Nye 1979: 188).

Orcutt oil operations were also to serve notice that all does not necessarily

rim smoothly in the petroleum business; Hartnell well No. 1 (about a quarter of a

mile from No. 2) burst into flames, on July 7, 1905, from the carelessness of a "boy

with cigarette," and, as was reported in a San Francisco newspaper, became "the

fiercest and most terrible of oil fires in the history of the State" (Sm Fnzndsco Call, July

7, 1905).

But Union Oil's fortunes rose, fueling the development of the community of

Orcutt, which by 1906 had outp aced Santa Maria as the largest trading center in the

North County (Nelson 1987: 30). Growth took place in fits and starts; heavy

overproduction throughout California in 1905 caused Union to shut in wells as

soon as they were completed (Welty and Taylor 1958: 237). The Graciosa Oil

Company's wells that were supposed to produce $9 million a year in production for

export to Japan proved a bust, causing an abandonment in 1907 of plans for a 38-

mile pipeline from the oil fields in the Santa Maria Valley to a newly constructed

Oilport refinery, located on the bluffs north of Pismo Beach in San Luis Obispo

County. The Oilport refinery was shut down before it ever began operating (Krieger

1990). Some details of oil field development in the North County can be found in

Table 2

15
Cuyama Valley Discovered by the Norris Oil Company in 1948; Richfield later

buys 90% of acreage and assumes Norris lease.

Sources: Welty and Taylor 1958: 98, 241; Franks and Lambert 1985: 21-25; Simon 1990:22,80

North County life accommodates to oil

By the end of the twentieth century's first decade, oil was integrated into

people's lives in different ways. The larger North County's economy was still

predominantly agricultural; Santa Maria (incorporated in 1905) served as the center

of that economy. In addition to sugar beets (for the Union Sugar factory in

Betteravia), barley, and beans, flower seeds became another Santa Maria agricultural

export with opening of the Waller-Franidin Seed Company in 1912 (Carlson 1957:

239). At about the same time, Santa Maria's vegetable-growing era (especially

lettuce, tomatoes, and strawberries) was just beginning (Carlson 1957: 235-236), with

the city of Santa Maria as the heart of that economy.

In contrast, oil families were more centered in Union Oil's company town of

Orcutt (Standard Oil also built workers' homes in Orcutt) or scattered in settlements

that were sizable but often transitory. As production increased in the surrounding

hills, oil workers and their families settled in tents and shacks near wells, resulting

in "lease communities" far from town. Many residents were newcomers attracted

by work in the oil fields, some of whom would eventually move on to other oil

fields in the state. Growing population in these hamlets led to the formation of

three school districts named after the leases nearby: Bicknell and Careaga districts

(south of Graciosa Ridge) in 1904, and Newlove (on what is now called Orcutt Hill)

in 1908.

The historic record yields little evidence of conflict between the twin sectors

of oil and agriculture. At the level of key local businesses, including those in Santa

Maria, of banking, real estate, railroads, and port development, there was strong

integration across spheres. A few agricultural families made fortunes leasing their

land for oil exploration, and their names were attached to productive leases:

Brookshire, Careaga, Newlove. Thus oil installations had names on them

commemorating "old" families, just as some school districts had their very names

derived from oil operations. This provides an ongoing sign of the integration

between the industry and North County communities.

Many farmers found part-time and full-time employment during off-seasons

working in the oil industry. For example, farm boys earned extra money digging

ditches and performing other odd jobs for oil companies. As teamsters or "cat

skinners," farm hands worked second jobs directing wagons carrying oil equipment

and products. The ranchers and farmers also had equipment the oil developers

could put to use: "With all the horses and wagons on their farms, it was natural for

them to supply goods and services for the oil industry" (Nelson 1987: 30, 55-56). By

17
providing incomes and revenues to many farmers and ranchers, the oil industry

bolstered the fortunes of agriculture in the Santa Maria Valley, a pattern that would

continue over successive decades.

18
II. Between the Wars (1919-1945)

Table 3: County socio demographic characteristics, 1910-1940

Source: US. Census.

* Indicates data not available

The mterwar years continued the pattern set before the Great War, with

growth quite steady but well short of the now meteoric rates in the Los Angeles

region. Development was held back by distance to the two great metropolitan

centers to the south and north and the relatively poor transportation facilities

(Graves and Simon 1980:11).

In the South Coast, elites from around the country and Europe continued

building mansions and attracting visitors of great wealth from across the world.

The likes of Paderewski and Heifetz gave private concerts in one of the larger

mansions (Jackson 1996); the King of Belgium was a houseguest. Although

amounting to probably no more than 300 households during this era, the people of

great wealth were significant far beyond their numbers in terms of their effect on the

physical landscape and built environment, as well as the social and cultural texture

of the region. They also represented the most visible segment of a larger group of

migrants, many at least prosperous but some less so, who were similarly attracted to

the region for its beauty, cultural tone, and gentility. The charities, amenities, and

entertainments of the very rich made the area that much more attractive to those of

similar taste.

Increasingly over time, as Los Angeles created its own wealthy aristocracy,

some of them moved up to Santa Barbara to live in quasi-isolation on great estates

or oceanside villas. It has been argued that this was an exit of the more

environmentally-oriented of the Los Angeles wealthy (Davis 1995) - a migration

that may have eroded preservationist and environmental sentiments in Los

Angeles (compared, for example, to the more robust movements in the Bay Area).

But the local Santa Barbara pattern was only reinforced as a result.

19

1910 1920 1930 1940

Total Population 27,738 41,097 65,167 70,555

Percent Foreign Born * * * 15.54

Percent Nonwhite 5.25 3.86 18.76 5.97

Percent Males * 52.17 53.04 50.50

Household Size 4.15 4.13 * 3.11

Median School Years, Males * * * 8.9

Median School Years, Females * * * 10.6

Percent Unemployed * * * 53
Santa Barbara was the site of the first California film studios. Built in 1913,

the "Flying A" studios on Mission Street in Santa Barbara (part of the complex stifi

stands) produced 1200 films. The studio lasted only about a decade, but Hollywood

personages adopted Santa Barbara as a "getaway." Two small hotels were owned

and operated by Hollywood figures for their friends and parties. Fatty Arbuckle and

Charlie Chaplin operated what became the Montecito Inn - said to be the "small

hotel with a wishing well" in the Rodgers and Hart song lyric. Ronald Colman

(partnered with State Senator Alvin Weingand) owned San Ysidro Ranch where

John and Jacquelyn Kennedy, as with many other notables, spent their honeymoon.

The influence of the rich families went beyond their numbers also because of

the numbers of people they employed to maintain their elaborate households

(cooks, maids, horse trainers, mechanics) as well as those who provided them with

supplies and took care of their various other service needs. Building mansions and

continuous remodeling employed many construction workers, induding stone

masons (many from Italy) who built thousands of yards of estate walls and

decorative garden elements. The economic multiplier effects were large as their

expenditures moved through the local commercial system, including the banks and

brokerages they helped keep in business.

This collection of actors - the core group of affluent spenders plus those

whose income depends on them directly and indirectly - are linked to many others.

People engaged in what we might call the "rich people's estate industry" have

friends, associates and relatives who, while not themselves economically dependent

upon this industry, have good wishes for those who are. There is, in effect, what we

term a "social multiplier," analogous to an economic multiplier in the sense that

the impacts of an industry radiate out from those who work in it toward a wider

circle of those with less direct interests. This social multiplier is always at work as a

potential force that creates an interest in maintaining a particular economic

function. Some people may themselves make no money from a given sector but

have sympathy for it because of their relations with people who do.

The inter-war period was also a time in which those with great wealth

impacted the larger region through the gifts and endowments they provided

(particularly in their bequests). "Brand name" people like Peabody (Arrow Shirts)

and Billings (for whom the University of Chicago hospitals were named) kept most

of East Beach (several miles of the city's prime ocean-front) from development by

buying it up in 1924 so that the city could later acquire it intact. Cudahy (Chicago

meat) built and furnished the appealing Our Lady of Mount Cannel Church for local

Catholics; two other Chicago meat families Armour and Swift - also played roles in

local charities and civic institutions. Max Fleischmann (the yeast king) paid most of

the costs to develop the city's breakwater so that he could dock his private yacht (it

cost him more than $630,000 in the end); he also endowed the Santa Barbara

Foundation with an initial $250,000, matched by others to become a million by 1929 -

- increased still again by Fleischmann. A retired president of Wellesley College

donated the land for the Museum of Natural History; joining her in similar work, a

20
retired president of the Carnegie Foundation arranged the grant that launched the

Community Arts Association to foster culture and beautification. Past presidents of

institutions like MIT and corporations like Phelps-Dodge, Union Carbide, and many

others also played civic roles.

The city's citizens, for their part, also voted large bond issues for

improvement projects; they voted twenty-to-one to support Fleischmann's yacht

harbor plans with an additional $200,000 from the city. They authorized another

$1 4 million to renovate the city's beachfront boulevard (Chase, 1959; Graham, et. al.

1994: 57) to give it the shape it has to this day (see Photo 2). As the grants,

constructions, endowments, and beautification continued, they made the area that

much more attractive to the kinds of people who could choose where in the world

they might live. More brought more in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Still another element of the region's social make-up were "bohemian"

orientations (presaging later non-conformist "beat" and "new age" presences in

Santa Barbara). Among the migrating rich, there were always some seeking

alternative ways to live; choosing to be free of the daily grind of adding to their

family fortunes in other climes, they could devote themselves to experimentation

in thought and lifestyle. But it was not only those of privileged wealth who chose

this route. People of varying material levels were attracted to the area as a place to

play out such aspirations, even while working at modest occupations.

Besides individual projects of good works and acts of beautification, the

region was also the site for innovations in land use planning. In the earlier Yankee

phase, Santa Barbara took on an appearance not very different from that of any

prosperous Eastern or Midwest American town, with a varied mix of buildings in

Italianate, Queen Anne and other period styles, constructed of wood clapboard or

brick. Many of the old landmark adobes were allowed to disappear in the general

Yankee distaste for things Spanish. Although with a bit more respect for the past

than in other parts of the state, the city had aspects of an ordinary Yankee

settlement, both in its physical form and anti-"Latin" mentality (pronouncements of

the time were crudely racist). Special measures to save landscapes or buildings took

place on a piecemeal basis, often with the rich either wielding their power to get

what they wanted or, as in the case of the beachfront purchase or Fleischmann's

construction of the breakwater, buying the city what they thought it should have.

21
Photo 1: Sunmierland oil derricks (1930). Reprinted from Franks and Lanibert (1985).

Photo 2: Santa Barbara oceanfront. Steams Wharf is shown in the background, at the

intersection of State Street and Cabrfflo Boulevard. Photo by Harvey Molotch.

22
More systematic efforts began in the 1920's. Created in 1922, the Plans and

Planting Committee of the Community Arts Association, with "its innocent

sounding name" (Gebhard 1982: 9), was actually a source of great power, with

financial backing from Fleischmann and leadership from the redoubtable Pearl

Chase - herself an affluent and well-connected woman of great energy and

leadership capacity. Chase, along with a number of similarly committed (and

mostly well-fixed) citizens, was to lead not only these early planning efforts, but

remain a force in land use throughout the county until her death at the age of 91 in

1979. Not only the initiator of local conservation organizations, Chase also was a

founder of the California Conservation Council and the California Roadside

Council, devoted to controlling billboards on state highways (Obern 1995). She and

her brother Harold were later memorialized with the renaming of the city's primary

beach recreation area as Chase Palm Park.

Chase's committee pressured city government and organized expenditures

among the wealthy to remake the downtown and generate public amenities across a

wide swath (Graves and Simon 1980: 16). ('lifornia's first zoning law was created

for Montecito via special legislation passed by the State Legislature; official zoning

and a planning commission for the City of Santa Barbara came in 1923. The state's

first county planning commission was that of Santa Barbara County, created in the

early '30s (Graham, et al. 1994: 54).

But the most dramatic innovation came in the aftermath of the great 1925

earthquake, when the City of Santa Barbara created America's first Architectural

Board of Review. The crisis atmosphere of disaster ordinarily inhibits innovation

or creative gestures; indeed, what today we call "fast track" systems of permitting

and reconstruction are the order of the day (this is what followed more recent

destructive fires in the Santa Barbara foothills). In this context, the architectural

reconstruction of Santa Barbara was an especially remarkable event. In the midst of

vast destruction, the local powers determined that Santa Barbara would have a

physical environment to match its "Spanish" past. In this way, a romantic

interpretation of the Califormo rancho system became permanent in the landscape.

The earthquake of 1925 destroyed much of the city's downtown at a time

when the Plans and Planting Committee had become thoroughly organized. An

Architectural Advisory Committee had also been previously formed, predecessor to

the 1924 ordinance establishing the Board of Architectural Review. It was also a

moment when the Spanish Revival style was catching on throughout Southern

California. These conjunctures resulted in the processing of over 2,000 building

designs within less than a one-year period, most conforming to the new design

guidelines for the Spanish style. For those without the resources, the Plans and

Planting Committee provided prototype plans for those with modest means (houses

and shops in the proper motif).

The official city government agency, its Architectural Board of Review, was

assisted by the citizen-based Plans and Planting Committee, which had lobbied for

23
the board's creati'n. Although it carried on a wider range of architectural and

environmental activities, a central task of the committee was to make sure the city

was rebuilt "Spanish-style" after the quake. The leading local architects and their

patrons of that moment were to create a style of building that persists in new

construction in the city to this day. It is a style that never characterized the historical

city; indeed, it never quite characterized any city. Elements of 'old Spain" were

expansively used, including plain unadorned walls (stucco in the local version), red

tile roofs, exposed massive wood beams, and extensive use of decorative iron work.

But the buildings also had to cater to modern tastes for large window areas,

provision for central heat, and parking for automobiles. All this and more

combined to create "Santa Barbara Spanish" - a blending of Andulusian Spanish

architecture with American technologies and life-style preferences of the late '20s

and early '30s (see Photo 3). In terms of public buildings, its quintessential

representation is the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, completed in 1929 (see

Photo 4). It was later to become one of the city's major tourist attractions, as well as

a setting for numbers of Hollywood film and TV scenes.

Enough was built in the initial reconstruction to give the city its architectural

cast and contribute to its international reputation and tourist draw. But it has not

been smooth sailing for lovely construction. At the time of its creation, the S.inlzz

Earixmz News-Press, now the only daily paper, editorialized against the innovation as

an unnecessary interference. In part because of the paper's opposition, and joined by

other business groups, the Architectural Board of Review was eliminated after only

nine months of life. But the style and its accouterments were still urged on by some

business leaders, including Storke of the News-Press. Even before the quake he had

his own newspaper housed in a grand Spanish building, still dominating the city's

central downtown square (at De La Guerra Plaza). The popularity of the style was

enough to give it some force even when regulation was weak.

About a decade later, another display of local aesthetic power was displayed in

the building of the new post office. Storke helped convince the federal government

to throw out its completed architectural plans for the city's new central post office

because they did not conform to the local architectural ethos. The Chamber of

Commerce gained an exception that allowed the city to handle the building's design,

which it did by hiring Reginald Johnson of Pasadena, one of California's leading

figures in the Spanish-colonial revival movement (and architect of Montecito's

swank Biltmore Hotel). The new building was sited so as to remove a part of the

city's small Chinatown ("as near to being a slum as Santa Barbara had," according to

Storke [1958: 360]), but yet preserving the historic "El Cuartel" adobe on the site.

This required another federal exception to allow building on a site short of the

minimum lot size requirement. In a further gain for the city, the old post office - grand and imposing in its own right - was sold, in 1940, to the county for use as the

permanent home of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (at a price of $50,000).

24
Photo 3: The shopping arcade at Santa Barbara's "El Paseo." The downtown attrathon is built

around an historic adobe. Reprinted from Plunket (1995).

Photo 4 Santa Barbara County Courthouse. Photo by Leonard Nevarez.

25
Periodically amidst all this building of edifices and cultural development,

new opportunities and some anxieties arose from oil. In Montecito, in 1927, the

influential Montecito Commi.mity Association (which created the state's first

zoning law and was dedicated to protecting "residential beauty and exdusiveness")

declared a ban on any oil derrick "or structure for use in the boring of oil (from

being) erected" (&inki EaiivraMomingPcess, April 6, 1927). Three years later, a resident

filed an injunction to prevent drilling near his property, claiming the unsightliness

and noise were infringements on his property rights (EankzParbaniMoiningPress, April

18, 1930). Although the property owner lost - the plaintiff, the Lincoln Drilling

Company, successfully argued they were drilling in a sparsely settled neighborhood -

- the case evidenced further tension between oil and community.

In the city of Santa Barbara, anxieties arose from repeated efforts of the state

legislature in the early '30s to initiate tidelands leasing to protect oil stocks being

drained by companies operating on adjacent lands - as was happening in

Huntington Beach (Bartley 1953: 71). The state's efforts were thwarted by a series of

state-wide referenda and initiative votes.

Development was more successful on land. The highly visible La Mesa field

(see Photo 5), annexed by the city in 1921 but outside its borders when drilling began,

reached a production peak by the mid-1920s. Later, to gain local support for a largescale oil pipeline project, The Irvine Oil Company promised to use local labor and

purchase all possible materials within the city. When the pipeline was approved by

a newly elected city council in 1931, protest was loud and clear. The MorningPress

quoted a Santa Barbara "mechanic" as follows:

They seem to deliberately ignore the character of the city and the fact that an

uncontaminated ocean front is its greatest asset (Santa Barbani MorningPress, Feb.

24, 1931).

The newspaper editorialized:

Santa Barbara has ever held its beaches in jealous regard, it did not seem

possible that a city council elected to represent the people, would endanger

this priceless asset by permitting a pipeline.... We do not believe that failure

to obtain pipeline facilities will prevent the development of oil on La Mesa,

but, even so, the entire community cannot afford to endanger that which is of

such value to ALL THE PEOPLE for the welfare of a small area (S.znta&zrlxnn

MorningPress, Feb. 28, 1931, emphasis in original).

The Chamber of Commerce pushed for a ban on drilling anywhere within the

city limits. Newspaper commentaries pressed the point that oil would hinder

tourism as well as hurt the quality of life, and also voiced doubt that oil, and the

Mesa field in particular, would bring significant enough prosperity to justify its

harm. Mention was made of the potential for fire and the remaining unsightliness

26
of abandoned oil derricks on the eastern side of the Mesa as reminders of

unsuccessful dry holes and the long-term negative effects on the city.

During something of a slow-down in oil production in the North County, in

the years prior to the 1934 discovery of the Santa Maria field, the South Coast was

also the site of production at the Eliwood field (which began producing in 1928),

with its oil later bound for Japan. Japanese ships would load at Ellwood pier

"almost every day" through 1941 (Storke 1958: 293). Ellwood was located north of

Goleta, some 12 miles from the existing city line, apparently far enough away to

mitigate concerns. Thomas Storke, in his memoirs, referred benignly to the field as

"perfectly situated, shipping being only a few yards from the ocean" and other

transportation routes passing across the lease (Storke 1958: 292).

The pattern seems clear. Whereas the business community may have been

pro-development in most arenas and split from citizens groups on such matters,

there was a more complete opposition to oil development within the city (and

Montecito). Petroleum operations outside the city and its immediate environs

seems to have been much more acceptable to the local leaders.

The North County: Only problem with oil is there's not enough of it

The contrast with the North County, during this as with the previous period,

could not be greater. World War I demand for oil precipitated a further influx of

workers into the oil fields of Santa Maria Valley, and employment by the oil

industry reached a welcome new peak. Individual oil companies were flush with

activity; for example, by 1917 the Pmal Oil Company had taken over a competitor

(Dome Oil Company), employing 350 before being acquired, in turn, by Union Oil

for $3.6 million (Carlson 1957: 130; Welty and Taylor 1958: 130). This acquisition of

Pinal-Dome, which operated 20 service stations in the Los Angeles area, moved

Union Oil into retail sales, thus launching Union as a vertically integrated oil

company (Welty and Taylor 1958: 130-131). More towns and lease communities

developed, like the Bicknell community (managed by Western Union Oil,

employing 500 in 1920) with workers' tents and shacks, a post office, schoolhouse,

grocery store, gas station, boardinghouse, bunkhouses, and baseball diamond. Its

population in fact exceeded Orcutt's.18 Overall, by 1920, oil production in the Orcutt

hills reached-a peak of close to four million barrels for the year (Nelson 1987: 20;

Simon 1990: 38), stimulated in part by wartime demand.

With the end of World War I, both agriculture and oil went into decline.

Marginal farmers searched for alternatives, including work in the oil fields (Simon

1990: 39). There was also a decline in railway employment as rail transport became

18TWO years later, Shell acquired the Bicknell lease (Nelson 1987: 48).

27
increasingly uncompetitive with pipelines and trucks (the railway dosed in 1942)

(Simon 1990: 41).

There were also declines coming from the oil industry. In 1922, Union Oil

began reducing the numbers of wells in its fields to conserve oil reservoirs, resulting

in a production drop of more than 50 percent (from 2,673,692 barrels in 1921) (Simon

1990: 39); its Lompoc wells were shut-in completely for 6 years (Franks and Lambert

1985: 23). Other played-out fields, such as Casmalia in 1926, were retired (Franks and

Lambert 1985: 24). With less work, many Union Oil employees moved south to the

company's Los Angeles fields throughout the 1920s, leaving many houses in Orcutt

vacant for years (Simon 1990: 39), the town in economic struggle, and the

surrounding lease communities emptying out (Nelson 1987: 36, 52; Simon 1990: 41).

Further to Orcutt's disadvantage, the state relocated the main north-south artery

three miles to the east of Orcutt (where Highway 101 is currently), thereby

devastating the town's restaurants, lodgings, gas stations and garages (Simon 1990:

41). Orcutt-based, independent oil companies were absorbed by larger units, Union

in particular. Orcutt-based Rice Ranch Oil Company, for example, sold its "Rancho"

filling stations across the Central Coast to Union and entered into refining

agreements exclusively with Union in 1936 (Nelson 1987: 20). This sort of change

moved administrative controls and jobs out of the local area.

From the 1930's on, Orcutt was increasingly eclipsed by its neighbor to the

north, Santa Maria, which outpaced it in basic business activity as well as the

wholesale and retail market trade (Simon 1990: 41). Santa Maria's role as a produce

center for the Central Coast would only grow over time. The coming of

refrigeration and ice sheds in 1922 (through a company formed by two Santa Barbara

men) and snow ice blowers in 1931 allowed produce to be shipped by rail to

increasingly distant markets (Carlson 1957: 236-237). These developments, as with

oil discoveries to the north in the Santa Maria area, did "spill over" into nearby

Orcutt, supporting real estate and some commercial services in various parts of the

valley.

Unlike Orcutt, the city of Santa Maria was well established when oil was

discovered in its midst in 1934. After Union's first well in the Santa Maria field

came in modestly, the company purchased 3,500 acres in Santa Maria in 1935 and

generated nine producing wells (Welty and Taylor 1958: 242). One year later,

another well came in at 3,000 barrels daily, with the company opening its Battles

Absorption Plant to clean and separate natural gas from oil developed at Santa

Maria Valley sites (Uhi 1987). Increasingly, Union Oil directed its operations towards

Santa Maria as these activities took hold.

28
World War II and the North County

Operations in other parts of the North County continued and in some cases

were rejuvenated. The coming of World War II created economic booms across

many fronts in the Santa Maria Valley. Prices rose for agricultural products, as did

demand for oil. Not participating in any of this prosperity was the local JapaneseAmerican population, who had become dominant in truck farming. Subjected to

indignities and some acts of violence, they were packed-off to detention centers in

Arizona and elsewhere, and forced to sell their belongings, including in some cases,

highly prosperous farms, at very low prices. Later unclassified documents revealed

that General DeWitt's "Final Report" to the President on the internal Japanese

threat to America had singled out the Santa Maria Valley for special concern:

'"Throughout the Santa Maria Valley every utility, airfield, bridge, telephone and

power line or other facility of importance was flanked by Japanese" (Shriner 1991:

19). Besides the fact that these Japanese represented no threat whatever to the

country, their claimed deployment was, from the vantage of any local, "nonsense"

(Shriner 1991: 20); their only "flanking" was a dispersed agricultural land use

pattern.

The North County's economic profile was altered with the establishment of

Camp Cooke on 86,000 acres near Lompoc and an army training air base north of

Orcutt (at what is now the Santa Maria Airport) (Nelson 1987: 94). The coming of the

military not only generated greatly increased demand for local products and

services, but also raised wages across all sectors. The "Okies" who had performed

much of the arduous field labor left for government jobs, with Mexican labor

insufficient to take up the slack Eager for braceros, the Santa Maria thily Tim es

announced in a front-page headline, "Another Batch of Mexicans Coming," as a

local observer has written, using the "insensitive" tone "typical of the time, treating

the workers as objects rather than people, yet, to the tomato growers and beet

farmers, it was the triumphant sound of the cavalry to the rescue" (Shriner 1991: 68).

German and Italian prisoners of war were later to be used to bring in the harvests.

Although it helped create the workforce shortage, the military otherwise

posed no threat either to agriculture or the oil industry. True, Camp Cooke was

established on 70,000 acres of Union Oil property with 10 producing wells. The two

parties negotiated a unique arrangement, whereby Union Oil agreed to surrender

the land in return for retaining the mineral rights underneath. To prepare for the

base, Union Oil removed its surface facilities and bulldozed sand over the well

heads. After the war, the company renewed its drilling on base land.

Beginning in 1943, production in the Santa Maria field and Santa Barbara

County was reaching record-setting heights thanks to wartime demand (see Chart 1:

Santa Barbara County Oil and Gas Production). Union Oil had been under contract

since 1920 to supply fuel for the U.S. Navy; as naval operations in the Pacific Ocean

increased, Union Oil shipped tankers of Santa Maria refined oil from Port San Luis,

at Avila Beach, directly to the Navy's Pacific Fleet (Santa Maria oil made excellent

29
ship fuel). Wartime oil production also brought new capital investment (e.g. steel

structures, electric pumping units) to old rigs and made it feasible to resurrect shutin wells like Union's Old Maud, inoperative since 1918. Demand for labor exceeded

supplies, and transients, schoolboys, and off-duty soldiers were routinely hired for

oil work (Uhi 1987; Nelson 1987: 17, 94).

30
10,000,000 15,000,000 20,000,000 25,000,000 30,000,000 35,000,000 40,000,000 45,000,000 50,000,000 5,000,000 Chart 1: Santa Barbara County Onshore Oil and Gas Production, 1915-1992 0 'fl - fl 00 - -.1 - _4 - - _, - - - - (1 00 - - N 0 'fl 'fl '0 '0 '0 N C\ 0 C' O\ C\ Q _.l - - _4 0\ N 'C C N N O\ C' N If 00 - 00 00 00 0 Q O\ 0 C\ - - _.4 - 1 I I' V A Gas measurement . "Mcf produced changes from II I I I I I I I "Mcf Produced" I I I I I I I Santa Barbara County Onshore Oil Santa Barbara County Onshore Gas Annual Reports of State Oil and Gas Supervisor Source: California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil and Gas. C' N 0
Oil in civic life

Throughout the period between the wars and during World War II, the role

of the oil industry in the North County only grew, not only in economic terms but

also in civic life. Increasing oil production meant increasing contact between the oil

industry and farmers and ranchers, with more agriculturists employed or receiving

revenue from the use of their lands or equipment by the oil industry. Relations

were evidently informal and cooperative; oil workers would "since we're here

anyway" assist farmers in building roads, small ponds, and other improvements to

their property. Often these projects, negotiated ad hoc and on the spot, served the

needs of both parties. As recalled by Darwin Sainz, a third-generation resident and

longtime Unocal official:

If you ran cattle in an oil field, you got to know the superintendent, you got to

know the foreman, you got to know the workers. And you'd be out there

working cattle, and they'd come by in their truck, or they'd have an operation

that was - so they were invited to the ranch. So yeah, there was a lot of the

mutual camaraderie between the two, I wouldn't say to the point that they were

living in each other's household. But on a social basis, there was a social

element to that.

Connections between the industry and the population were also

intergenerational, with many families having several generations in the employ of

the industry, particularly Union Oil. All-day barbecues were the major social

gatherings in the Santa Maria Valley, held in the towns or on ranches; ranchers

commonly invited their oil industry neighbors. In 1919, Ed Craig, an employee

from the Graciosa oil lease, built the huge barbecue pit at the Santa Maria Club

which helped popularize Santa Maria's barbecues, "famous all over the state"

(Carison 1957: 225) 19

In 1937, Union Oil donated the 3000 plus capacity Union Oil picnic grounds in

OrcutL The list of civic projects paid for by the oil companies is extensive and goes

back a long time. Union, it could be argued, "saved" Lompoc's treasured La

Purisima Mission, which it acquired in 1903 as part of its general land acquisition

(Savage 1991: 13). Union and the Catholic Church transferred ownership to the

county for restoration-by the Civilian Conservation Corps, with the oil company

donating the building materials.

19Visitors are said to have declared, "No others in the west can barbecue like the Santa

Marians.... Barbecuing in the valley is a holdover from days when the vaqueros would dig

holes in the ground, and string their meat on long willow sticks, by which to hold them over the

fire. The methods have changed since that day, and so undoubtedly, has the qualitY of the

juicy charcoal broiled rib steaks, for which Santa Maria has become famous" (Carlson

1957:134). In 1996, an exhibition room at the Santa Maria Historic Museum is devoted to the

local barbecue tradition.

32
appointed to the County Board in 1915 by state Governor Hiram Johnson to fill the

remainder of another official's term, "a great howl of wrath went up from

politicians in the southern end of the county... and from that day until almost the

end of his political career Santa Barbara newspapers used Preisker as a target for

their most barbed harpoons" (Carison 1957: 194). Preisker exerted enough influence

to come to be called "Little Caesar" and for the charge to be made that "the county

was really run from Santa Maria, with the Santa Maria Inn21 as the 'little county

courthouse,' because of the many policy-forming meetings held there by Preisker..."

(Carlson 1957: 197). Preisker's support help build the splendid county courthouse in

downtown Santa Barbara; he too was eager to create splendor in the city's heart,

even at great expense. Much of the impressive $1.25 million cost was paid off with

tax revenues from oil properties then producing robustly in both north and south

county fields. To this day, the county courthouse symbolizes for some in the oil

industry the wealth which oil has endowed to the county. Most citizens and leaders

on the South Coast, it is safe to say, are ignorant of oil's role in financing their civic

gem; if anything, this courthouse centerpiece of Santa Barbara's tony downtown

district only symbolizes the distance between the gentility of Santa Barbara with the

perceived crudeness of petroleum and the north.

- The 24 bedroom Santa Maria Inn opened in 1917 - a dream come true (Carlson 1957:229). Its

owner, Santa Marian Frank McCoy, later purchased Santa Barbara's upscale El Encanto Hotel

and managed both from Santa Bathara, he also served on the county planning commission)

(Carlson 1957: 229).

34
Table 5: County employment by occupation, 1940-1970

Source: U.S. Census.

* Indicates data not available

The mining sector (which includes oil and gas) was not a sigrificant source of

employment, declining to barely more than 1,000 workers by 1970. Thus, despite the

fact that county onshore production was as high as it had been for much of the

century (see Chart 2: Oil Production in the Tn-Counties, 1915-1992) and Channel

offshore production had risen sharply (see Chart 3: The Offshore Era - Production

in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties), employment in the sector was quite small

compared to other job sources. Mining employment from all sectors amounted to

only one percent of all county jobs in 1970, compared for example to retail trade (16

percent) and Finance! Real Estate! Insurance (almost seven percent) (for selected

comparisons, see Table 8: County employment by occupation, 1960-1990).

Table 6 (below), based on a different data source (the Census as opposed to

Regional Economic Information Service, and using somewhat different

methodologies) shows a somewhat higher potential for oil related jobs, 1.7 percent

of total county employment, by including jobs in chemical manufacturing and

manufacture of secondary petroleum products (the "Petroleum" category).

36

1940 1950 1960 1970

Manufacturing * 2,187 8,581 11,786

Wholesale 2,118 2,047 2,163 3,260

Retail 3,774 6,990 9,820 17,053

Professional 2,246 4,479 9,280 19,763

Proprietors, Managers, and Officials 2,689 3,997 6,130 9,169

Clerical and Sales 4,042 6,840 12,882 23,394

Craftsmen and Foremen 2,423 4,575 8,539 10,851

Domestic 1,590 1,465 1,567 1,683

Service (non-domestic) 1,571 3,817 5,587 12,240
10,000,000 20,000,000 30,000,000 40,000, 50,000,000 60,000,000 - 70,000,000 80,000,000 Chart 3: The Offshore Era Production in Santa Barbara and Veiitura Counties, by Oil Source ! ,_.JIiIIllIlHhIliii1i.. y ;;' IllIlIlIllIlIlliiIIII 00 O Q -1 C"1 N 0Q O c - rl rq ' tfl o 1 00 O Q F'- 00 O\ 00 00 00 00 .'4 - - - .-4 - .-1 .-1 - .-4 ,-. - - .-i ..-1 - ,-1 .-4 - -.4 - .-1 .4 .-4 - -4 .4 * .-4 - Ventura County Onshore Oil N Ventura County State Tidelands Oil I] Santa Barbara County Onshore Oil N Santa Barbara County State Tidelands Oil 0 Santa Barbara Channel OCS Oil Minerals Managment Service, Estimated Oil And Gas Reserves, Pacific OCS (MMS 94-0008) Sources: California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil and Gas; Aimual Reports of the Oil and Gas Supervisor.
100.00% 120.00% 140.00% 20.00% 40.00% 60.00% 80.00% Chart 4: rflle Extraetlliitact Ratio Santa Barbara Santa Barbara County Compared to State and Region s San Luis Obispo 0 Ventura - -X -State Ave. Source: U.S. Census establishments -- a proxy for the tourism industry. The Extract/Intact Ratio compares the numbers of jobs in mining, chemical/allied, and petroleum to jobs generated by eating, drinking and lodging 0.00% - L_ I 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
North County and postwar defense activities

Because the two ateas of the county played such different roles in the war,

with the North County providing the larger troop-training base as well as oil and

food supplies, the ending of the war also had distinct consequences. For the North

County, the closing of Camp Cooke and the exit of its 30,000 troops carried major

negative economic impacts (Simon 1990: 45, 46). The Korean War brought the base

back into operation, creating another defense-related employment rise, with other

cutbacks in successive years of demobilization and defense budget cuts. This up and

down military cycle continued with the 1956 conversion of Camp Cooke into the

Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) as a national missile center. With an initial

construction expense of $61 million, a North County growth boom began; the first

successful missile launch was in 1958. By 1960, the airbase employed more than

15,000, then 21,000 two years later. Although the airbase provided substantial

amounts of housing, about two-thirds of those stationed there lived off-base; this,

combined with construction, created a sturdy building boom in the region with

many new firms created in land development and the building trades. The city of

Santa Maria attracted over 10,000 new residents between 1960 and 1965 to reach a

population of 31,031, bringing it to about half the size of Santa Barbara. The regions

surrounding Santa Maria grew to create a total of 48,750 by that year; Orcutt's

population had increased from about 3,000 (in 1950) to 11,539 (in 1%0) and to 19,477

(in 1970). These growth rates began equalizing population levels between the North

County and South Coast. Defense cutbacks at various times, such as a major cut in

1963, carried new downturns for the base and a weakening in the local economies,

creating a surfeit of housing especially in the Lompoc area (Simon 1990 50-52;

Nelson 1987: 101).

Oil development, postwar

Oil development in the North County continued apace to meet both civilian

and Korean War-era military demand, with new discoveries near the northern

county line by Norris Oil and then Richfield (see Table 2: North County oil field

discoveries). As in the past, relations with neighbors were cooperative, with oil

helping-at least a few of them become rich. One land owner gained $1000 a day in

royalties from Richfield Oil (Title Insurance and Trust Co. 1964: 50). Concentration

also continued; Union Oil in 1954 bought Sunray Oil's Orcutt refinery and built

another at Santa Maria. This plant processed 20,000 barrels daily of the sulfur-laden

heavy crude for pipeline transport to Pt. San Luis, hence tankered to Union's Oleum

refinery. A third refinery was built a year later just across the county line inland

from Tipomo Dunes23 that also produced coke for foreign export and asphalt for

regional use.

23By 1965, Unions Nipomo Mesa refinery employed 80 workers; approximately two-thirds

resided in San Luis Obispo Countys Five Cities area while the rest lived in Santa Maria

41
With the Santa Maria refinery came a carbon dioxide plant, operated by

Union's Brea Chemical subsidiary (established in 1952). Combined with prior

constructed refineries in the area, Brea chemicals became the largest producer of

carbon dioxide products (including dry ice) west of the Mississippi (Welty and Taylor

1958: 213, photo captions). With its dry ice production, Union Oil provided shippers

a new means to refrigerate their produce in rail cars, a boon to local agriculture.

In 1957, Union Oil began using secondary recovery methods (gas injection,

water flooding, underground burning, or a combination) at 35 sites across the state,

including several North County fields. This tripled production at Union's

Guadalupe field, with other boosts elsewhere (e.g. Cat Canyon and Orcutt).

Petroleum-separating innovations at its Brea Research Laboratory also allowed

Union Oil to begin developing the Sisquoc tar sands in 1957 (Welty and Taylor 1958:

229-230).

The instability so often visited upon the North County's economy - with rise

and fall in defense, oil, and farm prosperity - may well have contributed to an

urgency regarding development opportunities. Various efforts have been made

over the years to attract manufacturing and other forms of investment to offset

these periodic declines. Indeed, this cyclical quality provides still another element of

commonalty among the ensemble of North County industries and a consistency in

the perceived need to facilitate industrial growth.

The South Coast, postwar

The South Coast had been drawn into World War II most dramatically

through the oil installations at Eliwood. In 1942, a Japanese submarine prowling the

central California coast fired at the Ellwood oil facifity, including its two huge

storage tanks.24 Although the Japanese managed to damage equipment at one well

site, most of the shells were well off-target. But the event did much to agitate the

population across the whole western seaboard, and it clearly fed the hysteria about

Japanese-Americans.

Other than this remarkable incident, the war had fewer direct or lasting

impacts on the South Coast than it had on the North County. The military built

Hoff General Hospital in 1941 to serve the wounded (Days, 1991), with its site after

the war becoming MacKenzie Park and the city's public golf course. Some already

standing facilities in the area had been converted to defense use (e.g. clubs and

several mansions were used to support troop and civil defense functions), but since

there was no heavy industry before the war, little could be converted to war use or

(Santa Maria Times, October 29, 1965).

2'1The submarine commander is said to have known his target from previous visits loading crude

for shipment to Japan (Shriner 1991:24-27).

42
expanded to create the kind of large industrial production centers created in other

parts of the country. Nor did the War Department or the nascent aerospace industry

choose to locate large-scale training or production centers in Santa Barbara, as

occurred in the Los Angeles region to the south or the Santa Maria Valley. Indeed,

the Santa Barbara kite-flying enthusiasts who founded Lockheed (the Loughead

brothers) moved their major operations to what they considered the more

appropriate production clime of Los Angeles (Brantingham 1992), although they

manufactured airplanes and parts in Santa Barbara during both world wars. The

most significant local elements of the war effort were probably the airport and

certainly the related oceanfront Marine Base at Goleta Point. The War Department

made extensive use of the existing airport, greatly expanding it with structures that

still stand.

As with the airport, the Marine Base land was turned over to civilian use

after the war, becoming the new campus of the University of California, Santa

Barbara (UCSB). The suburb of Goleta, which had been a small service center for the

surrounding agricultural lands, is said to be the most populous unincorporated

community in the state. The great change began in 1955 when UC initiated

construction of the new campus, turning its prior city harbor site over to Santa

Barbara Junior College.25

The prime mover for the establishment of the UCSB campus was Thomas

Storke, then publisher of what had become the South Coast's only daily newspaper,

the SantrzBarbamNews-Prrss. His holdings also included large tracts of land, some

descended from the vast rancho owned by the Calif ormo family (the Ortegas) into

which his Yankee ancestors intermarried. He owned substantial lands adjacent to

what became the UCSB campus (and indeed, part of what became the campus itself).

The coming of the University led to the largest single growth spurt in the history of

the county, occurring in the late 1960's (much enhancing Storke's newspaper and

real estate). Storke was a major benefactor of the new campus, including significant

financial support (upwards of $700,000, augmented with millions more from his

descendants).

As a University of California Regent, Storke helped convince the Regents to

upgrade the smallUC College at Santa Barbara into a full-fledged general campus,

overcoming the fear that a new campus would dilute resources for Berkeley and

UCLA But, according to Storke:

We felt the cultural background of Santa Barbara offered a real asset to the

university family, that no community in the west had so much to give (cited

in Douglass 1995: GI).

25Prior to its move to Goleta, the university had been located first at a city hillside location

(the "Riviera') and then also on a bluff above the harbor, but for most of its life as a state

teacher's college, rather than part of the University of California system.

43
Special state legislation made possible the absorption of the Santa Barbara state

college into the UC system, followed by subsequent legislation that preduded any

other state college from enjoying a similar conversion.

As a power in the Democratic Party (rewarded with an appointment to the

U.S. Senate to complete an unfilled term), Storke was instrumental in the federal

government's selling the campus's current ocean-front site to the University for a

$10 fee. Storke's view, shared by others in the business community, was to use the

university as a centerpiece for the emergence of clean industry and further

development in culture and tourisim The News-Press frequently editorialized on this

positive vision of "clean growth."

The first elements of a high-technology, research and development presence

were arising both in the city and in suburban Goleta. UCSB was one of the founding

four sites of the DARPA network - the Defense Department Project that laid the

basis for today's "information highway" (i.e. the basis for e-mail and the internet)

and immediately spun-off an important, although small-scale, computer

innovation company called Culler and Harrison Electronics. General Electric

Tempo, the defense-oriented R & D center of the corporation1 took up a major

presence in downtown Santa Barbara. Hoffman Electronics constructed a major

facility on the top of the Mesa. Defense contractors like Raytheon came in as well as

General Research and Santa Barbara Research (General Motors Delco was to follow).

At the Montecito edge of the South Coast, under the support of Ford

Foundation money, Robert Hutchins, outgoing head of the University of Chicago

and recent head of the Foundation, created the country's most important think tank

in the hills adjacent to Montecito in 1959: the Center for the Study of Democratic

Institutions. The initial grant was the then impressive sum of $4 million. In

addition to a permanent resident staff of luminous Fellows (which included the

double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and Alex Comfort, author of the then bestselling and controversial book, The yof Sex), the "Hutchins Center" (as it was

informally known) brought an unending stream of dignitaries through the locale as

part of its program of "dialogs." The Center spent many, many millions on these

daily efforts to find solutions to the world's problems - an activity that did manage

to lure stifi more affluent retirees (mostly liberals) to the community. The

institution also published a monthly magazine (The CenterMzzthae) that had a strong

circulation (about 100,000) among intelligentsia throughout the country. After

Hutchins' death in 1973, his Center eventually became a part of UCSB, finally

folding when income could not keep up with expenses.

While the Hutchins Center may have added a liberal intellectual dimension

to the ongoing elite structure of Montecito and Santa Barbara, the more typical inmigrant was something like those who had come before, politically conservative on

many issues, perhaps, but strongly oriented toward lifestyle and the environment.

The large estates were increasingly divided, and while the new owners may have

lacked the vast wealth of their predecessors, they were still affluent. Although not

44
eligible for voting or holding office in Santa Barbara, Montecito activists - old timers

or new migrants - have indeed played a strong role in Santa Barbara city

government, making campaign contributions as well as providing leadership in

civic groups of what they consider to be "their" city. Sometimes they have been

joined by the other rich-persons suburb to the north, Hope Ranch. Hope Ranchers

have somewhat less need for direct involvement with local governance issues; all

its roads are privately owned by the residential association, as are its beach facilities

and the system of equestrian paths that link residences. As with affluent

neighborhoods of the City of Santa Barbara itself (primarily along the "Riviera"

hillsides overlooking the ocean), Hope Ranch joins Montecito not only in

providing the global reputation of the region's picturesque residential areas, but also

in supplying disproportionate financial and person-power for the South Coast's

civic and political life.

Somewhat in contrast to its surroundings, a community of free-thinkers

developed in the Mountain Drive area of Montecito early in the 1950s (Chiacos

1994). Over the decades, the founding figure, Bobby Hyde, gave, sold, or rented land

parcels to friends and compadres who were artists, crafts people, and writers, or

otherwise socially compatible. The community grew to have several hundred

residents, its own preschool, holiday calendar (e.g. Bastille Day), bacchanal, and

newspaper ('The Grapevine") and was on the circuit of the San Francisco beat poets

and other hip notables, including the Zen Buddhist interpreter, Allan Watts (Watts'

daughter married Hyde's son). Others who circulated through the Mountain Drive

scene included Philip Whalen, Timothy Leary, Peter King, Joan Baez, and John Cage

(Chiacos 1994: 14). Homes were often hand-built of adobe or tile made on the site,

and life evolved on a quasi-communitarian basis. Marijuana was a staple crop as

well as recreational drug; acceptance of nudity and sexuality were other

characteristics. Sometimes credited as the birthplace of the hot tub (and other

residential solar-power applications), it continues, albeit in a less distinctive form,

up to the present.

The case of those living the alternate life styles reminds that it is not just the

rich who give Santa Barbara its character, and it is not just big money that makes for

political and social force. In part because of affluence, but also because of the

predilections of those with more modest means, the region has had a substantial

number of people who have staffed or volunteered for organizations and election

campaigns of those running on quality-of-life platforms.

Despite the fact that county government during the 1950s and 1960s was

"characteristically pro-development" (Graves and Simon 1980: 20), there were still

innovations in land use planning and regulation. In what was a pioneering move

in California, the county banned billboards along the entire Highway 154 route

linking the city with the North County via San Marcos Pass. The city of Santa

Barbara elected officials mostly sympathetic with business as well; it was a time

when enforcement of architectural standards was somewhat relaxed, with results

45
still visible on the city's main street (an occasional conventional modern building

with a dollop of "Spanish" decoration).

But past decisions and improvements had created a thriving as well as

picturesque city center. At a time in the '50s and '60s, when town centers were

abandoned or destroyed across the country through federal urban renewal, Santa

Barbara eschewed the program, with preservationists wanting to keep the new

version of "old Spain" intact and political conservatives fearing urban renewal as a

federal version of "socialism." The city center had itself become a tourist attraction

as well as a true main street for all levels of society and ethnic groups to gather.

When redevelopment was to be used, beginning in the late 1960s, the primary

purpose during this period was for housing, as in the Presidio Springs Senior

Housing project on what had been utility yards.

Offshore oil again

As the Santa Barbara South Coast laid its foundation as a future academic and

high-technology region, the basis was also being created for a new era of oil for the

county as a whole. In the immediate postwar period (in 1947), voters defeated a

Charter Amendment to prohibit oil drilling or exploration within the city limits

72.5% to 27.5% (Sanla Bazlvm News-Press, May 7, 1947). Oppositional sentiment,

however, caused a 1951 referendum on whether or not drilling should be allowed

on airport lands owned by the city in the Goleta area; the public again approved by a

wide margin, this time influenced perhaps by the fact that Goleta was far enough

away (about 12 miles) to mean oil would not be in the city's own backyard.

In 1953, for the first time, the City Council banned drilling anywhere within

the city. With a 1965 vote, city residents supported the elevation of the 1953 ban to

the status of City Charter amendment26 with 77 percent of voters in favor (San

Barbam News-Press, May 5, 1%5). Drilling was declared "unlawful" and "a public

nuisance." Endorsed by the Santa Bathani News-Press, the ban passed with little

apparent controversy; election coverage instead focused on the mayoral race, a

Freeholder proposition, and pay raises for public employees.

This increasingly anti-oil context was not auspicious for the coming of

offshore oil development. The sea is often spoken of as the city's front yard, and the

arc-like quality of the coast line makes any ocean development highly visible from

many points on land, whether at the seaside or on the slopes above; this also

exacerbates the aesthetic impacts of any visible form of air pollution which appears

to hang over the ocean. Much of the development in the region, especially in

affluent neighborhoods, was schemed to capture views out to the ocean and across

to the Channel Islands. Within the city itself, the Riviera neighborhoods are laid

26A charter element can only be changed by a future public vote.

46
out as a series of terraces parallel to the coast, almost like an amphitheater, with the

ocean as the central feature from the omnipresent picture windows and outdoor

patios.

The city and county made prodigious efforts to prevent offshore oil

development Beginning in 1948, amidst continuing controversy over whether

coastal waters were under state or federal jurisdictions, the city and county

attempted to control offshore activity. Santa Barbara protest led C1ifomia

Governor Earl Warren to halt oil company seismic testing temporarily. Local

governments made an unsuccessful attempt to secure local zoning authority over

submerged lands adjacent to the coast and, in one option, to restrict production to

onshore slant drilling. Protests came to a head in response to Humble Oil's 1953

application for seismic exploration in the Channel. In 1954, city and county officials

lobbied the state legislature to make the Channel an oil-free sanctuary, along with

the option of local ocean-zoning (Johnson and Nye 1979:194; Lirna 1994). There was

extensive local as well as national new coverage of the conflict (from AP and UPI),

helping to build Santa Barbara's national reputation as a significant political voice.27

The examples of Long Beach and Seal Beach, south of Los Angeles, were cited as the

kind of degradation that would occur if extraordinary measures were not taken.

The public controversy contained the usual Santa Barbara motifs. The city

matriarch, Pearl Chase, was reported in the News-Press as having met with

"experienced oil men" and she quotes them as giving her the inside tip: "If you

love Santa Barbara, keep on saying 'no' - both to exploration and drilling" (News

Press, January 10, 1953, "City Advised to Keep Up Oil Fight": Al). The gist of the

coverage was that the toehold of exploration will provide the base for operations

that will never be stopped: Santa Barbara should not compromise, and Santa

Barbara should be firm. We don't know who the "oil men" were, but we do know

that among the possibilities were various local residents whose fortunes came from

oil (e.g. Samuel Mosher, founder of Signal Oil, Alice Keck of Keck Petroleum); even

the ardent environmentalist Robert Easton was from a family with an oil

background.28

27See: 'District Attorney Preparing Tidelands Control Ordinances" Santa Barbara News-Press,

January 2, 953: Al; "Santa Barbara Gives Nation Example of 'Democracy in Action' Santa

Barbara Wews-Press, January 11, 1953: Al.

28 1899, the senior Robert E. Easton came to Santa Maria Valley as surveyor for the Sisquoc

Investment Company. He eventually became operating superintendent of the companY's Sisquoc

Rancho for a half century, as well as president of Santa Barbara County Telephone Company,

director and vice-president (1906-1926) of First National Bank of Santa Maria, chairman of

Santa Maria Chamber of Commerce (in 1924), and (by 1928) president of Santa Maria Gas

Company (Carlson 1957: 136). Easton helped organize the community orchestra and other

institutions, and was an ardent conservationist (see McMillan 1968). His son, the prominent

writer and environmentalist, authored an account of the 1969 blowout in the Santa Barbara

Channel (Easton 1972). Easton had also served as an oil company foreman.

47
But offshore drilling, as well as compromise of a sort, was in the offing. After

initial court decisions that granted all coastal waters to the federal government (in

1947), Congress placed California's tidelands, extending three miles seaward, under

state jurisdiction in 1953. In the same year, Congress and the Eisenhower

administration gave the Interior Department authority to lease Outer Continental

Shelf Lands for oil production. But when the state legislature passed its enabling

legislation for drilling (the 1955 Shell-Cunningham Act), it gave Santa Barbara

something of what it wanted: a 16 mile development-free oil sanctuary stretching

from above the city limits at Goleta (including the UCSB campus) to below the city

limits at Sununerland. Elsewhere in the Channel, a 200-day waiting period would

take place between application for drilling and granting drilling rights. The question

remained, however, as to the status of the whole Channel, with the state daiming

the entire 24 miles of width between ocean and islands to be an inland waterway,

and hence completely subject to state control. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in

California that only the first three miles from the mainland and

surrounding the Channel Islands were state waters; the rest was federal.29 In

deference to local feelings, the Interior Department established a two-mile wide

ecological preserve seaward of the state sanctuary.

Thomas Storke was later effusive in his praise of the oil men for having

"helped me and the News-Press immeasurably in winning our fight" in the state

legislature to establish the sanctuary; he saluted them "for recognizing that the

natural beauty of this coast should not be marred for commercial gain" and for being

"devotees of Santa Barbara's natural beauty who put esthetic values ahead of

personal profit" (Storke 1958: 295). Perhaps more important than the oil mens

devotion to Santa Barbara's beauty was a strongly united and well-organized

community protest against oil activity said to have deeply impressed a State Senate

committee during hearings in Santa Barbara. As it was to turn out, this was only a

very partial victory in aesthetic terms; oil platforms in state waters (as in federal

waters) were to be highly visible from vantage points within Montecito and the city.

The state-controlled tidelands leasing began in 1956 with Platform Hazel

installed in 1958 (many platforms have women's names), erected on the

Summerland oil field south of Montecito. It was the first of nine platforms (plus

several artificial islands) constructed in state waters between 1956 and 1966; by 1966

all state tidelands parcels, except for the sanctuaries, had been leased - generating

almost $150 million in royalty income to the state (Lima 1994: 216).

The prospect of federal leasing once again mobilized local anxieties. Stuart

Udall, the environmentalist Secretary of the Interior appointed by John Kennedy,

then serving under Lyndon Johnson, met with local officials, including Santa

Barbara's former state legislator Alvin Weingand (also partner with Ronald Colman

in the exclusive San Ysidro guest ranch). The Sierra Club (Los Padres Chapter) was

29This decision, in effect, overturned the State of California Tidelands Act of 1929 that granted

the state comp'ete control of mineral rights to all tidelands, with no specified limits out to sea.

48
at the fore in pre-spifi fights to keep oil out, with people like Fred Eissler active at

both the national and local level in negotiations with Secretary Udall. (Eissler had

been Conservation Chair of the national Sierra Club under David Brower.) In the

negotiations, assurances were given that nothing would be done that could harm

the Santa Barbara environment, indeed that the platforms would be constructed in a

way that would make them virtually invisible from the shore.

Federal outer continental shelf (OCS) leasing began in 1966 with a sale to

Phillips Petroleum; this was a "drainage" sale, held to avoid losing oil to the state

from production in the adjacent tidelands. It was a decision that took local

authorities by surprise and served to increase local-federal tensions. This was a

period with no mandates for environmental review, public notice, or hearings prior

to such decisions. Comments were restricted to those relevant to Army Engineers'

concern for navigation through the Channel, and even these were pro forma, since

the platform in question was already making its way through the Panama Canal for

installation in the Channel.3° Local authorities pressed the federal government for a

sanctuary consistent with the state sanctuary, along the 16 mile stretch that included

the city of Santa Barbara shoreline. The federal government responded with

another compromise: a two mile buffer adjoining the state sanctuary along its

entire length. A six week moratorium on new leasing was declared to allow the

county time to review the next round of leases.

This was a period of intense displays of opposition by citizens and political

leaders against additional leasing, with sometimes fierce confrontation between

delegations flying across the continent with threats and protests. It was continuous

with sentiments that, in the words of Walter Hickel, the Secretary of Interior at the

time of the great oil spill, had been around "as early as 1955... [when] the people of

Santa Barbara had fought against the establishment of offshore rigs on their resort

doorstep..."; they had "yelled" loudly both before the fact of offshore oil

development as well as after (Hickel 1971:99). The year 1968 saw the federal

government's first large-scale leasing program: 71 tracts, covering 360,000 acres were

leased with immediate revenues of $603 million to the federal government, setting

up the mechanism that would inject hundreds of millions more into the federal

treasury over the next decades. The county scrambled to create onshore facility

siting plans to handle the anticipated demand for processing and storage facilities as

well as possible onshore sites for slant drilling of offshore fields (Lima 1994: 215). It

was a planning challenge of a magnitude that would challenge any locality, even

states or nations in terms of the scale of potential outcomes.

30The Interior Department resisted demand for hearings before the 1967 offshore leases "for

fear of stirring up the natives" (Interior Department Chief Petroleum Engineer Eugene

Standley, quoted in Easton 1972: 101).

49
W. The Environmentalist Era, 1969 to the Present

The county continued to grow during the era, at a rate (40 percent between

1970-1990 - see Chart 5) somewhat lower than that of the state overall, which grew

by 49 percent over the 1970-1990 period. Both rates are modest compared to the

boom in Los Angeles and San Diego counties during this era.

As in the past, the proportion of jobs in manufacturing is still much lower

than the state average during this era. Professionals and Service employment

represents about two percent more of the total non-farm labor force in Santa Barbara

County for 1970 through 1990 than for the state overall; retailing is also stronger by

about the same magnitude in Santa Barbara county compared to the state as a whole

(both for 1980 and 1990). Proprietors/managers and Clerical/Sales are about even

with the state.

One of the striking changes over the period, the sharp rise in the percent nonwhite, needs to be interpreted with great caution. These numbers likely reflect the

changing definition of the Mexican-American, Latino, and Hispanic populations

used by the Census and the changing self-conception of those interviewed by Census

enumerators. What is nevertheless clear (from school data among other sources) is

that the city and county have long had substantial populations with Latino and! or

Spanish heritage. Indeed, some of these families trace their kinship back to the

Califormo era; more reflect modem waves of migration. Besides the agricultural

sector which has long employed Mexican and other Central American laborers, the

tourist economy also draws on low-wage immigrant labor for the work-intensive

tasks of making hotel beds, cleaning up, gardening, and kitchen work in the cafes,

restaurants, and dining establishments that increasingly characterize the area.

50
250,000 275,000 -__________- Chart 5: Santa Barbara County Population, 1969-1992 I I I I I I I f I I I I I I I I $ I I -1 O 0 - c'I m 'j r O N 00 O 0 C\l r 00 - N N N N 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 O c O O\ O\ O\ O O\ O O\ C\ C\ O _4 _4 - - ,-4 Source: Regional Economic Information Service 300,000 325,000 350,000 375,000 400,000
Table 7: County sociodemographic characteristics, 1960-1990

Source: U.S. Census.

* Indicates data not available

Table 8: County employment by occupation, 1960-1990

Source: U.S. Census

Table 9 (Number of jobs, by sector, 1970-1990; see next page), shows more detail and indicates jobs in each sector as a percent of total county employment. A

most striking finding is that the "Mining" sector, which includes oil and gas development, never rises much beyond one percent of all employment.

52

1960 1970 1981) 1990

Manufacturing 8,581 11,786 21,916 23,515

Wholesale 2,163 3,260 4,208 4,991

Retail 9,820 17,053 25,275 30,648

Professional 9,280 19,763 20,677 29,377

Proprietors, Managers, and Officials 6,130 9,169 15,695 22,645

Clerical and Sales 12,882 23,394 37,341 48,188

Craftsmen and Foremen 8,539 10,851 15,953 19,249

Domestic 1,567 1,683 1,057 1,438

Service (non-domestic) 5,587 12,240 18,700 23,274

1960 1970 1980 1990

Total Population 168,962 264,324 298,694 369,608

Percent Foreign Born 9.92 8.1 12.01 16.93

Percent Nonwhite 3.65 5.6 17.07 22.77

Percent Males 50.21 49.3 49.24 50.22

Household Size 3.07 299 2.62 2.73

Median School Years, Males 12.2 12.7 13.0 * Median School Years, Females 12.2 12.6 13.0 * Percent Unemployed 3.4% 6.0% 5.6% 5.3%
Source: Regional Economic Information Service Table 9: Santa Barbara County -- Number of Jobs by Sector, 1970-1990 Year . .j bID .. bD! u -h .(u0 w 0 ..0 rj F- 4-. 14 U j ru.i 1970 116,062 6,075 1,780 1,159 4,541 10,787 3,540 3,350 18,521 7,984 29,772 4,113 9,090 15,350 5.2% 1.5% 1.0% 3.9% 9.3% 3.1% 2.9% 16.0% 6.9% 25.7% 3.5% 7.8% 13.2% 1975 137,224 7,526 2630 959 4,444 12,994 3,700 4,585 22802 11,206 35,899 3,973 6,645 19,861 5.5% 1.9% 0.7% 3.2% 9.5% 2.7% 3.3% 16.6% 8.2% 26.2% 2.9% 4.8% 14.5% 1980 167,133 6,848 4,153 1,794 6,929 17,143 5,418 4,421 29,449 13,295 47,645 4,018 4,712 21,316 4.1% 2.5% 1.1% 4.1% 10.3% 3.2% 2.6% 17.6% 8.0% 28.5% 2.4% 2.8% 12.8% 1985 193,999 5,910 5,263 1,945 9,693 24,803 5,919 5,542 33,958 15,026 55,807 4,256 5,166 20,711 3.0% 2.7% 1.0% 5.0% 12.8% 3.1% 2.9% 17.5% 7.7% 28.8% 2.2% 2.7% 10.7% 1990 217,428 7,479 6,782 1,529 11,571 23,955 6,335 6,846 35,355 17,049 68,668 4,424 4,493 22,942 3.4% 3.1% 0.7% 5.3% 11.0% 2.9% 3.1% 16.3% 7.8% 31.6% 2.0% 2.1% 10.6%
During this period, the Extract-Intact ratio of jobs related to oil versus jobs

related to tourism shifted slightly toward tourism overall, even with the coming of

offshore oil in state and federal waters. The oil industry payroll in the county

derived from oil rose significantly beginning in the mid-70s, peaked in the early SOs,

but then declined again into the 90s (all based on constant dollars) (See Chart 6: Oil

Industry Payroll, 1969-1990). Payrolls and most economic impacts of oil tend to

come during the early phases - with construction of platforms, processing plants,

and drilling operations. Production itself is capital intensive, but requires relatively

few workers to maintain.

In the North County, with no competing edge of tourism and no staunth and

well-heeled cadre of searchers for quality of life, oil remained strongly favored. The

North County's military-based sector continued its ups and downs. In Lompoc, the

space program at Vandenberg helped launch a fivefold increase in the number of

motel rooms in the first half of the 1980s, along with housing tracts and new

shopping centers. Construction expenditures in Lompoc rose from $9 million in

1980 to $61 million in 1985 (Wallace 1996a: Bi). But with the Challenger disaster in

1986, the boom came to a sudden end, resulting in declines in retail business, high

housing vacancy rates, and depressed real estate prices. The launch pad, mothballed

in the process, would not see a blast-off until 1994 with the base's first commercial

space project by Lockheed. Although that blast-off ended in failure, the base is now

being readied for a continuing program of commercial space operations, with

numbers of private firms in place, and high hopes - once again - for growth in the

Lompoc area. But this time, growth would be based on serving the

telecommunications industry, presumably more stable than military applications.

One realm in which the oil industry has played a significant role is in

providing tax revenues. Neither the county nor any of its cities receives either tax

or royalty revenues from federal installations (although the county taxes tidelands

facilities). But OCS operations generate local tax revenue from the industry's

onshore facilities, including processing plants that service the offshore production.

In 1985, the high point of tax receipts from oil operations of all types (including

"ordinary" terrestrial production), the industry was providing just over 11 percent

of the county's property tax revenues (see Tables 10, 11).

54
$10,000 $20,000 $30,000 $40,000 $50,000 $60,000 $70,000 Chart 6: Santa Barbara County Oil Industry Payroll, 1969199O* (In Thousands of Dollars) $0 I i i o .- ci tn 00 C 0 .- c m 00 a '0 F F-- N N N N N F-- N N 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0 0\ 0\ Q\ C. O\ C 0\ 0 0 0 0. 0\ 0 0\ 0 C\ C C D 0' .- .-4 ,- .-4 I 4 Source: Regional Economic Information Service * Adjusted to Constant Dollars (1982).
Source: State Board of Equalization

Table 11: Santa Barbara County percent of net taxable value owned or

developed by oil and gas companies

Source: County of Santa Barbara Tax Assessor

Onshore development continued to decline in the county to reach a level in

the 1990s of only a fifth of its 1960s volume (a similar although less precipitous fall

took place in Ventura County as well). Virtually all drilling was now in the North

County, also the site of most workers living in the county who worked with oil,

including offshore oil (Molotch and Woolley, 1994). Even including the sharp

production rise in the early '90s of OCS oil (including all the oil produced in the

Channel, some of which went to Ventura County for processing and shipment), the

1990s did not quite manage to match the late 60s peak in total production (See Chart

3: The Offshore Era: Production in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, by Oil

Source).

Consistent with our prior cautions not to exaggerate the financial well-being

of Santa Barbara compared to the rest of the county (or the country), median

incomes in the city are not very different from other parts of the county, including

the North County cities of Santa Maria and Lompoc. Indeed, as shown in Table 12

(Median household income, 1980-1990), some of the smaller North County towns

(Buellton, Mission Hills, Santa Ynez, and Vandenberg Village) have considerably

higher median household incomes than found in Santa Barbara.

56

Table 10: Santa Barbara County tax contributions,

oil and gas properties and developments

1977 $6,099,421

1980 $6,122,396

1985 $13,823,497

1990 $8,816,608

1995 $10,923,169

1975-76 8.40%

1985-86 11.37%

1996-% 4.70%
Table 12: Median household income, 19804990

Source: U.S. Census.

* Indicates data not available

More distinctive than variations in income are differences in education

among the county's cities and towns. Table 13 shows that the percent of adults with

a college degree is highest in the city of Santa Barbara (despite its high proportions of

poor people and minorities); indeed it is triple the proportion of college graduates in

Santa Maria and more than double the proportion in Lompoc. These variations

have remained quite stable over time; if anything, the Santa Barbara contrast with

Santa Maria and Lompoc has increased (although declined in regard to Vandenberg

and several other smaller North County locales). High levels of education have

been found to predict environmentalist attitudes in general (Dunlap 1975; Lauber

1978; Protash and Baldassarre 1983; Clark and Goetz 1994) and opposition to offshore

oil (among Californians) in particular (Smith 1995: Fig. 5).

57

1980 1990

Bueliton * 39757

Carpinteria 19,804 34,827

Guadalupe * 22,169

Lompoc 18,374 31,702

Mission Hills * 41,766

Santa Barbara 20,376 33,667

Santa Maria 18,253 29,492

Santa Ynez * 51,697

Solvang * 36,841

Vandenberg AFB * 27,005

Vandenberg Village * 49,176
Table 13: Adults with B.A. degree as percentage of total population, 1970-1990

* Indicates data not available

Even more striking than differences in education are differences in housing

costs. The South Coast's housing costs have long been higher than the rest of the

state and nation (even though, until 1974, they were at parity with the U.S. as a

whole), but the differences have grown greatly over the years (see Table 14).

Table 14: Median housing value, 1970-1990 (in dollars)

58

* Indicates data not available

These high housing costs, which spill over into high rental costs as well,

mean that those who live on the South Coast pay a housing premium to do so.

Either a larger proportion of their income goes into shelter, or they live under more

crowded conditions than their counterparts in the North County; we suspect it is a

combination of both. Perhaps this is a reason why homelessness is apparent in the

city of Santa Barbara (where panhandling is common), while it is much less evident

in North County cities and towns.

1970 1980 1990

Bueliton * * 19.5

Carpinteria 8.6 16.7 22.6

Guadalupe 3.4 3.8 4.2

Lompoc 12.0 13.2 14.2

Mission Hills * 11.6 20.7

Santa Barbara 18.1 28 33.1

Santa Maria 9.7 10.5 10.7

Santa Ynez * 28.8 29.1

Solvang * 19.6 24.4

Vandenberg AFB 17.2 20.7 27.6

Vandenberg Village * 27.5 29.3

Source: U.S. Census.

1970 1980 1990

Buellton 21,100 * * Carpinteria 22,800 * Guadalupe 11,700 * * Lompoc 17,200 118,041 144,600

Santa Barbara 25,700 209,989 346,900

Santa Maria 17,400 117,564 141,900

Solvang 25,500 * * Source: U.S. Census.
For the South Coast, another distinguishing characteristic is a bimodal age

distribution - the presence of the university, other colleges (Westmont, Brooks,

Santa Barbara Community College), and the tourist industry attract a

disproportionate number of the young. Retirement brings (or retains) a

disproportionate number of elderly (an adage used to be that Santa Barbara was "for

the newly wed and the nearly dead"). These two groups, the young and the old,

show modest incomes that obscure more affluent lifestyles and consumption habits.

Retired people draw on wealth in various combinations of pensions, social security,

CDs, stocks, bonds, and so forth. Their income stream understates their wealth and

level of security.

Young people's low wages obscure their actual class backgrounds, which

especially for the university students tend to be quite high. Because UCSB has

relatively few students commuting from their parents' homes, it has long drawn its

students from wealthier backgrounds than have the other campuses in the UC

system (Kelley 1981: 16, 104).31 The "student-ghetto" of Isla Vista, adjacent to UCSB,

with an average age of 23 and very high rents for crowded apartment blocks, has per

capita income of $6,007, lower than the urban ghetto of Compton (Potter 1995: 28).

This surely misleads about actual life-styles in the city as well. Some of the young

people, whether students or not, work in jobs like waiting tables where tips are

greater than reported wages. Again, many of these people are from higher social

circles than even their combined tips and wages would indicate; waiting tables in a

fashionable city can be a way-station to some other occupational niche. Students

attending the other local institutions have a similar profile; even the local

community college is distinctive in the number of non-local (including

international) students who attend. The point here is that, for various reasons, the

income levels of these "ordinary people," young and old, do not give a good sense of

their cultural location. For various reasons, quality of life issues loom larger for

them than for other types of workers.

During this time period, among newly arriving think-tanks and cultural

establishments were the Maharishi University in Isla Vista (before its move to

Fairfield, Iowa), the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Esperia Foundation, the

Fielding Institute (a national graduate degree institution), the Buckminster Fuller

Society, and Pacifica Graduate Institute (which offers degrees in psychotherapy).

Although not all were in place when the event occurred, it was this kind of social

grouping that would be part of the local mix that would witness at close-hand "the

spill heard round the world."

311n 1978, for example, only three percent of UCSB students reported their fathers worked as

skilled laborers, compared to eight percent who were physicians, 6 percent lawyers, and 14

percent engineers (See KeIley 1981: 104).

59
The great spill and immediate aftermath

As it turned out, the federal government's first major lease sale in the Santa

Barbara Channel included the tract upon which Union Oil was to construct the

"Platform A" that was to blow-out in 1969 and create the Santa Barbara Oil Spill.

When the Army Corps of Engineers issued Union's permit (the Corps was the

relevant reviewing agency at the time), the city of Santa Barbara had filed protests,

citing the lack of a public hearing as a primary grievance (hearings, indeed, were not

required by law; the city could only make a moral claim). On January 28, 1969, the

oil hit the water with monumental consequences in Santa Barbara. For America, oil

drilling, as well as many other ways of doing business in the environment, was

never to be the same.

Estimates of the scale of the leak ranged from 10,000 to 780,000 barrels; one

Coast Guard estimate put the loss at 100,000 barrels, while a UCSB scientist came up

with the 780,000 figure. Whatever the volume of crude, it had stunning visual and

emotional impact as it came ashore across the city of Santa Barbara's waterfront and

Montecito. It took eight days to bring the gushing spill under control; leakage

persisted,. however, through fractures in the ocean bottom, and on the one year

anniversary of the accident, there was still an outflow of five to ten barrels per day

(Easton 1972: 293) with some leakage persisting for an unknown number of years

ever after (perhaps up to the present). Beaches were covered with tar for a stretth of

about 40 miles (although not over this whole distance at any one point in time), as

oil came ashore at various locations over the weeks and months. Clean-up efforts

were conspicuously tedious and primitive, with work crews raking straw over the

sands, each day's work undone by the next day's incoming tide of oil. Evidence of

the spill was stifi apparent months after.

Tourism for the year 1969 was off by 20 percent; although it is difficult to

know what proportion of loss was caused by the spill, local sentiment considered the

long-term threat to tourism as great indeed (Easton 1972: 266; Mead and Sorenson

1970). Ironically, and not known at the time, later studies would show the spill (and

cumulative spills) were considerably less degrading for the Channel habitat than

routine pollution from urban sources, although the urban effects were of a longterm variety compared to the short-term effects of the spill - made more dramatic by

the obviousness of the cause.32

The outpouring of anti-oil sentiment was on a vast scale, both locally and

nationally. At the local level, virtually all civic and business organizations, at least

in the South Coast area, denounced the oil industry and asked for new regulations,

if not outright ending of oil operations in the Channel. This included the Santa

32The noxious effects were indirect: sewer outfalls and similar sources of pollution caused an

urchin proliferation which, in turn, damaged kelp forests which, in turn, eroded conditions

needed by other varieties of marine life (see McEvoy 1986).

60
Barbara Chamber of Commerce and county government. Prominent citizens

immediately formed a new organization, Get Oil Out! (GOO). As the name implied,

the stance was uncompromising. The leadership included the social elements that

make up Santa Barbara's environmental activism. Of the half-dozen or so initial

founders, several were professional staff at local high-technology firms. Two were

the prominent mystery writers Margaret Millar and Ross MacDonald, the latter of

whom made the oil spill the backdrop for his best-selling detective novel, Sleeping

Beauiij. Another two were Montecito society notables Alvin Weingand and Lois

Sidenberg (daughter of a countess and well-noted horse woman and sports aviator

in her younger days). GOO officials would eventually gain what was claimed to be

200,000 petition signatures forwarded to President Nixon demanding an end to

drilling

When results were not forthcoming as quicidy or as completely as the locals

demanded, "a current of gloom and despair," in the words of a Wall Sfreet Journal

report, seemed to take hold. The president of one of the region's leading R&D

firms, an international company called Sloan Technology, came to comment:

We are so God-damned frustrated. The whole democratic process seems to be

falling apart. Nobody responds to us, and we end up doing things

progressively less reasonable. This town is going to blow up if there isn't

some reasonable attitude expressed by the Federal Government - nothing

seems to happen except that we lose."

Various other organizations joined what was to be a decades-long battle,

including the Citizens Planning Association, established in 1960, and local chapters

of the Sierra Club, the League of Women Voters and the Audubon Society (with an

impressive 750 members at the time in the local chapter [Macdonald 1972]). A

Community Environmental Council was formed that was to grow into an endowed

think-tank with international recognition (and a paid staff of 60, including workers

at its recycling centers). Directly critical to the future of oil was the creation of the

Environmental Defense Center (lL)C), which came to be staffed by four lawyers and

support staff of an additional four, plus interns, and volunteers. Spread across

many issue areas besides oil, the EDC has played the informal role of galvanizing

citizens, advising local governments, entering litigation, and threatening litigation.

Some groups were to be one-shot and short-lived, arising to oppose specific projects

over the next years or to do battle on particular issues, elections, and referenda (e.g.

sonar testing, on-shore facilities, air quality issues, etc.). These include County

Environmental Alliance, Santa Barbara Coastwatch, the Scenic Shoreline

Preservation Conference, Citizens to Preserve Zaca Lake, and Citizens Alert.

Others, like the Surfrider Foundation, Citizens for Goleta Valley, and Save Eliwood

Shores were to persist, albeit without paid staffs, into the present, with still other

groups forming to replace those that have passed from the scene.

South Coast locals carried out their battles with a repertoire that varied from

hot-headed and colorful to studied and coolly strategic. Besides marches and

61
demonstrations, there was a sail-in, in which boat owners moved on to a platform

site to block the edifice from being erected (this was good international press).

When oil first came, neither citizen groups nor local government staff had much

relevant expertise, although the county's long-standing prior experience with oil,

both terrestrial and in the tidelands, meant they were starting from a point well

beyond zero. But there were no "imports" from government agencies in Texas or

Louisiana to guide local policy makers; staff expertise was all home-grown. Many of

our informants observed that this expertise grew gradually; both citizens and people

in government "grew into" their roles.

There were groups formed over the years to promote development, including

in the South Coast, but none of them - at least until the 1990s - actually supported

oil explicitly even though they strenuously objected to the "anti-business" policies

of local government in other spheres. Among the pro-development groups have

been Santa Barbara Tomorrow and Citizens for a Balanced Community, both

organized by business people, including leaders from real estate, construction, and

banking.

In the aftermath of the spill, the local media mobilized anti-oil sentiment

with consistent, striking, and extraordinary coverage and editorial commentary.

The News-Press coverage was massive by any standard. We counted the number of

stories in the first eleven days after the spifi, and compared it with coverage in the

Ven turn Slur-Free Press and San Luis Cbispo Telegnvn -Tribune, the papers of the two closest

jurisdictions to the spill. While no oil ever came ashore at San Luis Obispo, it

actually hit Ventura County beaches before Santa Barbara County's. Ventura city

beaches and the Ventura Harbor were shortly inundated (Chart 7 shows the results

of our counts of news stories). Santa Barbara coverage was approximately three-fold

Ventura's and five times the coverage in San Luis Obispo. There were pictures of

struggling animals caked in oil and birds cradled in would-be rescuers hands (see

Photo 6). Other photos showed children in tears and citizens irate (these images

were also presented on local television - and picked up by national news media).

62
Chart 7: The First 10 Days of the Oil Spill, Coverage in the Tn-Counties Santa Ventura- San Luis Santa Ventura - San Luis Bathara- Articles Obispo- Barbara- Editorials Obispo- Articles Articles Editorials & Letters Editorials & Letters & Letters 01/29/69 01/30/69 01/31/69 0211169 02/2169 fl2/3169 2f4I69 D215169 2/6/69 2I7/69 Ventura Star-Free Press, and San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune Source: Data compiled by authors from the Santa Barbara News-Press,
11* ji._j J 4. .... 4

- Photo 5: La Mesa oil field (1934). Reprinted from Pranks and Lambert (1985).

-

64

Photo 6: Santa Barbara Channel oil spill clean-up. Reprinted from Kallrnan (1984).
For the first year, each day's News-Press front page contained a daily reminder

that the leak continued even after the gusher had been contained. It ran a score-box

that read, simply: "_th day of the oil spill, when will it end?" We similarly made

counts of editorials, commentaries and letters to the editor across the three papers

(see Chart 7). These results are even more lopsided. The opinions expressed in the

News-Press were overwhelmingly negative. The ordinarily mild-mannered paper (its daily editorial page motto was "Disagree if you must, but don't be disagreeable") used language as intense as any oppositional group. Under the headline, "Menace

in the Channel," an editorial concludes: "All offshore drilling should be halted at

once and until there is absolute assurance that there can be no recurrence" (&infri

Parhzm News-Press, January 30, 1969). The next day's editorial, entitled "Oil outrage

against public," ended with: "At the moment, the oil companies may be legally within their rights to drill, but they are compounding a crime against the South

Coast public at large" (.9mhz Barbam News-Press, January 31, 1969). The paper ran

additional pages to accommodate the deluge of letters to the editor coming in (372 published in the first month) - virtually all denouncing oil.

The .9mhz Math Tim es, although providing less attention to the spill, took an

editorial position similar to that of the News-Press. It ran a front page editorial of

complaint on February 6 (the spill was January 28) and then followed up with a

second editorial the next day on the regular editorial page in which it noted Santa

Barbara's rare beauty and the city's effort to prevent drilling. This editorialsays that

until the reason for the spill could be found and corrected, then all drilling must be

stopped. Still another editorial (Feb. 10) used the spill to argue for local control of offshore drilling

By way of contrast, the Ventura paper took the more equivocal stance that the

event was indeed unfortunate but a part of doing business and reparable. The

Ventura paper also pointed to the costs and other problems the spill created for the

industry itself. Santa Barbara media focused exclusively on the damage inflicted by

the spill and the irresponsibility of Union Oil and the federal government's policy

on the Channel. The paper described in detail that the blow-out took place because

Union requested and received a variance from the usual casing requirements (the

variance was granted by Interior Department's Geologic Survey, at that time

responsible for regulation of drilling and production). The fact of the variance,

interpreted as somehow operating outside the rules, was prominently featured as

the cause of the spill and the argument made that the government was deeply

incriminated for having allowed drilling in the first place and for so poorly

enforcing its own regulations. The paper also detailed the state attorney general's

difficulties in finding academic experts willing to testify against oil; the angle was

that the universities too were "in the pockets" of petroleum.

The News-Press elevated coverage of oil pollution incidents elsewhere in the

world, helping form a coherent picture of oil exploitation as dangerous and

degrading everywhere and under all circumstances. The News-Press ran front-page

stories on the economics and politics of the industry, exposing in muckraking style

65
the low level of income taxes it paid to the federal government (because of

"loopholes") and the large subsidies it (then) received to maintain the price of U.S.

oil above world-market prices.33 The paper also shared many of the suspicions of.

anti-oil groups that the Interior Department was "in bed" with the oil companies,

and that acadenucs, including those in the University of California, were similarly

mere hired hands of the industry. Thus there could be only suspiciousness of any

remedies promoted by the federal government or academic experts, short of an end

to drilling altogether. A litany of "broken promises" and "betrayals" was recited.

Early offshore structures (albeit in state tidelands) were left behind, some to rust

down to water line, exposed for years after at low-tide. Offshore platforms were

supposed to be invisible (assurances from Secretary Udali to State Senator Alvin

Weingand), but they were obvious enough from the shore. Despite constant efforts,

the locals were denied standing vis a vis the Department of the Interior. Union

officials had initially minimized the size of the ocean slick and the rate of spillage.

The Coast Guard was accused of deliberately delaying notifying local authorities that

the spifi had taken place. Union Oil was castigated for only confirming the fact of

the eruption 23 hours after it had occurred. The media conveyed a perception of oil

as pollutant and oil as beyond control.

According to the News-Press reporter charged with handling the oil beat, the

paper saw itself as "making the battle" against oil with everyone else backing them

up. This reporter, Robert Sollen, became full-time environmental correspondent

(perhaps the first such beat on any paper in the U.S., and certainly the only one in a

community as small as Santa Barbara). In 17 years of covering oil, he says he was

never interfered with by management. An ardent environmentalist (later a leader

of the local Sierra Club chapter in his retirement), the paper's choice of him for this

role could only generate further coverage critical of oil.

Although a story in a locality in which no national media are permanently

based, the oil spill generated massive national coverage, with most of it taking the

anti-oil perspective found in the News-Press. The symbolic deaths of birds and other

"human interest" angles were used to tell a story of beauty destroyed and ecological

mayhem. The New Yoik Times ran 22 news stories on the spill; the WashinnThst,

with major (usually cover) stories in Time (Feb. 14, 1969), Newsweek (March 3);

Life (June 13) SaturdatjReview (May 10), SienuClubBullelin (April 10), arid Sports 111w, ruled

(April 10) - the last three articles written by Santa Barbarans. Such national (indeed,

global) coverage helped make the blowout at Platform A a world-wide media event,

considered by many the precipitating incident of the modern environment

movement (Easton 1972; Mowrey and Redmond 1993).

Key among the consequences was federal passage, in 1969, of the National

Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California's passage of the California

33Coverage included testimony in the State Legislature and reports from other papers (see e.g.

Mead 1969; Rennert 1%9).

34For these and other counts of coverage, see Molotch and Lester (1975).

66
Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), both of which required environmental impact

assessments of major public works projects or those requiring governmental

permits. These are the landmark laws that gave birth to the environmental review

process and the vast data collection apparatus that has come about, as well the

consulting industry that carries out the analyses.35 Because OCS leases are on federal

lands, NEPA also meant that offshore oil development would come under the law's

requirements. Oil development in the Channel would henceforth be held

accountable to the environmental review process. Indeed, it is likely that few

regions in the country require as much environmental review as Santa Barbara

county jurisdictions, and in regard to many forms of development, not just oil.36

But oil would hardly be exempted in the NEPA context.

The oil spill was also a likely force behind creation of the California Coastal

Conservation Commission, the watchdog agency charged with protecting the state's

coastline. Passed by state-wide referenda in 1972, all lands adjacent to the coast and

the tidelands themselves came under the special review procedures of the six

regional coastal commissions as well as the state-wide body. Again, because of its

long coasthne, much of Santa Barbara County's development potential came under

Coastal Commission jurisdiction, and any proposed onshore facilities to support

offshore oil became subject to commission approval. Again, such changes create a

longer time-line for any development proposal, more opportunities for public

review, and more openings for legal and political challenges to a proposed project.

A new set of institutional arrangements altered local conditions of oil

development, as with development in general. Decisions like those that had earlier

generated the Channel leasing program and the permitting of each platform would

not again occur without public participation. And this change, in turn, generated

new local energies and modes of community organization as citizenry took part in a

newly developed public process for judging the value of projects.

In the Santa Barbara case, it is dear, the new processes took hold in a context

that was ready and willing Events and circumstances had come together by the late

1960's to create a very particular type of socioeconomic region. There were an

unusually large number of very rich people with concomitant senses of entitlement

and resources at their command. There were strong currents of art,

experimentation, of seekers of Truth and spiritual values. The university was in

place, attracting hundreds of faculty and other researchers, thousands of students,

and providing its own sort of draw for retirees who valued the cultural resources of

a significant educational institution nearby. Volunteers' expertise could be put to

use analyzing environmental documents and industry proposals. There were

35The scope and significance of this legislation was greatly increased with "Friends of

Mammoth' decision, in which the California Supreme Court ruled that projects could be

challenged on the basis of the adequacy of the environmental review that had take place.

This extensive use of the environmental review process in Santa Barbara compared to other

areas has been well documented. See Warner and Molotch (1992).

67
strong organizations devoted to planning, and with the oil spifi there was an almost

religious conception of the need to reform the way the earth was used and local

land-use policy conducted.

New community mobilizations

Just as prior arenas of local activism helped form the response to the oil spill,

the events at Platform A spilled over into other realms of mobilization. The civil

rights movement, anti-war movement, and student-power movement gaining

ground in other parts of the country had largely bypassed Santa Barbara. Despite

having a student body of 12,000, in 1%7 TJCSB was showing few signs of

participating in the great upheavals. All this was to change dramatically with a

student protest, led by a young anthropology professor, of oil-supply operations at

the city's wharf - otherwise given over to restaurants and recreational activities.

The quiescent "campus by the sea" shortly arose with great furor. From oil, the

increasingly strident student activists turned to saving the job of the professor who

had led their protest at the wharf (whose teaching post was threatened on other

grounds); this escalated into a general protest over civil rights, "overbuilding" and

other environmental conditions in Isla Vista, the University's policies toward

students, and - most importantly - the war in Viet Nam. Continuing

demonstrations and agitation on campus and nearby resulted in, first, bringing in

the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department to bolster local police, and then

occupation by the National Guard. Making national headlines, the Isla Vista branch

of the Bank of America was burned to the ground on February 25, 1970, as part of an

all-day and all-night general protest (Potter and Sullivan 1970). More than 500

students were arrested in various waves over the next several months; one student

was shot dead by law enforcement (ironically protecting property at the time), and

an innocent campus janitor was killed by a bomb planted at the Faculty Club. The

tactics of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs deputies brought in to quell the

disturbances were condemned by the otherwise anti-protester News-Press.

Investigations would reveal illegal entering of homes, widespread arrests of

innocent people, and other allegations of mass civil rights violations (Kelley 1981:

55).

These events, controversial and searing, nevertheless added still another

element to the local mix: a mobilized student community that provided support in

many other types of political activities. Students worked in election campaigns, and

when 18 year olds got the vote in 1970, Isla Vista was to provide huge voting blocks

for left-of-center candidates at the national level and for liberal-environmental

candidates running for the supervisorial seat serving the student district. In the

early 1970s, UCSB students not only tended to be liberal like youth throughout the

country, but more liberal. So, for example, a UCLA survey of entering students at

"highly selective" institutions across the country revealed that whereas 40 percent of

entering students nationwide described themselves as "liberal," the figure for UCSB

68
was 53 percent. By the late 70s, the numbers were all moving to the right, but UCSB

students remained to the left of their counterparts elsewhere. This included

Berkeley, whose entering students were more conservative than those at UCSB

(Kelley 1981: 105).

Especially significant is the particular meaning that being 'liberal" seems to

have had for UCSB students. The campus established the country's second

Environmental Studies Program, immediately swamped with student demand (it is

still a popular major). In the 1972 UCLA survey of entering student attitudes, 53

percent of UCSB students said that an essential or very important life objective was

involvement in environmental campaigns, and 59 percent said "keeping up with

political affairs" was essential or very important (Kelley 1981: 105). All of these

numbers were to decline by the end of the decade; in 1978, UCSB students ranking

involvement in environmental campaigns as an important life objective had

declined to 38 percent, a still robust number and higher than the percent at Berkeley

(31 percent). Further, these data are based on entering students, but research

findings on UCSB students, and students generally, show a shift to the left as they

move through college. The UCSB campus student profile in the decade following

the spill was thus particularly to the political left, and especially strong on

environmental activism.

A core group of the activists created a short-lived Isla Vista newspaper called

Smilegic Ham let. With financial support from a few Montecito philanthropists and

others, the core staff followed up with a more long-lasting weekly paper, the Sania

ParbaraNewsand Review. This paper lasted from 1972-1986 until it merged with a

second weekly and became the currently robust Sanla Bathanzlndeperident(whose

owners have recently created the Ventura Independent to serve the adjacent county to

the south).

Especially in its News and Review days, Santa Barbara had an alternative paper

that was intensely political, and relative to most media in the country, far to the left.

It opposed oil development with even more fervor and certainly more consistency

than the News-Pres, but in addition fought development across the board. It

provided positive coverage of environmental protest organizations, including the

specifics of their projects and complaints against local government and developers.

On oil issues, it joined the News-Press in giving not only detailed information, but

providing specifics of just how citizens could take action: where and when hearings

were to take place, the relevant issues at stake, locations of protests, and so forth.

These media facilitated not only local knowledge, but also local action.

A new generation of land-use regulations

In this context, politics was to greatly change in the city and county of Santa

Barbara. A harbinger of future events, in retrospect, was an earlier and

unprecedented voter initiative that overturned the county's rezomng of land to

69
allow Humble Oil to develop a processing plant near Carpinteria. Humble had

purchased the lease on February 6, 1968, and by June 27 of the same year, the

Planning Commission had rezoned the property - amazingly quick service by later

standards. Almost as quickly, an opposition developed, gained the necessary

signatures, and defeated the rezoning at a November 5 county-wide vote.

A post-spill landmark was a 1970 county-wide vote that reversed the Board of

Supervisors' rezomng approval to permit a large-scale luxury housing development

and polo dub on the ocean in a rural area north of the city, well-beyond Goleta at El

Capitan beach. This reversal, carried two-to-one, was noteworthy on a number of

grounds: it also was county-wide, meaning that environmentalists again could

prevail even when more conservative North County voters were participating. It

also registered a new level of concern for the land; such luxury development had

not previously been thwarted in the sort of 'gentlemen's agreement" that had

fostered "clean" (and affluent!) development in the past3'

Local political changes followed in rapid-fire succession. In part to gain

planning time to create proper methods for environmental review, the county

passed a near-complete moratorium on new construction (in place for less than a

year until the more rigorous procedures were set up). County voters on the South

Coast, in 1972, elected two environmentalists to the Board of Supervisors (James

Slater and UCSB professor Frank Frost). Environmental regulations were refined

and expanded continuously, with a major change coming in 1974 with the creation

of a semi-autonomous County Office of Environmental Quality which, among

other responsibilities, would have the power to select firms carrying out

environmental review for developers, even though developers were required to

pay the costs of their services. The county had become a leader, "unique" in its

procedures (Graves and Simon 1980: 38) which would be praised by state officials

both for their effectiveness at "full disclosure" of project impacts as well as their

"streamlining" of the process. This Office of Environmental Quality would grow

and build strong in-house expertise that would come into play in fateful ways for

the oil industry. In 1977, it was elevated to full department status as the Department

of Environmental Resources, and all oil development impacts came under its

purview.

Despite bitter criticism from two North County supervisors and two negative

grand jury reports, the department not only survived but grew in both size of staff

and range of its activities (a later grand jury, differently constituted politically,

would praise the quality of the departments work as "virtually unassailable").38

The situation thus evolved that, in part because of the spifi but also in line with a

37Part of the drama of these events was the arrest of two elderly Santa Sarbara women for

irregularities in how they handled some of the petitions that placed the measure on the ballot.

The ensuing sympathy for the women further galvanized support for their goals.

38"Grand Jury Urges County Effort for New Housing," Santa Barbara News Press, July 8, 1980, as

cited in Graves and Simon (1980 87).

70
long history of local innovation, the county of Santa Barbara developed leadership

in the new procedures of environmental review, and the segment of county staff

responsible for this leadership came to play an important role in regulating oil

development. In part, this build-up in capacity was made possible by the fact that so

many projects were coming together at once. This both forced action and made it

economically feasible to hire and train a range of specialists who could work

together on the common challenge (Lima and Woolley 1991: 7). In 1983, the county

created its own Energy Division within the Resource Management Department,

with its operations financed by oil industry development fees.

The reorganization of county planning was a response to the vastness of the

projects being proposed and the county's historic concern to maintain amenities.

The developments were of a scale unprecedented in the history of the county;

indeed they were large by the standards of many countries. The need to consider so

many documents, reports, complaints, permits, environmental impact reports

(EIRs) concerning oil created an "agenda glut" (Lima and Woolley 1991) for the

County Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission. The county's staff

agencies were similarly impacted in their efforts to assess impacts and plan for them,

especially given the county's ongoing commitment to control the consequences of

development. It was not just the planning departments that were affected, but other

agencies as well - most notably the Air Pollution Control District which bore much

of the brunt of monitoring air quality impacts (Santa Barbara's sunshine and

mountain proximity are smog-inducing). First, through assistance of other agencies

(the State Coastal Commission) and later through fees imposed on the oil industry,

staff and budgets sharply rose. The Energy Division grew from 12 positions in 1984

to 25 in 1990; the local Air Pollution Control District increased from 17 to 110 over

the same period, with a budget increase of similar magnitude (Lima and Woolley

1991: 9).

Here is a list of the major new projects, one that understates local

government planning burdens because of additional projects that were proposed but

later withdrawn (for further detail see Appendix A: Santa Barbara County

Timeline).

1974 Exxon's onshore Las Flores Canyon processing faculty begins 6 year

permitting process. In 1975, South Coast activists succeed in

subjecting zoning approval to county referendum vote but fail to

defeat project. In 1978, Exxon initiates use of surrogate offshore

storage and treatment facility while county approval for onshore

facility remains pending; county finally reaches agreement with

Exxon for facility operation in 1980.

1979 Federal Lease Sale 48 offers 148 OCS tracts from Point Conception to

Mexico border. Results in nine active leases covermg 23,040 acres

71
72

and two offshore platforms (Harvest and Hermosa) erected in the

next five years.

1980 Federal Lease Sale 53 offers 111 OCS tracts from Point Conception to

the Oregon border. Results in 38 active leases covering 202,660 acres

and two offshore platforms (Irene and Hidalgo) erected in the next

six years.

1981 Federal Lease Sale 68 offers 140 OCS tracts from Point Conception to

the Mexico border. Results in four active leases covering 15,860

acres.

1982 Federal Lease Sale 73 offers 173 OCS tracts from Point Conception

and Morro Bay. Results in eight active leases covering 43,801 acres.

1982 Federal Lease Sale RS-2 resells 12 OCS tracts. Results in two active

leases covering 11,386 acres.

1982 Arco caps oil and gas seepage area off Coal Oil Point with two giant

steel pyramids to satisfy required emissions trade-off by the county's

Air Resources Board and the state.

1984 Federal Lease Sale 80 offers 657 OCS tracts from Point Conception to

the Mexico border. Results in one active lease covering 456 acres.

From late 70s With cumulation of federal OCS lease sales, other proposed

onshore installations proceed through various stages of permitting

process but are never constructed: an LNG terminal, two supply

bases, a crew base, and additional processing facilities.

1985 County approves Chevron's proposal for onshore Gaviota

processing facility. The facility is built and operative by 1987.

1995 Mobil proposes Clearview slant-drilling project (as part of Ellwood

onshore facility expansion) to develop tidelands reserves. Mobil

withdraws its application in February, 1996.

In the city of Santa Barbara, a reform slate oriented toward growth control

took over the City Council in 1972 - for the first time providing an

environmentalist majority in the city. This majority has persisted, on a more or less

continuous basis, up until the present day. It pursued even stronger anti-oil policies

than its predecessor, taking the step of banning oil activities at the city wharf - as

had been demanded by the student protesters several years prior. The new council

supported a change in the City Charter limiting all business buildings to 60 feet in
height and houses, apartments, arid hotels to 45 feet (about four stories); this

followed a public vote aimed at blocking a proposed eight-story "high rise" (a project supported by the News-Press, whose founder Thomas Storke was to occupy the top

floor). Then came a change to the city's general plan that cut much of the allowable

residential densities in half; this was part of a comprehensive growth control

program that zoned the city for a maximum population of 85,000 people (an

addition of about 12,000 from the existing 1974 level). Finally in 1989, the city

imposed sharp limits (through a public vote, "Measure E") on additions of office,

conunercial, or industrial space, permitting only a modest increment to the existing

total over the next 20 years (about 500,000 square feet of new space). In neighboring

Goleta, a moratorium on water hook-ups (in 1973) became, in effect, a strong growth

control mechanism39 - and is only now in the process of being lifted. At various

times, other jurisdictions - Montecito and the small enclave of Summerland - had

their own versions of hook-up moratoria. Virtually all these actions (except to a

degree those against oil) took place with most local media, particularly the NewsPress, strongly opposed because they were deemed excessive and unreasonable

controls over local business.

In the North County, no city or local community had any political or social profile resembling that of Santa Barbara. Although both North County

supervisorial districts elected environmental liberals (Dianne Owens and Robert

Hedlund) and one moderate (Toru Miyoshi) during the period after 1969, local

political leaders were overwhelmingly pro-business and pro-oil (Owens and Hedlund were forced out after a single term; Miyoshi served two). Santa Maria has had, at most, a token environmentalist now and then on its council. Because the

two North County districts could usually be relied on to provide pro-oil supervisors,

any shift in the sentiments among the three other supervisors provides a majority

at least somewhat sympathetic to petroleum development - at least compared to the

city of Santa Barbara's leadership.

Besides the differences in socioeconomic base (particularly education levels

and occupational role) and cultural tone between the North County and South

Coast, there are other plausible ways to explain the varied responses to offshore oil

development. Oil development in the North County has taken place in locations

generally hidden from major population centers, whether at inland valleys or offshore (most of the offshore platforms have been farther south, and North County

cities are not on the coast in any event).40 Certainly important in the north-south

difference is the contrast in the organizational infrastructure, international

reputation, and self-consciousness between the two areas.

But increasingly over time and throughout many county jurisdictions and within county government itself, there came to be a new understanding of how any

This is probably one of the few growth control mechanisms of the many enacted in California

that has actually curtailed growth (Warner and Molotch 1992).

40This point was made by Robert Sollen (see Graves and Simon 1980: 14).

73
additional growth, whether residential or business, would be monitored. Even as

more conservative leaders took power in various jurisdictions, there could be no

going back on certain ways of thinking. A new kind of logic was imposed on

development that shifted the grounds of debate. A project would have to:

Pay its own way. As particularly revealed by studies conducted by the city of

Santa Barbara, population gains, on the whole, resulted in a net loss in public

revenue. A burden of proof was thus laid on any new project that they would

not be a fiscal liability. This could be accomplished by the developer paying

special fees or in some other way mitigating the damage. Many local business

spokesmen (and the News-Press) fought such provisions, and the degree of

mitigation has remained an ongoing series of contests in the city, the county, and

other jurisdictions as well.

Enhance amenities. Again1 city analyses pointed out that additional growth

would erode citizen access to existing amenities like beachfront and parks. The

burden of proof was on developers to show their project would not do this or to

mitigate with special fees or other mechanisms any detraction from quality of

life.

Sustain the environment. City voters had passed an addition to the City

Charter in 1982 for the city to live within local resources" (Santa Barbara City

Charter §1507). This was code language, in particular, for relying on local water

supplies instead of joining the State Water Project. Santa Barbara was the only

county in the state whose voters had rejected the State Water option (in 1979), in

part because of its negative environmental effects in northern California, in part

for fear it would stimulate local growth. Equally as important as the issue of

water use was the fear that new development would further erode air quality.

Santa Barbara's meteorological conditions (including extensive sunshine and

rings of mountains that can trap air in stagnant valleys) make it susceptible to

smog. At the time of the 1977 statewide evaluations, the entire county was

deemed a non-attainment area for oxidant; the South Coast was in nonattainment for carbon monoxide, and the North County was in non-attainment

for particulates.41

The upshot was, again, a shift in the burden of proof to developers to show

their projects would not harm the natural environment. They would have to

show, on a case-by-case basis, that their project's pollution would be offset by

pollution abatements they would create, that their water use would actually lower

the total amount of water used at the site compared to the prior pattern, or that they

would - in relevant cases - safeguard habitats, open spaces, viewsheds or other

environmental resources.

41 State of California Clean Air Act Amendments, 40 C. F. R., sections 51.12, 107, 110, 174

(1973); also, Graves and Simon (1989: 70, 71).

74
Once again, all these policies and programs were stridently opposed by

business groups, but through the kinds of people they elected to office or by direct referenda, citizens overcame such resistance and made environmentalism local

policy and the basis of city government with at least some carry-over to county government as well.

Some policies do change as a result of the balance at any given moment on

the County Board of Supervisors. For example, when the County first created an

Office of Environmental Quality in 1973 (to oversee all planning and development programs), it appointed a highly energetic and experienced administrator as director

(Albert Reynolds, a former State Department official). He was to become thoroughly

informed about local oil issues and was known as a formidable regulator or

alternatively, as portrayed by a. Grand Jury investigation requested by a North

County Supervisor, infused with "bureaucratic self-interest."

As further enhancement of the scope of the agency, a supportive majority in

1977 raised the Office of Environmental Quality to full department status as the Department of Environmental Resources, which was, in turn, in 1981 merged with

the Planning Department to become a new "Department of Resource Management." Although Reynolds was widely expected to become head of this new department he had put together, a political shift in the board's leanings not only deprived him of

the post but caused his unceremonious firing. In 1991, the name of the department was changed still again to "Department of Planning and Development" a signal of more pro-development board sentiments, not only toward oil, but toward business

in general. In terms of actual policy shifts, however, precedents make it hard to

implement strong reversals; public watchdogs remain on duty, ready to create

controversy, litigate to delay, or mount initiative campaigns.

Public sentiments: Evidence from surveys, votes, and hearings

This is the changing, litigious, and polarized context in which oil has had to work during its years in the Channel. The oil industry has managed to prospect, to drill, to produce, to process, and to transport but only under conditions of threat and counter-threat, oppositional referenda, litigation and counter-litigation. On

very .many occasions, and especially in the South Coast, it has also had terrible press and widespread public denunciation. It was not just the oil companies who came in for local rage, but also government - and most especially the federal government,

particularly the Department of the Interior and its minerals management arms.

Opinion polls taken in 1972, 1988, and 1990 do indicate persistent local concerns about offshore oil. The first county survey reported 53 percent viewed Channel offshore oil as a "serious problem." While only about a fourth wanted all drilling halted, 56 percent favored tighter regulations (Hetrick 1973: 72, 74). In the 1988 county-wide survey which asked about opposition to further drilling, 54

percent of county residents opposed new activity, with 39 percent in favor. The 1990

75
poll yielded almost identical results (Lankford 1990).42 Statewide surveys again produce very similar majorities opposed to additional drilling off California. The Santa Barbara North-South County split was in clear evidence in all these surveys. It helps explain still other survey findings (Smith 1995) that California coastal

county populations do not differ much from inland counties in attitude; diversity within coastal counties is likely as great as differences among counties.

An indication of how citizens of different communities felt about the coastal

environment more generally can be gained by inspection of referenda votes at two

points in time after the spill - the 1972 statewide vote to establish the Coastal

Commission (which asked voters to recoginize the coastal zone as a "delicately

balanced ecosystem"), and the 1985 Santa Barbara County ballot measures to

consolidate oil processing facilities at either one or two coastal locations. Support for these initiatives indicate not only an environmental awareness but a willingness

to increase state and local regulatory power to preserve coastal resources.

Santa Barbara County voters supported the 1972 measure by a 61.9% majority. As Table 15 shows, however, support for the initiative varied by community, with South Coast locales in support and North County towns in opposition:

Table 15: Votes cast on 1972 Coastal Zone Conservation Act

Source: Elections Division, Santa Barbara County Clerk Recorder Assessor

Strongest support came from the city of Santa Barbara (67%); weakest support was

from Santa Maria (43%).

This north-south difference tended to persist across all county votes relevant to the environment, but county majorities consistently passed environmental measures at the polls. In all ten Santa Barbara area referenda (city and county)

involving environment and growth issues between 1967 and 1983, the

environmentalist position prevailed (Sollen I 983b).

By 1985 the environmentalist position was becoming less reliable as a predictor of election outcomes. In that year, the county electorate was given two propositions explicitly concerning oil development - ballot measures A and B.

These surveys were conducted by Richard Hertz consulting. See also Smith (1995: 12).

76

Yes No

Carpinteria 55.58% 44.42%

Guadalupe 45.26% 54.74%

Lompoc 47.38% 52.62%

Santa Barbara 67.17% 32.83%

Santa Maria 42.58% 57.42%

Total, unincorporated areas 64.52% 35.48%

Total, County 61.91% 38.09%
Measure A, drafted by Santa Barbara's Environmental Defense Center, called for

consolidation of oil processing facilities at one site on the South Coast (Las Flores

Canyon) and one site in the North County, specified air quality regulations

indicating allowable amounts of pollutants, and sought to ban tankering of Santa

Barbara Channel crude by 1988 (in favor of pipeline transport). Measure B was a

weaker countermeasure placed on the ballot by the then generally pro-oil Board of

Supervisors to undermine Measure A; it was advisory only, recommending the

following:

(1) Strict enforcement of clean air standards, (2) consolidation of oil and gas

processing facilities at two sites (but both on the South Coast, rather than one

south and one north), (3) pipeline transport of oil out of Santa Barbara

County, (4) pipeline transportation of hazardous natural gas liqui4s, propanes, and butanes, and (5) consolidation of marine tanker terminals at

one site.

While support of either measure reflects an interest in environmental

preservation, Measure A would have provided more stringent and binding

controls. As shown in Tables 16 and 17, Measure B was supported almost four to

one, while Measure A failed to carry a majority anywhere in the county:

Table 16: Votes cast on Santa Barbara County Measure A (1985)

Source: sections Division. Santa Barbara County Clerk Recorder Assessor

77

Yes No

Carpinteria 33.77% 66.23%

Guadalupe 14.84% 85.16%

Lompoc 30.31% 69.69%

Santa Barbara 49.09% 50.91%

Santa Maria 15.07% 84.93%

Solvang 27.12% 72.88%

Total, unincorporated areas 39.34% 60.66%

Total, County 37.37% 62.63%
Table 17: Votes cast on Santa Barbara County Measure B (1985)

Source: Elections Division, Santa Barbara County Clerk Recorder Assessor.

Again, the pattern of north-south split was evident; the city of Santa Barbara

showed the most support for Measure A (it almost passed, with over 49%). In Santa Maria, only 15% of voters supported the more stringent initiative. Support was also

low in the North County towns of Guadalupe, Solvang, and Lompoc. While Measure B was supported throughout the county, voting followed a similar pattern

in that support was highest in Santa Barbara and lowest in Guadalupe and Santa Maria.

To gain other evidence of county sentiment toward oil development after the

spill, we carried out detailed studies of public responses at two important oil-related hearings. Whether or not testimony at hearings accurately reflects public opinion, and some evidence indicates it does (Gundry and Heberlein 1984), expressions at hearings are important in themselves. For one thing they have legal force in that evidence of "controversy" associated with a project, under California Environmental Quality Act, is one basis for requiring full-scale environmental reviews of a given development. Hearing testimony also may be covered by the media and in that way spreads concerns and anxieties. Hearings may also introduce

evidence that courts will later rule has not been dealt with adequately by those environmental reviews or by government agencies that may approve a project. There are thus good reasons to take sentiments at hearings seriously.

One hearing we used was for Lease Sale 53, the federal government's

proposal to lease 243 tracts off central and northern California; the hearing for the

lease sale's draft EIR was held in San Luis Obispo on June 27, 1980 and incorporated only the northern end of the Channel. The second hearing we examined was for Lease Sale 68, the proposed lease of 218 tracts off central and southern California,

this sale involving southerly parts of the Channel. This hearing was held in Santa Barbara on July 28-29, 1981. Both of these hearings were held as part of the mandate

to gain public comment on the environmental reviews stating the impacts of each

of the lease sales.

We carried out our examination of these events by:

78

Yes No

Carpinteria 75.03% 24.97%

Guadalupe 69.10% 30.90%

Lompoc 75.60% 24.40%

Santa Barbara 82.78% 17.22%

Santa Maria 73. 14% 26.86%

Solvang 80. 13% 19.87%

Total, unincorporated areas 80.10% 19.90%

Total, County 79.74% 20.26%
Determining the content of the Environmental Impact Reports, in terms of

the volume of discussion given different types of issues (e.g. air quality versus economic impacts, etc.). We counted every line of text and dassified them by their

subject matter, using a previous technique developed by Freudenburg and Gramling

(1994).

Determining the content of public response as represented by statements made at the hearings and letters filed. Again, we precisely counted every line of

every response and classified them according to the kind of issue area they took up.

We then looked at news coverage of the same events and again classified

lines of text, using the same mode of categorization.

In this way, we could study the process of "amplification" - the way content in the Effis were selectively portrayed and reformulated as it moved through

successive stages of "public life."

Comments from Santa Barbara County speakers and correspondents included

29 parties who were opposed to the leases and 28 who were supportive (none were neutral). Positive comments tended to come from the North County rather than

the South Coast and from business groups rather than citizens associations. Of the

ten North County speakers, all were in favor of the sales, while all 32 of those in

opposition were from the South Coast. Of the parties identifying themselves with

business affiliations, all 12 supported the sales, while 23 of the 34 unaffiliated

individuals or representatives of citizens associations were opposed.43 What is most apparent is that while the EIR focuses on technical issues (assessments of impacts on

endangered species, other plant and animal species, water quality, and matters such

as oil spill models, drilling cut analyses, and seismic fault mapping), the "public"

takes up much larger issues which, if dealt with at all, are taken up only in a cursory way in the Effis.

Those in favor of oil disproportionately stressed the issue of national energy

needs (a topic mentioned only as prefatory language in the EIRs). Those opposed to oil raised issues of legitimacy and raised them intensely - the legitimacy of the entire oil program, the legitimacy of the hearing, the legitimacy of how decisions would be made, regardless of what the EW had to say (this effect was even stronger

among those testifying from San Luis Obispo County and much weaker from those

coming from-Ventura County). The other major issue raised by opponents was a general appeal to "way of life" (the term was often used) - the idea that something

precious was in jeopardy, something inconsistent with oil development (the specific numbers and percents are detailed in Appendix B: Federal OCS Lease Sale Hearings

- A Case Study).

430n1y those speakers who identified their location and/or affiliation during the course of

their testimony were counted. Data was gathered by reading all hearing transcripts arid

letters, isolating speakers from Santa Barbara County, and determining affiliation and

position.

79
Issues like "way of life" are, of course, difficult to quantify and hence noteasy

for those who write EIRs to deal with. Concerns with the legitimacy of procedures

and the integrity of political leaders, the courts, and administrative umts (salient

among oil opponents) are not at all matters deemed appropriate for EIRs by those

who conunission them and those who write them. But the "public" - regardless of which side they were on - took the hearings as an opportunity to present the

relevant issues as they saw them, and this brought many non-technical concerns to

the fore.

This effect was further amplified at the stage of media dissemination. We

categorized fully half of the News-Press coverage (at the time still very wary of oil

development) as devoted to the issue of legitimacy (the Sm ía Maria Times, by contrast,

concerned itself with this question in only six percent of its coverage). The NewsPress coverage included prominent (and sympathetic) treatment of then State

Senator Gary Hart's hearing comments; Hart was a well known and extremely

popular politician, elected on a liberal-environmentalist platform. Hart's public

denunciation of Lease Sale 68 EIR process as a "sham" was prominently played -

front page, and the basis of the story's headline and lead paragraph (Hart was

referring to the Interior Department's alleged unconcern for local opposition to

offshore drilling).

Specific bones of contention: Local government vs. oil

These negative sentiments, widely held in the South Coast and expressed in

diverse ways, were stimulated by and impacted the relations between local

government, on the one hand, and the industry and federal government, on the

other.

Among the bones of contention over time:

The Interior Department's efforts, in 1975, to perform a "blanket"

environmental review for future developments across its lease sales without the

kind of individual reviews favored by local authorities.

The industry's resistance to local efforts to consolidate oil processing

facilities, first at one major location (Las Flores Canyon) and then, as later agreed to

by authorities, to two locations to ward off scattered industrialization along the

coast. The locals have prevailed, with two new efforts to overcome the

consolidations apparently defeated (the Molino project and Mobil's "Clearview").

44The belief that oil and Interior were riding roughshod over Santa Barbara was to be

supported in a searing National Academy of Science report that criticized the federal

government's failure to develop information on the social impacts of its OCS programs (see

National Academy of Sciences 1989).

80
Local authoritiest efforts to force transport of processed oil by pipeline,

rather than tanker, to mitigate potential for spills and air quality losses (as well as to

avoid conflicts with local fishers and recreational boat enthusiasts). The locals won

most of the battles, but the county has remained embroiled with Exxon over its

alleged failure to adhere to its agreement in this regard. This is an especially telling

case, in political terms, because the anti-Exxon stance is being taken by a unanimous

Planning Commission and a unanimous Board of Supervisors at a time when the

majority of both bodies are sympathetic to development.

Locals' demands that offshore facilities (e.g. engines on platforms) fall

under the same air quality rules as onshore facilities. The county's position was

greatly strengthened when the 1990 federal Clean Air Act amendments transferred

OCS air quality control from the Interior Department to the Environmental

Protection Agency which, in turn, delegated authority to the county.

Types and levels of mitigation oil companies should compensate for the

socioeconomic impacts of their activities. Intense and protracted negotiations led to

the creation of two ameliorative programs. The oil companies accepted, with

reluctance, the locals position that rather than being a fiscal and social benefit

through jobs and taxes, oil projects were a net loss that had to be mitigated. Two

mechanisms were set up:

Coastal Resources Enhancement Fund (CREF) in which each oil

development is assessed a fee that Santa Barbara County uses to offset impacts on

coastal resources. These funds have been used to enhance access to the coast, to

acquire land near the ocean edge, to build and improve coastal-related parks,

bikeways, marinas, etc., and to fund environmental programs like Earth Day. A

total of $8.9 million has been distributed through this program over the 1987-

1995 period (oil industry advocates have asked that CREF recipients be required

to identify oil companies as the source of their project's funding, a source of

minor controversy at present).

The SocioEconomic Monitoring and Mitigation Project (SEr'vlP). A

complex monitoring of new employment caused by the oil industry results in

payments to local jurisdictions (school districts, fire districts, cities, etc.) to offset

costs created by new additions to service loads. This innovative program means

that rather than pay based on environmental impact reports that predict impacts,

payments are based on the actual impacts as revealed through the monitoring

procedures. In its first four years of existence (1986-89), SEMIP resulted in

$1,600,000 in payments to a wide range of local jurisdictions as offsets for oilrelated costs. The largest single block of funds went to the South Coast to

mitigate housing impacts, with another substantial block going to the city of

Lompoc (which has more than a proportionate share of oil workers) to offset

costs of public services and school facilities. The payments listed (see Table 18),

because they are based on impacts measured by questionnaires filled out by oil

81
Table 18: Cumulative SEMP mitigation payment summary, 1986-89, Santa Barbara County, by company ce JURISDICTION IMPACT AREA CHEVRON/ T6XACO UNOCAL ALL- AMEflICAN TEI9MINAL GAVIOTA E0(ON TOTAL CITY OF LOMPOC PUBLIC SERVICES $207,953 $13,853 $22,858 $5,068 $10,656 $260,386 WATER SUPPLY $18,911 $1,249 $1,904 $374 $560 $20,996 CItY OF SANTA MARL PUBLIC SERVICES $40,700 $9,277 $4,328 $2,348 $4,190 $60,841 BUELLTON UNION SCHOOL DISTRICT SCHOOL FACIU11ES $10,509 $747 $3,675 $683 $397 $16,011 SCHOOL DISTRICT SANTA MARL BONITA SCHOOL FACIUTIES $32,901 $3,721 $12,520 $1,792 $3,596 $54,532 LOMPOC UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT SCHOOL FACILI11ES $87,550 $5,847 $9,824 $2,430 $8,053 $111,704 COLLEGE SCHOOL DISTRICT SCHOOL FACIU11ES $4,563 $269 $174 38 $3,521 $9,065 SOLVANG SCHOOL DISTRICT SCHOOL FACILES $5,215 $314 $56 $270 $162 $8,017 GOL.ETA UNION SCHOOL DISTRICT SCHOOL FACIUT1ES $7,833 $1,051 $241 $1,769 $6,190 $17,084 SERVICES DISTRICT BUELLTON COMMUNITY SEWER TREATMENT WATER SUPPLY AND $28,092 $1,987 $8,402 $2,078 $599 $41,158 CITY OF SOLVANG SEWER TREATMENT WATER SUPPLY AND $21,620 $3,341 $718 $508 $263 $26,650 CI1Y OF SANTA BARBARA HOUSING WATER SUPPLY $81,060 $245,633 $7,768 $25,354 $55,308 $15,290 $7,294 $22,826 $39,880 $12,129 $386,981 $123,541 COUNTY OF SANTA BARBARA HOUSING (Santa Ynez HOUSING (South Coast) CAMPGROUNDS $23,807 $162,856 $7,226 $28,550 $1,710 $31,232 $1,486 $21,010 $756 $13,849 $34,967 $257,497 Valley) $113,268 $18,563 $3,012 $14,619 $8,930 $156,392 SANTA MARL J. HIGH SCHOOl.. SCHOOLS $5,362 $0 $159 $329 $884 $6,734 SANTA BARBARA CIT SCHOOLS $3,142 $0 $339 $690 $2,715 $8,886 TOTAL $1099175 $127,119 $171,748 $86,090 $115,312 $1,599,444 SOURCE: PAYSUM spreadsheet provided by SEMP administrators
workers as to their residence, roughly parallel impacts of OCS activity in various

parts of the county (for an evaluation of SEMP, see Molotch and Woolley 1994).

Safety and other regulatory standards at onshore facilities, frequency of

inspections, and speed and completeness in reporting pollution incidents and other

troubles. Local authorities and environmental groups complain of industry failings;

industry consistently assures compliance.

Rates of new leasing and drilling (locals want slower pacing to allow for

planning and impact amelioration). In response to local complaints, both the state

and federal governments have responded with moratoria on new Channel oil

activities at various time points. The federal government first ordered an

immediate shut-down of all new initiatives immediately after the 1969 spill (as did

the state); the federal government then resumed activity at the end of 1970; in 1973

the state lifted its ban on new drilling; the federal government instituted a new oneyear drilling moratorium in 1983, another in 1988, extended for another year twice

again, finally shelving, in 1992, any more lease sales for five years.

Areas to be excluded from oil activity. The city won its concession from the

state for the sanctuary along its coast, only partially honored by the additional twomile buffer provided by the federal government along the same boundary.

Although recommended by the Nixon Administration (in 1971), Congress rejected

proposals for canceling at least 35 leases to substantially increase the sanctuary.

Turning the Channel Islands into a national park (in 1980) led to another marine

sanctuary extending seaward six miles from the islands. The state cleared some

ocean from future drilling by offsetting Arco's costs in forgoing drilling and

production at its tidelands lease offshore in Goleta so as to spare UCSB and

neighboring communities noise and viewshed problems.

The array of offshore facilities that came into being is depicted in Map 2. A

way to summarize the complex outcomes of the many events in litigation,

environmental review, and legislation around these controversies is well

represented by a statement made to us both by a local environmentalist and by an oil

industry businessperson: "You win some, you lose some." The industry, in the

end, gained access to virtually all the drill sites that the federal government leased to

them, albeit at a somewhat higher cost than they otherwise would have had to face

without mitigation. The local government, although losing the fight to get oil out

or keep oil out, created a system of mitigation that kept many aspects of

development under their control.

83
U N9FQ! Oil and Gas Facilities Santa Barbara County r4j Plait 0mm bRelirremy Oil separation and Gas processkmg plant Ot & Gas separation. treatment plant to 1.000000 html Storage tanks 500.000 .rSOO,l)0lJ html Storee tanks Marine terminal processing plant treatment and gas ' Onshore d,flt ntis Pump stations supply hums Crew lmnd 119111 tutilpOlt -- Pethmes (w/dlrectlon at flow) Fedora! Unit boundary Federal Lease boundary Transmission line SCE66kV ciei
Specific impacts turned out to be less than originally anticipated, in large part

because the anticipated scale of OCS activity never materialized. This outcome in

turn was primarily due to the falling price of oil (the Channel's oil is especially lowquality), the local political milieu, and better opportunities around the globe. As

shown in Figure 1, earlier forecasts for the years 1986-1990 dramatically overstated

the volume of oil activity. These forecasts were based on earlier Environmental

Impact Reports and industry projections. The county tended to use "worst case"

projections. Public reaction likely would have been at least somewhat less strong if

the actual outcomes had been the anticipated ones.

What does seem apparent is that the industry had never before had to deal

with such resistant locals, and locals of Santa Barbara had never had to deal with so

large-scale a challenge. Each "side" regarded the other, at least at various times

along the way, as intransigent, unreasonable, and threatening essential values of

health, safety, patriotism, and economic well-being.

This document is not the place to specify the actual outcome of oil

development in the county, other than to note the general increments to local

economies, especially in the North County, over the years. But it can be noted that

the coming of oil over the decades has done little to alter the shape of social and

economic life different from the first impacts early in the century. The South

Coast's trajectory, with its economy heavily reliant on local social and natural

amenities, remains intact. The North County's trajectory, much less dependent on

such amenities, also remains intact.

Figure 1: Forecast and actual impacts of OCS development,

Santa Barbara County

a,

C0

200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

85

Year of Forecast

89 do

Year

85

91 92 93 94 95 86 87 88
V. Today, Tomorrow, and Trajectories of Local History

We emphasize that despite our detailed descriptions of the exceptional nature

of some parts of the county, there are - both in the north and south - poor people as

well as rich, along with substantial diversity in racial and ethnic groups (the latter

predominately Latino; less than three percent of Santa Barbara city and county

populations is African-American). Because Santa Barbara city itself is not a suburb

of a larger metropolis, it holds its own service class within the area. Although

somewhat dispersed into neighboring communities of Goleta and Carpinteria (a

small city south of Montecito), the working classes live in the same general areas

along with their employers (although usually not in the same neighborhoods).

People who perform the entire array of jobs found in an urbanized area of any

significant size are found in this county, within the South Coast as well as North

County, and within the city of Santa Barbara itself.

Our job has been to indicate the distinctive qualities of places in order to

explain their different reactions. We come back to the key goal of this report: to

indicate the kind of distinctions that are present and how they work together to give

a place a different sort of character over time. But cutting across all social levels,

races, and ethnicities are people whose lifestyles and beliefs do not correspond to the

traits we have emphasized. In the city of Santa Barbara, there are bowling alleys,

cults, right-wing groups, and fundamentalist Christians (the first local "March for

Jesus" took place in Santa Barbara in May 1995, drawing about 2,000 marchers from

Santa Barbara and Ventura counties). Also not conforming to the Santa Barbara

image of chic are the Latino people who work in the economic "backstage" - as in

the kitchens of the hotels and sophisticated restaurants (whether northern Italian,

Thai, or California nouvelle). With its enormous internal differentiation, Santa

Barbara city compares to the great headquarter metropoles of the world, "global

cities" like New York, London, or Paris, in which the most sophisticated

occupational tasks and consumption patterns co-exist, indeed are made possible by

the presence of low-cost labor living in quasi-Third World conditions (see Sassen

1991). Recall the Santa Barbara data: large numbers of highly educated people with

much wealth living in a city whose median income is not very high.

The presence of so many low-income and minority people, especially in the

city of Santa Barbara, presents at first glance a particularly inconsistent element.

Here, as elsewhere, poor people and minority poor have low voting turnouts -

apparently a consistent pattern in the area.45 But the Latino population still makes

up a significant proportion of the population (31 percent in the city; 38 percent in the

1n 1920, for example, Spanish-surnamed voters accounted for only 3.2 percent of registered

voters in the dty of Santa Barbara, while adult population levels were at least three-fo'd

that proportion (Camarillo 1979: 187).

86
county). Although the stereotype of minority people, as with working dass

populations in general, is that they are too preoccupied with survival to "care"

about the environment, voting patterns from the city's Latino precincts indicates

strong support for candidates who carry the environmentalist banner. While it is

not possible to know whether the appeal of these candidates derives from their

stands on ecology or their more liberal stands on social issues, the pattern conforms

with some survey data showing minority and poor people sympathetic to "green"

policies.47

Among those who do vote, there has been a particular tendency for

Republicans t cross party lines and vote for candidates who espouse the "good

environment" line, which tends to mean voting for Democrats. By 1990, the city of

Santa Barbara's Republicans outnumbered Democrats as registered voters (23,975

versus 16,970), but even after the 1994 GOP sweep of the national congress, local

citizens elected (in 1995) all Democrats for the mayor and all open city council seats

(the elections are officially nonpartisan). By contrast, the two parties were almost

even in Santa Maria in 1990 but without any significant break in the prodevelopment and pro-oil stance of local government.

Referring to her city of Santa Barbara, former mayor and long-time civic

leader Sheila Lodge spoke of a "Golden Crescent" of consistent voters - literally a

crescent taking in the neighborhoods around downtown, from the "Riviera" to the

"Upper East," San Roque (at Outer State Street), to the Mesa. These are largely

single-family, middle and upper-middle class districts, with a majority Republican

registration, but for the most part supportive of environmental protection. These

patterns highlight the fact that traditional party identities and national political

trends cannot be easily applied to Santa Barbara county politics or explain policy

differences within the county.

Organizations, organizations, organizations

We have made repeated reference through this report to the large number of

environmental organizations in the South Coast. This is part of a larger pattern or

organizational richness that has likely been a force in the past and will continue to

be one in the future. In our interviews, a recurrent theme among informants asked

to indicate how Santa Barbara was "different," was that it had so many "good

organizations." These groups are in place to carry out its citizens' preferences, and

Precise estimates of the Latino population are difficult to determine because of shifting and

problematic definitions by the Census as well as changing self-designations among the relevant

populations.

47Statewide surveys (Smith 1995) indicate a slight tendency for Hispanics and AfricanAmericans to have more favorable attitudes toward offshore oil than other residents. For more

general evidence, see Van Uere and Dunlap (1980) and Davis (1992).

87
there is a significant difference in the number and type of such organizations

between the north and south county areas.

Social scientists and historians of American culture have often focused on the

American tendency toward creating associations, quite apart from official political

and economic forms. Thus, alongside parties, corporations, and trade associations,

Americans join recreation, charity, and service groups collectively called "voluntary

associations." Their members participate on a voluntary as opposed to paid or

coerced basis (as with some military units). To the degree people are organized in

these associations, they have mechanisms to respond to changes affecting their

communities, whether from acts of nature or from other human beings. They have

means to communicate with one another and take action, outside established

institutions of government and business.

Many of those we interviewed, regardless of their own walk of life or political

leaning, agreed that Santa Barbara had more than its share of voluntary associations.

We examined the voluntary sector in Santa Barbara in a systematic way by

comparing it in size and other attributes to the analogous sector in the neighboring

counties of San Luis Obispo and Ventura, as well as variations within Santa Barbara

County between Santa Barbara city and Santa Maria. In all cases, we standardized

our numbers to take into account the different size of population in the areas we

were comparing; we use per capita measures to draw our conclusions. We are hence

comparing oiinizaiiona1 densities.48

The results were unambiguous. By virtually any measure, Santa Barbara

County and its South Coast, in particular, has the strongest voluntary sector.

Chart 8 gives an overview of the total density by county.

We look at the most recent data from Santa Barbara County (as well as comparative data

from San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties) as published in county human resource directories

(in Santa Barbara, The Community Resources Information Services (CRIS) Directory for 1995,

published by the Family Service Agency of Santa Barbara; in San Luis Obispo, the 1994-95

Human Services and Support Groups Directory, published by Hothne; and in Ventura, Blue

Book: The 1995 Directonj of Health and Human Services throughout Ventura County,

published by Helpline, a non-profit organization under the umbrella of Interface Children,

Family Services), the Yearbook of California Charitable Organizations (published by the

National Center for Charitable Statistics, 1989), and supplemental sources (the Santa Barbara

Area Foundations & Funding Sources directoty, published by Charitable Funding Services, 1992,

and the Chamber of Commerce listing of nonprofit organizations in San Luis Obispo County).

88
D Total Revenue R Total Asss Number of Organizations

Source: Data gathered by authors. See foothote 48

A first noticeable difference is in aggregate revenues and assets among the

counties' voluntary organizations: Santa Barbara County stands clearly above the

other two counties (as represented by the two columns of Chart 9). The second

measure is one of organizational density - the number of organizations per capita in

each county. Santa Barbara County once again is considerably denser.

The comparison between the county's two principal cities shows that the city

of Santa Barbara that has more than twice as many organizations per capita as Santa

Maria. The picture in terms of revenues and assets, however, is even more skewed,

with nearly eight times greater resources in Santa Barbara than Santa Maria. That

the city of Santa Barbara's dominance is not simply due to the fact that it is the

county seat is revealed by the fact that Ventura County's official county seat, the city

of Ventura is not dense and indeed, pales compared to the outlying city of Ojai

located inland as well as compared to Santa Barbara city.

We examined the possibility that although Santa Barbara may be the leader in

the aggregate, there are, certain areas in which its density is especially great but other

49Revenues indude all public contributions, program service revenues (subscription fees,

counseling fees, etc.), and other revenue (interest, rents, gain or loss on sales, etc.) received by

the organization. Assets refer to the dollar value of an organizations assets including cash,

accounts receivable, savings, loans due, inventories, investments, land, buildings, and

equipment These two measures describe both the amount of support and the net worth of the

organizations, an important distinction because these are very different sorts of moneys. While

support is clearly critical to maintaining an organization, its assets are also critical for

expanding an organization's functions.

89

Chart 8: Organizational Density of Tn-Counties

0C

$1,000 18 .

$900 16

$800 14 S

$700 12

'$600 10 L$500

$400 8u

$300 6

$200 4 N $100 2

$0

Ventura Santa Barbara San Luis

aispo
realms in which it may not be a leader at alL This would be consistent with

Wolpert's (1988) notion of a "balanced generosity," in which one type of community

may be strong in, say, arts organizations while another compensates with strength

in, say, social service organizations. We compared organizational densities among

places in terms of: 1) Health and Human Services; 2) Arts and Cultural

Organizations; 3) Recreation and Leisure; and 4) Counseling and Support

Organizations. We used these categories because they came closest to the

breakdowns we found in organizational directories for the counties (some

adjustment was necessary to deal with some inconsistencies in how organizations

were dassified from county to county).

Chart 9 displays the density of Arts and Cultural organizations in two

communities in each of the three counties.

Chart 9: Arts and Cultural Organizations in Tn-County Communities

$400.00

$350.00

$300.00

$250.00

$200.00

$150.00

$100.00

$50.00

$0.00 I

. .

Santa

Barbara

Source: Data gathered by authors. See footnote 48

Not surprisingly1 when we examine the Arts arid Cultural category, the data

show Santa Barbara strongest, whether in regard to revenue! assets or number of

organizations per capita.

Contrary to the "Balanced Generosity' hypothesis, Santa Barbara again

exceeds the densities of the other two counties by a large margin in all categories.

The fact that these two charts look almost the same suggests that density is not the

result of any "trade-off' between the two types of organizational priorities (Chart 10

JU Revenues i Assets Organizations

90

Santa

Maria

San

Luis

ciMspo

Paso

Robles

45

C A 0

a

'-4 35 'I

3

I

25

2

0

1.5

0.5 0

0

Ventura Ojai
displays the densities of Health and Human Service organizations in the

communities of three counties).

Chart 10: Health and Human Services Organizations in Tn-County Communities

1400

1200

1000

800

j600

C

400

200

0

Source: Data gathered by authors. See footnote 48

When we compared the city of Santa Barbara with Santa Maria, we again see

no evidence for the Balanced Generosity concept. Differences are great, and they

persist across all realms.

Perhaps it is no surprise to learn that the traditions of Santa Barbara, coupled

with the great wealth of a minority of its population1 has had the effect of creating

these major differences in voluntary organization.5° For our purposes, the

differences reflect distinctive tendencies and capacities to respond to outside forces.

Beyond the resources reflected by the organizations themselves is the effect of them

in combination and in interaction with one another. On the basis of our interviews,

we believe that organizations - even those active in different spheres - will be in

interaction in ways that facilitate local response.

Some types of community projects require involvement across spheres. For

example, Access Theater is a production company oriented toward improving

Revenues Cl Assets Cganizations

5°This is important for those suggesting America's welfare functions devolve to the private and

local spheres; the inequalities among places would likely be exaggerated by such policies.

91

U4

3

2

1

0

.

.

11 = -.... - -, -

Ventura Ojai Santa Santa San Luis Paso

Barbara Maria Cbispo Robles
attitudes and resources for the physirally challenged (the key actor, writer, and

producer has severe physical challenges). Initially funded by the Fund for Santa

Barbara, a source of start-up dollars for "social change" projects, early productions

were sponsored by public school support groups. Health and social service

organizations provided audiences and generated other financial support. But this is

a theater company, yet involved with schools, social service groups, and health

associations. As another example, tackling problems of youth violence involves

school support groups, public health associations, youth organizations, and sports

associations.

Another "linking't example is the Santa Barbara Flag Project - an

organization whose only purpose is to fly "color flags of local community service

and government agencies on the Santa Barbara Harbor Breakwater, Stearns Wharf,

and City Hall.' The project arranged for local artists to design a flag for each

participating organization, and these organizations ran the gamut across the arts,

welfare, health, environment, and social service range. A total of 43 flags were

created, each in consultation with the community group for which it stands. In this

way, each organization gains by having a design specific to it (one which could be

repeated as logo on stationary, publicity, vehicles, etc.) and a flag to fly at the city's

ceremonial spaces. Another outcome is still an additional asset to the city's beauty,

made possible by the stirring sight of so many color flags arrayed at important

locations - like the great arc of flags that stretch out to sea on the breakwater and

surround the city's harbor.

The tendency of community groups to engage with one another has

cumulative effects. When something occurs that disturbs the community, prior

contacts have been forged and there are pre-existing networks through which news

can travel and action be taken. Many people involved in "doing good" as a

significant part of their lives already know each other, have experience in

mobilizing others, and have the kind of minimal administrative skills and political

knowledge through which to be effective. Many of these groups are also closely

networked with environmental organizations, sometimes with that as an explicit

goal - e.g. the Fund for Santa Barbara supports and has on its board leaders of

environmental, civil rights, social service, arts, and health organizations. The

much larger and more traditional (founded in 1928) Santa Barbara Foundation is

among the oldest and largest (43rd place) of the country's 400 community

foundations(almost all above it in the rankings draw on much bigger populations).

As with voluntary organizations in general, members of the middle and uppermiddle classes are most likely to participate, and, within those class sectors, persons

with higher levels of education (?vfilbrath 1965; Verba and Nie 1972; Warren 1963).

Again, these are also the people most likely to vote and have the most influence

over others' voting behavior (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955):

The high profile of Santa Barbara's civic groups also translates into raising the

profile of the city in national and international circles. The citys Art Museum is a

major institution with an endowment of $48 million, a collection of 17,000 objects,

92
including major collections of Greek and Roman sculpture as well as Asian artifacts

and French impressionists. Other major institutions include the local Museum of

Natural History, Historical Museum, Botanic Gardens,51 the Music Academy of the

West, Zoological Society - each well-funded. There are many more institutions of

smaller scale including a showcase for contemporary art, a world-class private

manuscript library, a surfboard museum, and various important homes that have

become civic-owned facilities. Associations exist as well to promote the symphony,

the civic light opera, grand opera, dance, and live theater. There are few cities in the

U.S. of comparable size that have anything like this matrix of institutions.

Stifi another array of local groups supports various units of TJCSB, Westmont

College and the extremely well-organized community college. Separately and

together, through their collections, buildings, publications, and programs that attract

visitors from distant places, these institutions advertise Santa Barbara to the world

in a certain kind of way. This, in turn generates still more migration of the sort of

people for whom these assets matter.

In all these groups, as is generally the case elsewhere as well (Daniels 1986),

there is a strong tendency for women to play especially important roles.

Organizations like the League of Women Voters appear to have been an important

"training ground" for local volunteers and leaders, including a number who went

on to political office (such as the city's recent mayor, Sheila Lodge, whose combined

tenure on the planning commission, city council, and mayoral chair lasted 20 years).

51The Botanic Gardens, founded in 1926, also operate two other facilities, both extraordinary

gifts of wealthy philanthropists: the Alice Keck Park gardens, a city park bequeathed by the

oil heiress for whom it is named, and 'Lotusland," the garden estate donated by Ganna

Waiska.

93
Local scenes

Along with formal organizational structures, community response is also

facilitated when people are held together by a common sense of place, a sense that is

encouraged not only by history, landmarks, and legends, but also by concrete

circumstances. A first mark of coherence is the large proportion of residents who

live and work in the immediate area. With the obvious exception of the

Vandenberg base, residents' work commutes are the shortest of those living in any

city or town in the county (see Table 19).

Table 19: Median one-way commute times, 1980-1990 (in minutes)

Source: US. Census.

* Indicates data not available

The history of Santa Barbara's development, quite by intention, has preserved

a central city core with a main street that serves virtually all social groups and

merges with residential neighborhoods and the tourist areas at the beachfront.

Downtown is the location of the majority of the South Coast's movie theaters (15

screens) and the concentration point for its concert halls, live-theater venues,

retailing establishments, restaurants, taverns, and nightclubs. It's where both city

and county government are headquartered, along with the central library, the

Greyhound Bus Station,. the flop houses, the most visible panhandlers and

wandering homeless, the service agencies, and the book shops (three of which are

very large, have their own cafes, and stay open late into the night). Downtown has

the "social feeling" of amiable hubbub and promenade that besides being still

another draw for tourists provides an opportunity for meetings, including by

chance. Santa Barbaras downtown is often cited as one of the few downtowns in

America that has succeeded in these regards; it has been offered as a model for the

country by prominent architects and planners (Gebhard 1982). Downtown has all

manner of special events, including once a year festivals like the annual Fiesta that

attract thousands with parades, shows, parties, and dancing in the streets; Summer

94

1980 1990

Bueliton * 25.4

Carpinteria * 18.3

Guadalupe 16.4 19.7

Lompoc 18.4 24.2

Mission Hills 21.3 25.2

Santa Barbara 15.6 15.9

Santa Maria 15 17.8

Santa Ynez 21.5 23.7

Solvang 19.9 20.2

Vandenberg AFB 12.8 11.4

Vandenberg Village 17.4 20.1
Solstice is an arts event that also generates thousands of parade viewers and

participants in associated downtown activities. An annual Film Festival

increasingly gains international attention.

Again, a contrast with the North County brings home the larger point

Throughout the 1970s, the city of Santa Maria replaced much of its historic

downtown core with a modem shopping center, anchored by three department

stores in the 'Town Center Mall" (see Photos 7 and 8). This was a strategy to

enhance the local tax base, in part by increasing the city's share of sales tax revenues.

Extensive parking, including a three-story parking structure, was part of the project

On an opposite corner, existing structures gave way for a HtJD-assisted residential

high-rise for senior citizens. All four corners of the previous downtown have now

been replaced and with it almost all vestiges of the historic buildings serving this

old agricultural center. The redevelopment plan met little organized resistance,

although some downtown merchants regarded the mall as a threat to their

businesses. Indeed, none of the locally-owned displaced stores (including a drug

store, shops seffing western clothing, home electronics, hardware, a bakery and

various eateries) survived the change. Despite promises that space would be

reserved for local merchants, only three relocated, each subsequently going out of

business. New malls have had similar impacts in Santa Barbara and elsewhere

throughout the country, but seldom leading to such a complete remake as occurred

in Santa Maria.

In contrast to the South Coast's relationship with development, what was

missing from Santa Maria was an organized preservation sentiment. As a docent at

the Santa Maria Historical Society Museum told us, 'The city has had no real

preservation society, as far as I know; that's pretty obvious by looking at it." Some of

the buildings the city chose to tear down would have been prized in other cities, like

its Carnegie Library and a 1940s theater near the northwest corner of what became

the redevelopment site. The city has made efforts at self-promotion, as with its

annual Strawberry Festival, 4th of July Fair, and celebrated barbecues. A recent

Sunset magazine article featured Santa Maria as having "the best barbecues in the

world" (Fish 1995: 14). But Santa Maria's attractions have not yet generated a very

extensive audience from outside the region. As lamented by a business supporter

we interviewed, although the barbecues are now commemorated in a special

"Barbecue Hall of Fam& room in the Historic Society, none of the local restaurants

have featured barbecue on their exterior signs. This tradition thus goes unmarked

for casual visitors.

95
Photo 7: Santa Maria's Town Center Mall. Photo by Krlsta Paulsen. Photo 8: Site of Town Center Mall, showing prior usage (1955). Photo provided by Santa Maria Historical Museum.
Shopping malls such as the Town Center Mall have been widely noted as

providing a weak kind of "civic space" compared to traditional downtowns, less

likely to foster chance meetings, stimulate community organizing, or induce

political activism (Kowrnski 1985). In some cities, they are actually being torn down

or sharply modified to restore a traditional shopping street ambiance. Of course, the

North County has long had other venues for social gathering besides its downtown

- the long standing barbecues and dining rooms at the Santa Maria Inn along with

other restaurants and meeting places - but these have been spread across the

landscape in a manner that contrasts with Santa Barbara city's more concentrated

form.

Synergy, locality, and the Santa Barbara County factors

The social and economic factors that make up a locale are not an additive list

of ingredients to be totaled up, but a system of interacting qualities that together

provide a certain kind of place character. Santa Barbara's economic base, as it moves

forward, is still suffused with the elements that shaped its role in the prior eras: the

social and climatic ambiance that appeals to those with the means to make good on

their life-style preferences. The tourism industry thus remains a strong sector, and

as we have seen, the biographies, predilections, and efforts from the past endure in

edifices, landscapes, and organizations that, once created, continue having an effect.

But other groups play an increasingly important role. UCSB grows as the county's

largest employer, with total wage expenditures at about $200 million, a 1995 student

body of 18,000, and over 5,600 employees (the number of employees grows faster

than the numbers of students because research has been growing more than

enrollment). It functions as an engine of high-technology development

(particularly at its prominent engineering school) through its rapidly growing

research prowess (extramural grants steadily increase, at the rate of approximately 10

percent annually). The students are politically quiet these days, with very low rates

of voting (7.7 percent turnout in the November 1995 elections in the UCSB-Isla

Vista precincts of 17,000 registered voters - see Wallace 1996b) but they are still a

presence and may rise again.

For its high technologies in place, the South Coast has been dubbed "Silicon

Beach." Also in the sphere of cutting-edge economic development are local firms

engaged in real estate and finance, a number of which do not deal locally but use

Santa Barbara as a base for coordinating business elsewhere in the world. Of the 11

publicly traded corporations located in the county, seven are in the high-techinformation sector (including two medical technology firms); the others are in

finance (two), with one each in manufacturing (ultra-performance sportswear) and

oil (a firm that manages oil properties globally) (Ross 1995). All but one are located

on the South Coast (the odd one out is in the tourist-oriented "Danish village" town

of Solvang). The area now has also become home to some people who can use

Santa Barbara as home base for jobs and firms that interact with others via

97
electronics and periodic ifights to other places. This includes the arts - writing,

music, painting, sculpture, photography - as well as information-based jobs like

producing investment-advisory letters, corporate reports, and software

development Perhaps canceling out its once-reputed staid atmosphere ("Santa

Barbara is a place where old people go to visit their parents'), Santa Barbara was

recently dubbed one of "the newly deputized hip spots" in a LosAngeles Times article

describing Southern California's attraction to the fashion and modeling world

(Robinson 1995: El).

Arising from and also stimulating this kind of urban character are the shops

and services appropriate for this kind of occupational and social settlement. This

means restaurants with experimental cuisine, movie theaters, museums, and art

galleries, and in a way particular to the late 1980s and 90s, coffee houses where

people can order espresso and its variants. To document Santa Barbara's

distinctiveness in its consumption patterns, we used a computer phone directory

data base (roughly equivalent to "yellow pages") to compare Santa Barbara city with

the six other major towns that make up the three adjacent counties of Santa Barbara,

Ventura, and San Luis Obispo. We isolated seven types of establishment that

indicate cutting edge patterns of technology, culture, and consumption. These are

(we indicate their government SIC code after each): Architectural Services (8712),

Book stores (5942), Commercial Art and Graphic Design (7336), Museums and Art

Galleries (8412), Counseling Services (8322, Bicycle Shops (7699B/ 5941A), and

Computer Programming Services (7371). We counted the number of such

establishments within each city and created a ratio to population size to determine

which cities had the most of each type of establishment on a per capita basis.

While it is possible to quarrel with our selection of indicators, the pattern is

dear. We learned that Santa Barbara was highest in these categories compared to

any other place. It was first in architects, counseling services, and computer

programming. In the two art categories (Commercial Art and Graphic

Design/Museums and Art Galleries), as well as book stores, it was surpassed only by

the tiny art colony town of Ojai in Ventura County.

The presence of these sorts of services and establishments not only serves the

"needs" of those of a particular market segment, but serves notice to them and

others that this place has the sort of character they may think appropriate for

working andmaking their- lives. The presence of so much of this type of activity

may also put off other types of businesses and potential residents.

Here is one example of how diverse factors of culture, economy,

environment, and social ties work in tandem to form a coherent development

trajectory. Bega Lighting is a firm that designs and builds flood lighting projects

around the world (e.g. DC National Cathedral, Mexico City subway system). It was

started in Santa Barbara because the founder (partnered with Bega of Germany) was

inspired to start a business after visiting his daughter, then a student at UCSB. He

said he decided, 'This is a great place; I've got to find a way to live here" (quoted in

98
Ross 1994: B4). Bega has since donated the $100,000 lighting installation for the

Santa Barbara County Courthouse, providing even more glamour for a local

landmark already known around the globe. The local ambiance and social networks

of its residents (e.g. Storke, et aL) attracted the University, the University attracted

the daughter, the daughter (along with the ambiance) attracted the father, who

attracted the business. The business 'gives back" a little, further enhancing the

ambiance.

These networked and subtle effects - between the presence of the university,

the kind of industries that settle in, and the sorts of beautification that take place -

constitutes an ongoing story. It has also played a role even in the oil sector. We

have elsewhere noted that while many local oil support companies have undergone

crisis, or even disappeared as oil production declines, the richness of the Santa

Barbara "industrial atmosphere" permitted numbers of firms to diversify out of oil

and/or to use their Santa Barbara base to develop businesses of national or even

global scope. Thus a small firm engaged in diving operations to service offshore oil

came to develop the standard diving helmet now used in diverse applications

around the world. Another turned his company's work in undersea

communications into an electronics firm that operates globally and has almost

nothing any more to do with the oil industry. In other cases, the relatively strict

safety and pollution standards in the Channel stimulated companies that applied

their skills to training workers in various industrial and government sectors or

inspection of pipelines and other industrial equipment for clients far and wide (see

Molotch. et aL 1994).

Because of these sorts of adaptations, the modern Santa Barbara oil industry

(dating from the late '60s forward), which never accounted for a very large

proportion of the local economic base, did not have dire consequences even as it

entered decline. The usual "boom-bust" scenario associated with the extraction

industries was not, for these twin reasons, the outcome. That it was not highlights

something about the locality: people want very much to be there, and there is a rich

array of services - design, engineering, graphics, advertising, and venture finance -

to make economic success in certain cutting-edge spheres. This provides a clue to

the industrial and economic future of the region.

The nature of the existing residential population also provides clues to the

kinds of political and environmental decisions that will likely be made. Even as the

county government shifted to the right in the early '90s - in part from the local

recession, in part from the national shift in the same direction, in part perhaps

because of an inability of local environmentalist governments to cope with a fiveyear drought - the oil industry does not loom as an attractive option. Even for progrowth sectors of the electorate and civic leadership, oil is still not an especially

relevant element. Heavy industry, extraction functions, and - perhaps most

important of all - platforms on the scenic skyline are not helpful for making the

pleasant and thriving dynamic operate.

99
For the North County, there is also a synergy that takes place, one we have

also emphasized throughout this report. Oil and agriculture are, in the main,

mutually supportive industries. The coming of the military has not introduced an

inconsistent element. The military has worked at being a good neighbor, both to the

oil corporations as well as residents. Vandenberg functions as the UCSB of the

North County in that its payroll is of similarly large magnitude ($144 million), and

its employee number (including active duty military and civilian workers of all

sorts) is comparable to that of TJCSB (well above 8,000 workers). It also has a large

number of retirees living in the region; upwards of 5,000 in Santa Barbara and San

Luis Obispo counties (Vandy Facts Card 1994). As with the university campus,

Vandenberg is entering new realms of high technology, with its space station

applied to civilian needs. Although still at the early stages, the North County may

become the site of its own spin-offs in communications and other industries

needing access to sateffite facilities.

As the North County grows in significance, it is possible, by one scenario, that

the entire county will become less resistant to development in general and to oil in

particular. Although environmentalists succeeded in electing all their preferred

candidates in the 1995 Santa Barbara City elections, county politics and those at the

water boards have shown no similar pattern. Politics remains acutely polarized

outside the city with the coming of a conservative political organization at least as

omnipresent and well-funded as the environmentalist side. North county business

people, tied heavily to oil and agriculture, have created COLAB (Coalition of Labor,

Agriculture and Business) to provide what is likely the most effective mobilization

of conservative forces in county history. COLAB defends North County interests,

including demands for a larger share of the public pie. Most important is their battle

against regulation, in which they are joined by some South Coast business groups as

well. Together, they perceive regulation, especially on land use matters, as hatched

by South Coast environmentalists and "bureaucrats."

In part due to the conflicts over offshore oil itself, in part to growing

knowledge of how ecological problems span distance, north and south perceive

their interests as inconsistent (offshore oil has both economic and ecological

consequence county-wide in a way not perceived at earlier times or for other

industrial sectors). COLAB's intensity may in part be attributable to its supporters

having been suppressed so long, with less deference afforded the kind of business

actors ordinarily among the most prominent. It is also perhaps the case that

regulation for so extensive a period draws in an ever-widening circle of individuals

who experience "interference" in their business affairs. Hence, Santa Barbara

County's polarization over environmental issues has doubtless come to be more

complete and bitter than elsewhere. The stakes are high and the lines well drawn.

There are signs that, even on the South Coast, oil is less the "outlaw" it was

once considered to be. Although its views have shifted from time to time in recent

years, the News-Press has come to be supportive of the industry and its expansion

proposals. The paper took a positive tone in regard to Mobil's 1994 "Clearview"

100
project which would have replaced a declining tidelands well with new wells slantdrilled from an onshore tower (access to an appropriate onshore site has frustrated

the project).52 The News-Ptvss has also took a dim view of a 1996 voter's initiative

that requires a public vote to approve any new onshore oil facilities. The initiative

was moderate compared to those passed by virtually every oceanfront county to the

north in that it only mandates a public vote if a proposed project lies outside the

existing areas where fadlities are allowed. This degree of moderation probably

indicates a fear among environmentalist sponsors that a tougher stance against oil

would not now be acceptable to the electorate. But the fact of its supporters' success

in gaining passage indicates that many on the South Coast are still extremely wary of

the industry.

To understand this persistent opposition, unflagging at least among some, it

may be useful to take seriously the "way of life" concerns that have been articulated

so often in the locality's history - in the form of essays, proclamations, poems,

landscape paintings, newspaper editorials, and testimony at hearings. The idea of a

place having elements of the "sacred" is increasingly accepted by anthropologists as

not limited to earlier peoples but present in contemporary settings as well. At least

at certain times and places, it is reasonable to think that citizens conceive of some

uses of land as a pollution - not just in a technical ecological sense, but in a deeper

psychological sense of a profane defflement of the sacrosanct (Douglas 1966;

Rappaport 1968). In this vein, the presence of oil insults the very idea of Santa

Barbara - at least as that idea has been held by residents in the city and its immediate

environs. By the lights of a significant number of such people, oil has further

proven itself unreasonable and untrustworthy; those who have led the county in

industry negotiations can recite a litany of what they regard as unkept promises,

misleading representations, and gross insensitivity.

The South Coast's messianic fear of oil may be somewhat eroding, but this

does not mean that even a rising North County would transform oil politics. As

time goes on, declining oil production throughout the county, particularly compared

Iogmwth notherseclors means that economic dependence on oil declines as a

proportion of the total economy. Educational levels throughout the county are

rising, as is the proportion of jobs taken up by people who rely on such education.

Perhaps symptomatic, the former oil town Of Orcutt has emerged as an uppermiddle class suburb. Rather than generate enthusiasm for oil, growth in the North

County may instead imply a kind of merging of attitudes toward the state

orientation, which is less favorable (see Smith 1995) than attitudes in the North

County have historically been toward oil. Perhaps more than a symbolic change,

Unocal - once so important to the economy, philanthropy, and social life of the

52The paper moderated its position in the late '80s and today treats oil with equanimity. The

paper editorialized moderation in response to Supervisors' 1995 opening to oil and failed to

provide significant coverage of the event. It castigated UCSB faculty committees for opposing

Project Clearview.

101
North County - sold off all its California properties to an independent oil company

in 1995.

The nature of even some traditional North County industries is thus

changing. Besides the exit of lJnocal, change is afoot in agriculture. Wine grape

production is sharply rising; virtually non-existent before the 1980s, by 1990 they

were the county's fourth largest agricultural product (broccoli1 strawberries, and

lettuce were in the top positions). By that year, there were 30 wine makers and

10,000 acres under wine grape cultivation (Graham, et al. 1995: 83); by 1995 the

number of makers was up to 40. At least at the management level, wine making

uses a highly educated work force consisting of "farmers" who are more likely than

their counterparts in say, lettuce, to be urban in origin and to have the sorts of life

style and travel habits associated with sophisticated city people (among the North

County's most important vintners is the husband-wife team of Brooks and Kate

Firestone, he the scion of the Ohio tire company). Some doctors and lawyers and

many other people with some capital (occasionally to their financial detriment)

have "got into the romance of wine" in the county (Graham, et al. 1995:65). Grape

growers are "in a different culture than most American farmers" also in the sense

that winemakers often object to pesticides, and have led the movement toward

integrated pest management in the fields (Graham, et. al. 1995: 67). This industry

thus injects a level of ecological awareness otherwise less prevalent in North

County agricultural circles. Organic farming represents another new variant of an

old industry in the region, albeit at a smaller scale; there were 45 organic growers in

the county registered with the Agricultural Commissioner in 1995 (Chase, et. at.

19%).

Wine-making bolsters a tourist economy, drawing many thousands of

visitors on daily wine-tasting excursions (the county's wineries have published

maps for tourists; some have rather elaborate visitors' centers). Wine advertises a

place near and far by the labels, reviews, and write-ups that are circulated among

wine consumers, including life-style connoisseurs of whatever level. Because Santa

Barbara county wines are higher-end premium wines, and now internationally

recognized as such (some are major prize winners), the effect is quite strong. This

agriculture sector thus aligns, in cultural and political terms, with the South Coast

more than it does with traditional North County agriculture. While Firestone is a

moderate Republican now representing the district in the State Legislature, other

winemakers are reliable contributors to local environmental causes.

The North County thus increasingly has eggs in other baskets besides oil and

traditional agriculture; the significance of oil would be less, under any production

scenario than it was in the past. In addition, the South Coast continues to grow in a

direction inconsistent with uncontrolled petroleum development. Although

predicting the future is not in our charge, the safe bet is that there would be strong

and effective opposition should renewed efforts be made to exploit oil resources,

especially offshore and particularly in ways that would impact the South Coast. It is

certain that any such effort would have the best chance of success if it took place

102
under the most careful and conscientious attention to ecological resources, the local

economic base, and - most importantly - citizens' valued way of life.

103
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventI

Appendix A:

Santa Barbara County Timeline

(Digits following year indicate month of event.)

1542: Explorer Juan Cabrillo sees asphalt springs in Santa Barbara area.

1769: Spanish explorations of the region begin (Graham et al 1994: 2).

1769 Explorer Juan Crespi sees Chumash people caulking canoes

with local tar. - 1782: Presidio established.

1786: Mission Santa Barbara established.

1848: United States acquires California.

1850: California granted statehood.

1850: City of Santa Barbara is incorporated. First city council consists of

three prominent Califormos (Fuller and Olson 1980: 11; Villanueva 1990: 3).

1860s: Farmers and ranchers begin settling the southern foothills of the

Santa Maria Valley (Nelson 1987: 54).

1865: Santa Barbara County's first boom in oil exploration and

speculation, short-lived as results prove disappointing (Johnson

and Nye 1979: 188).

1872: Steams Wharf is built (Graham et al 1994: 16).

1872: Journalist Charles Nordhoff describes Santa Barbara's beauties and

climate for Harper's Magazine, launching Santa Barbara as health resort (Starr

1990: 247; Graham et al 1994: 17-19).

1873: State legislature creates Ventura County out of Santa Barbara County

(Fuller and Olson 1980: 76).

1874: Lompoc founded as a temperance colony (Starr 1990: 246; Fuller and

Olson 1980: 76).

1874: Town of Grangerville (often misspelled Grangeville; later renamed

Central City, then Santa Maria) is laid out (Carlson 1957: 48, 122).

1874-7: California's first major resort hotel, The Arlington, constructed,

establishing the area's reputation as a tourist center (Starr 1990 247, 256).

104
Community event

Oil industzy/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1880s Montecito laid out, largely given over to avocado-growing, but

attracting elite visitors (Fuller and Olson 1980: 11, 14).

1880s: Santa Barbara's first beautification committee is organized (Fuller

and Olson 1980: 76).

1882: Santa Ynez is established as commercial center (Davison 1955: 72;

Fuller and Olson 1980: 11).

1882: Pacific Coast Railway links the Santa Maria Valley to southern San

Luis Obispo County (Nelson 1987: 89; Simon 1990: 18).

1886: Natural and crude discovered in Summerland; the first oil

well in Sunimerland is drilled the following year (Fuller and

Olson 1980: 76).

1887: Railroad comes to Santa Barbara from the south.

1890: Alcatraz Asphaltum Company (also mining in Carpinteria

and the Sisquoc Ranch) opens Goleta asphalt mine, located on

current site of UC Santa Barbara. (Tompkins and Ruiz 1970: 84-86).

1890: Union Oil Company incorporated in neighboring Ventura

County (Johnson and Nye 1979: 188).

1892: The Santa Barbara Club is organized, the first country club on the

South Coast. Two years later, the Santa Barbara Hunt Club and the Santa

Barbara Country Club are organized (Myrick 1987: 135, 159).

1894: Mission Revival architectural style arrives in Santa Barbara, with San

Francisco architect's Arthur Page Brown's designs for five Garden Street

residences (Starr 1990: 275).

1899.08: Montecitans tear down an oil derrick constructed on the

beach (Santa Barbara Morning Press, 8/3/99; see also Myrick 1987:

144-145).

1901.03: The Southern Pacific Railroad closes "the Gap" in Santa Barbara

County with its first northbound train from Los Angeles to San Francisco

(Tompkins and Ruiz 1970: 91-92).

1901.8: Western Union Oil Company brings in the first successful

well in the Santa Maria Valley, Western Union #3 (Simon 1990:

21).

1902.6: On W.W. Orcutt's recommendation, Union Oil Co. leases

Hartnell property for oil exploration1 followed by the Hobbs, Fox,

105
Community event

Oil industrrJ development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventI

and Folsom leases south of Orcutt, and the Lompoc Monodine - a

total of 70,000 acres leased within one year (Simon 1990: 21).

1903: California became the nation 's largest oil-producing state,

with more than 3,000 producing wells (Johnson and Nye 1979:

188).

1903: State regulations established for casing and plugging wells

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 190).

1903.01: Santa Barbara's Potter Hotel opens, attracting" the great names of

American capitalism..." (Starr 1990: 257).

1904: Union Oil towr of Orcutt established (Nelson 1987: 17, 25-26;

Simon 1990: 22-23, 82).

1904.12: Union Oil's "Old Maud" well blows out, produces one

miffion barrels in its first 100 days (Simon 1990: 80; Johnson and

Nye 1979: 191; Carlson 1957: 129).

1906: Western Oil and Gas Association (WOGA) is created as the

industry's trade organization (Johnson and Nye 1979: 188).

1908: Santa Barbara National Forest established (to be re-named Los Padres

National Forest in 1936) (Blakley and Bamette 1985).

1908: Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce, fearing oil pollution,

officially opposes construction of an oil pipeline on Stearns Wharf

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 190).

1908: West Cat Canyon oil field is discovered near Los Alamos by

the Palmer Union Oil Company with its Palmer #1 well, which

"all but surpassed Old Maud's production" at 6000-10,000 barrels

daily (Nelson 1987: 19; Frank and Lambert 1985: 24).

1911: Community of Solvang settled.

1915: The Palmer Union Oil Company finds the first substantial

strike in the East Cat Canyon field (Franks and Lambert 1985 25).

1917: Casmalia oil field (between Point Sal and San Antonio

Creek) discovered by the Doheny Petroleum Company (Frank and

Lambert 1985: 24).

1919: Ed Craig, a worker in the oil industiy, builds the huge barbecue pit at

the Santa Maria Club; Santa Maria's barbecues are to become "famous all

over the state" (Carlson 1957: 225).

106
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1919.07: Santa Barbara holds its first modern-era fiesta days festival, "La

Primavera." eventually becoming the annual "Old Spanish Days" (Myrick

1987: 211).

1920: Solvang established out of the Atterdag College, anchoring a Danish

Colony in the Santa Ynez Valley (Davison 1955: 87-89).

1920: Santa Barbara Community Arts Association organized (Starr 1990:

287-279).

1920: Production in Orcutt hills reaches peak (Nelson 1987: 20;

Simon 1990: 38).

1921: California Mineral Leasing Act reserved to the state all

mineral rights to state lands and offshore tidelands, and

established regulations for offshore development (Johnson and

Nyc 1979: 190).

1922: A wildcatter well by the Puritan Oil touches off 10-year

boom at La Mesa, adjacent to Santa Barbara city.

1922.03: Local leaders form the Plans and Planting Committee, a section of

the Community Arts Association leading to the city's comprehensive

building-zone ordinance (Starr 1990: 279).

1923: Amendment to California Leasing Act allows California

Surveyor General to deny offshore permit applications under

certain conditions (Lima 1994).

1924: State Legislature passes Oil Pollution Act, prohibiting

discharge of oil into sea and navigable waters (Johnson and Nyc

1979: 191).

1925.06: Santa Barbara earthquake devastates many buildings (including

courthouse) and creates large oil slick in the Channel (Starr 1990: 287-288;

Johnson and Nye 1979: 191).

' 1925.07: Board of Architectural Review established in Santa Barbara, serves

as vehicle to "Hispariicize" the reconstruction of the city (Starr 1990).

1925, 1927, 1931: A series of bond issues results in city purchase of entire

beach and water frontage; private philanthropists assist the effort. Santa

Barbara is declared by its newspaper "one of the very few cities on the West

Coast in which the beach and water frontage of the city is entirely owned

and controlled by the people" (Days, 1977: 14, 15; Graham et al 1994: 54).

107
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventl

1926: El Capitan oil field discovery prompts a "rush" of permit

applications, many of which are denied by the Surveyor General

prompting a lawsuit by oil men (Johnson and Nye 1979: 190).

1927-37: Boone Kin2sbun, opens oil fields to development after

State Supreme Court holds Surveyor General's permit denials to

be unconstitutional (Lima 1994; Johnson and Nye 1979: 190).

1927: Eliwood oil field discovered 15 miles west of Santa Barbara

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 190).

1929: Santa Barbara County Courthouse is opened at final expense of $1.25

miffion (Carlson 1957: 194-5; Starr 1990).

1929: The Santa Barbara Foundation established with $250,000 endowment;

soon raises over a million (Starr 1990; Graham et al 1994: 56).

1929: Montecito residents push for and receive a county zoning ordinance

(the first in California history) to restrict lot sizes to one acre minimum

(Tompkins 1989: 71).

1929: Responding to anti-oil protest of drilling in the Mesa

neighborhood, the Santa Barbara city council opposes oil drilling

within city limits (Johnson and Nye 1979: 190).

1929: State Legislature enacts moratorium on offshore exploration

and leasing (Lima 1994).

1930s: Storke and other Santa Barbara boosters secure New Deal funds for

Santa Barbara projects, including the National Guard Armory, the County

Bowl, the stone retaining walls on Cliff Drive, the Laguna Park grandstand,

the municipal bath house, El Cielito Reservoir and other projects

(Tompkins and Ruiz 1970: 132).

1934: Oil production expands into the "Santa Maria Valley" field

(as distinguished from the nearby Orcutt field) (Uhi 1987; Simon

1990: 22).

1934: Federal attention brought to ownership of offshore oil leases

after Joseph Chamberlain denied an offshore lease claim and

appeals to Congress (Johnson and Nye 1979: 192).

1937: The Santa Maria Valley's Adams #1 well comes in,

producing about 3000 barrels a day (UhI 1987).

108
Community event

Oil industiy/development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventl

1937: Union Oil Co. opens its Baffles Absorption Plant to clean

and separate natural gas from Union Oil Co. production sites in

the Santa Maria Valley (Uhi 1987).

1938: California State Lands Act allows offshore oil development

with restrictions (Lima 1994).

1938: Legislation asserting federal ownership of offshore lands

dies in House Judiciary Subcommittee (Lima 7994).

1942: U.S. Army Camp Cooke completed. The economy of the Santa Maria

Valley becomes dependent on an outside economic source, the military, for

the first time (Nelson 1987: 94; Simon 1990: 17).

1943: Oil production in the Santa Maria Valley reaches

unprecedented heights during W.W.II (Uh.l 1987; Nelson 1987: 17,

94).

1947: U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of the federal ownership

of offshore lands in U.S. v. California. (Lima 1994; Johnson and

Nye 1979: 192).

1947: Interim Agreement of the State Lands Commission (SLC)

allows California to continue administering offshore lands within

three mile limit, with the approval of the Secretary of Interior

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 192).

1947.05: Santa Barbara voters defeat referendum to amend City

Charter to require public vote for permitting oil development

(Santa BarinraNews-Press, May 5, 1947). 1948: Three large seismic

exploration explosions in the Channel cause local fishermen's

complaints; Governor Earl Warren halls seismic exploration, then

reauthorizes it with stricter regulations (Johnson arid Nye 1979:

192-3).

1948: The Cuyama Valley field opened. Soon New Cuyama is

established as an Arco company town (Fuller and Olson 1980: 78;

Title Insurance and Trust Co. 1964: 50).

1950.08: Inoperative since the end of W.W.11, Camp Cooke reactivated to

train armored and infantry divisions for the Korean War (Simon 1990: 46;

Nelson 1987: 98).

1950: Revenues from offshore development are placed in a

federal trust fund instead of accruing to the State of California

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 192).

109
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event I

1951.05: City of Santa Barbara referendum to authorize onshore

drilling near airport is approved by near three-to-one margin.

1952: City of Santa Barbara adopts ordinance to ban oil drilling

and exploration in the Channel (Johnson and Nye 1979: 193).

1952.07: Union Oil director Herbert Hoover, Jr., tells Santa Barbara

audience oil development consistent with environmental

concerns and that immediate development was needed due to

Korean War. Santa Barbarans begin to mistrust the federal

governments offshore oil policies after President Eisenhower

appoints Hoover to be his advisor on oil policy (Johnson and Nye

1979: 193).

1953: President Eisenhower signs Submerged Lands Act and Outer

Continental Shelf Lands Act, which divides authoriti over

offshore area between state and federal government at 3 mile

mark (Lima 1994).

1953: County Air Pollution Control District established (Graves and Simon

1980).

1953.01: After Humble Oil applies to explore in the Channel.

Santa Barbara city and county appeal to States Land Commission

for authority t restrict offshore development. AP and UPI give

national news coverage to Congressional testimony by Santa

Barbara officials (&znz Batham News-Press, January 2, 1953; &rnla

Bathain News-Press, January 11, 1953).

1954: UCSB opens its Goleta campus (Fuller and Olson 1980: 78).

1954: Santa Barbara city and county lobby the State Legislature to

grant them a development-free offshore sanctuary and the

authority to restrict offshore development through zoning

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 194; Lima 1994).

1954: Union Oil Co. buys Orcutt refinery from Sunray Oil and

builds another facility at Santa Maria to process heavy crudes

(Welty and Taylor 1958: 213).

1955: State legislature passes the Shell-Cunningham Tidelands

Act (1) granting tidelands authority to State Lands Commission,

creating the development-free Santa Barbara Oil Sanctuary and

authorizing development elsewhere in the Channel with a

200-day waiting period after drilling application (Lima 1994;

Johnson and Nye 1979: 194).

110
'Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1955: Union Oil Co. opens Nipomo Mesa refinery.

1956: County adopts Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (Graves and Simon

1980).

1956.12: State Lands Commission issues first permit for an

offshore lease, near Summerland; exploration confirms the

presence of oil (Lima 1994: 194-195).

1956: Santa Barbara County prepares local ordinances in

anticipation of Channel oil development (Lima 1994: 192-193).

1957: City of Santa Barbara moves to annex the offshore Sanctuary

before pending state law prohibits such action. Four years later,

the city settles a state lawsuit by agreeing to annex only surface but

not submerged land in the Sanctuary (Lima 1994: 204-208; Johnson

and Nye 1979: 195).

1957: Amendments to Shell-Cunningham Tidelands Act create

sliding royalties scale which is decried as exorbitant by many oil

firms. State tidelands leasing suspended for one year until

amendments are approved (Welt-y and Taylor, 229; Lima 1994).

1957: Richfield Oil Company constructs Rincon Island to support

an oil rig one-half mile from shore (Johnson and Nye 1979: 195).

1958: County Board of Supervisors approves construction of a

Carpinteria onshore processing plant (Lima 1994: 201).

1958: Humble Oil Company (later Exxon) erects Platform Hazel,

the first offshore oil platform in California in the Summerland oil

field (Johnson and Nye 1979: 195).

1958.10: Camp Cooke transformed into Vandenberg Air Force Base, a major

national missile center touching off a north county growth boom (Graves

and Simon 1980; Nelson 1987: 97).

1959: Twitchell Dam is completed to provide flood control and water

supplies to Santa Maria Valley (Fuller and Olson 1980: 79).

1959: Cuarta and Conception offshore oil fields are discovered in

the Channel (Johnson and Nye 1979: 195).

1960: Naples gas field discovered (Johnson and Nye 1979: 195).

1961: Coal Oil Point oil field discovered (Johnson and Nye 1979:

195).

1962: Hancock College in Santa Maria opened (Fuller and Olson 1980: 79).

111
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1962: Alegria, Caliente, and Molino oil fields are discovered

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 195).

1964: City of Santa Barbara General Plan adopted.

1965: County Supervisors approve first General Plan for Santa Barbara

County (Graves and Simon 1980).

1965: U.S. Supreme Court rules on state and federal rights in the

ChanneL Federal government prepares to issue first Channel

lease (Lima 1994: 232).

1965.05: City of Santa Barbara voters approve Charter amendment

outlawing oil drilling within city limits by three-to-one margin

(drilling had already been outlawed by a 1953 City Council

ordinance (Sinta&zthamNews-Press, May 4-6, 1965).

1965.12: County Board of Supervisors reject proposal for South

Ellwood onshore facilities. Supervisors order a comprehensive

facilities siting policy (Lima 1994: 238).

1966: Point Conception, South Ellwood, and Carpinteria oil fields

discovered. All Channel state tidelands, except the Sanctuary, are

leased (Johnson and Nye 1979: 195).

1966.12: Federal leasing in Channel begins with sale to Phillips

Petroleum of Drainage Tract in the Carpinteria Field.

1967: Platform Hogan, the first offshore platform in federal OCS

waters in the Channel, is installed.

1967.03: The tanker Torre Canton runs aground in England,.

1967.04: County adopts consolidation as onshore oil facility siting

policy (Lima 1994).

1967.09: Federal government creates a Federal Ecological Preserve,

two miles seaward from the Santa Barbara Oil Sanctuary (Johnson

and Nye 1979: 197).

1968: City of Carpinteria incorporated (Graves and Simon 1980).

1968.02: U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holds Lease Sale

P-4, the first large-scale federal OCS sale, raising $602.7 million

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 198; Lima 1994: 253).

1968.03: Dos Cuadras Field discovered.

1968.08: Army Corps of Engineers approves Union Oil Co. permit

to construct Platform A over Santa Barbara protests. Platform

112
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

installed same year, along with Platforms B and Houchin

(Johnson and Nye 1979: 198; Sollen forthcoming: appendix B).

1968.11: County-wide referendum overturns County Supervisors'

approval of onshore facility at Carpinteria.

1969.01: Blowout occurs at Union Oil Co.'s Platform A in Dos

Cuadras oil field. Get Oil Out! (GOO) is founded to oppose oil

development in the Channel. Drilling is suspended pending

review of regulations (Lima 1994: 272, 274; Johnson and Nye 1979:

198-99).

1969.02: President's Panel on Oil Spills reports that oil spills will

happen, but technology to prevent spill damage was only five

years away (Johnson and Nye 1979: 212).

1969.02: U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution

holds hearing in Santa Barbara. Congress subsequently fails to

pass any bills banning offshore oil drilling (Easton 1972: 121).

1969.03: President Nixon visits Santa Barbara and inspects the

polluted beaches. Secretary of the Interior Hickel announces

expanded federal buffer zone around state sanctuary and new and

tougher drilling regulations (Easton 1972: 119)

1969.04: Cities of Santa Barbara and Carpinteria, Santa Barbara

County, and the State of California join class-action lawsuit

against Union Oil and its partners for the blowout. The

defendants eventually settle for $9.45 million, $4.5 million of

which is directed to the state (Johnson and Nye 1979: 208).

1969.04: Angry Santa Barbara citizens hold rally at waterfront and

march onto Stearns Wharf, the support base for oil operations

(Easton 1972: 143).

1969.06: Environmental Quality Advisory Board created by Santa

Barbara City to halt oil pollution in the Channel (Johnson and

Nye 1979: 186).

1969.07: Legislature expands sanctuaries but fails to pass bill

banning oil driffing in state waters of Channel (Lima 1994: 285).

1969.08: Federal District Court refuses injunction against further

drilling (Easton 1972: 170).

113
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1969.11: "Sail-in" protest off Santa Barbara blocks emplacement of

Platform Hilthouse (the first new platform since the oil spill), but

platform installed by year's end (Easton 1972: 178-180).

1969.12: So-called "second oil spill" blackens channel beaches at

Christmas. Loss of local tourism revenue due to oil spill estimated

at $24 million (Graves and Simon 1980: 23).

1969.12: Nixon signs Tax Reform Bill reducing tax depletion

allowance and eliminating ABC loophole" for oil companies.

1970.01.01: Wave of environmental legislation enacted. The National

Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California Environmental Quality

Act (CEQA) become law,; President Nixon establishes the Environmental

Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration. The Federal Water Quality Act and Clean Air Act pass.

1970.01.13: County brings criminal charges related to the oil spill

in District Attorney David Minier v. Four Oil Companies. The

charges result in token fine of several hundred dollars, causing

local outrage. Federal Appeals Court later quashes two injunctive

pleas by the city and county against federal policies (Johnson and

Nye 1979: 228).

1970.01: State Lands Commission lifts moratorium on existing

development in tidelands (except for waters off Santa Barbara).

First annual Environmental Rights Day observance held in Santa

Barbara, based on the Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental

Rights (Johnson and Nye 1979: 216; Easton 1972: 194).

1970.04: First Earth Day obseived (Easton 1972: 224).

1970.07: First public hearing on federal OCS development held in

New Orleans (Easton 1972: 234).

. 1970.11: Voters overturn Supervisors' approval of proposed subdivision of

Goleta's rural El Capitan ranch (Graves and Simon 1980: 105).

1970.12: Federal government allows resumed drilling in Channel.

1971.01: Exxon (formerly Humble Oil) submits initial plan of

operation for Santa Ynez Unit development (Johnson and Nye

1979: 184).

1971.01: Interior Department conducts first public hearing in

Santa Barbara regarding new platforms. Santa Barbarans protest

(Easton 1972: 246-247).

114
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[italics indicate non-local eventj

1971.01: State Lands Comniission lifts ban on new development

in tidelands (Johnson and Nye 1979: 216).

1971.01: Nixon Administration announces support for

cancellation of at least 35 leases, representing 50 percent of the

total remaining in federal waters, and for creation of a crosschannel marine sanctuary. Congress fails to act, however (Easton

1972: 279).

1971.09: President Nixon rules against additional platforms in the

Dos Cuadras field (Easton 1972: 285).

1972: County creates Environmental Quality Advisory Agency along with

Technical Review Staff (Graves and Simon 1980).

1972.04: Draft environmental impact statement (EIS) prepared for

Exxon's Santa Ynez Unit Plan of Operations, the first federal OCS

project in the Channel to go through the NEPA process (Johnson

and Nye 1979: 219-20; Lima 1994: 309).

1972.11: Proposition 20, the California Coastal Zone Conservation

Act, is adopted by California voters and creates the California

Coastal Commission (CCC) and six regional commissions. The

Federal Coastal Zone Management Act and Clean Water Act also

enacted (Johnson and Nye 1979: 217-18).

1973: First Energy Crisis begins. 077 shortage due to OPEC

embargo leads to a drive for greater American energy self-reliance

and independence through new energy sources and conservation

(Lima 1994).

1973: Nixon Administration withdraws support for Channel

energy reserve (Lima 1994: 301).

1973.05: Voters support Goleta Water Board imposes hook-up moratorium

by two-to-one vote (Goodwin 1992; Warner and Molotch 1992: 126).

1973.07: County abandons practice of accepting EIRs prepared by developers

(Graves and Simon 1980: 35).

1973.12: State Lands Commission lifts ban on renewal of Channel

drilling (Johnson and Nye 1979: 216).

1974: Santa Barbara city planning task force issues report on the "Impacts of

Growth" (Warner and Molotch 1992: 125).

1974.07: Platform Harry removed.

115
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1974.05: Interior Department announces plans for accelerated OCS

leasing, to indude the use of "blanket EISs," documents which

could be used for future developments without subsequent

individual project EISs (Johnson and Nye 1979: 220).

1974: Santa Barbara City Council bans oil support activities at

wharf.

1974.01: Exxon (formerly Humble Oil) requests county rezomng of

Las Flores Canyon for Santa Ynez Unit (SYU) onshore facilities.

County OEQ subsequently prepares Effi for rezoning (Graves and

Simon 1980: 189; Lima 1994: 312).

1974.02: Arco announces plans to resume drilling on Platform

Holly in the Channel, prompting GOO appeals and conflicts over

EIR procedures (Graves and Simon 1980: 222-227; Johnson and

Nye 1979: 218).

1975: City of Santa Barbara amends the General Plan and Zoning Ordinance

to reduce allowable densities in residential areas and sets a population goal

of 85,000 (Warner and Molotch 1992: 125).

1975.02: Interior Department releases several blanket EISs: two

draft EISs for its accelerated leasing program and for OCS Lease

Sale 35, and in June a draft EIS for Channel leasing and a draft ES

for Channel oil and gas development (Johnson and Nye 1979: 220).

1975.02: Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors approved

rezoning of Las Flores Canyon to allow siting of Exxon facilities.

RCC also approved the project, but the decision was appealed to

the CCC (Graves and Simon 1980; Lima 1994; Johnson and Nye

1979: 237).

1975.04: SLC approves Arco drilling proposal. The Regional

Coastal Commission (RCC) approves Arco's plans, but a GOO

appeal results in CCC's denial on October 15 (Johnson and Nye

1979: 218).

1975.05: Countywide referendum by the Stop Exxon Committee to

reject Supervisors' rezomng of Las Flores Canyon narrowly

defeated (Graves and Simon 1980: 194; Johnson and Nye 1979: 237).

1976: County Grand Jury report accuses OEQ coordinator accuses

Reynolds of "bureaucratic self-interest" and his reforms of county

Effi process as unjust. A 2nd report next year is less accusatory

(Graves and Simon 1980: 47, 49).

116
Community event

Oil ndusty/deveIopment event

[Italics indicate non-local er,entj

1976: Exxon's Platform Hondo installed.

1976.03: State updates the California Oil Spill Disaster

Contingency Plan / creating a State Operating Authority and

designating the Department of Fish and Game as lead agency

1976.03: CCC denies Exxon's Las Flores onshore facility permit,

prompting the company to build offshore facility (Johnson and

Nye 1979: 237).

1976.07: Court ruling overturns CCC, approves permit for Arco's

expanded drilling at Platform Holly (Johnson and Nye 1979: 218).

1976.12: At behest of County Supervisors, Joint

Industry! Government Pipeline Working Group established, to

consternation of local environmentalists (Graves and Simon 1980:

238).

1977: Environmentalist Bill Wallace elected to County Board of

Supervisors.

1977: Santa Barbara County designated "non-attainment" in several air

quality categories (Graves and Simon 1980: 70-71).

1977: Union Oil's Platform C installed, after eight-year delay.

1977: California Coastal Commission selects Point Conception as

best site for a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) port.

1977.01: Oil storage tanks leak at Coal Oil Point (Sollen 1977).

1977.01: Supervisors approve Arco's Ellwood expansion with

significant air quality conditions. Exxon agrees to terms, Arco

given permit (Graves and Simon 1980: 239-240).

1977.03: Santa Barbara city voters endorse 85,000 population limit.

1977.11: Supervisors raise OEQ to full department status as Department of

Environmental Resources (DER) (Graves and Simon 1980: 50-51; Warner

and Molotch 1992: 126).

1977.12: Chevron applies for permit to build subsea pipelines

from Platform Grace (in federal waters) to operating Platform

Hope (in state waters) and expand its Carpinteria operations

(Graves and Simon 1980: 319).

1978.05: 25 local Chumash Indians occupy LNG site at Point

Conception (Fuller and Olson 1980: 79).

117
Community event

Oil industiy/development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventl

1978.06: County voters pass two advisory measures (0 & P) proposing a

population growth rate of .9% per year for the South Coast.

1978.08: Congress passes Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act

amendments ,requiring OCS developers to meet county air

standards (Graves and Simon 1980: 72).

1978.10: Interior announces Lease Sales 48 (with tracts wholly in

the Channel) and 53 (with tracts partly in the channel).

1978.11: Proposal to divide county defeated at the polls (Simon 1990: 58).

1978.11: Federal court dismisses GOCYs effort to stop Exxon's

offshore facility (Graves and Simon 1980 210).

1979: County voters reject joining the State Water Project.

1979: Platforms Grace (Chevron) and Henry (Sun Oil) are

installed in Santa Clara Unit and Carpinteria Field, respectively.

1979.01: Chevron agrees to implement County DER's Carpinteriato-Rincon pipeline. County approves pipeline permit (Graves and

Simon 1980: 329-330).

1979.06: $527.8 million Bid for tracts in Lease Sale 48.

1979.07: GOO lawsuit to stop Platform Grace defeated in federal

court (Graves and Simon 1980: 333).

1979.09: County Plamiing Commission approves Chevron's

expanded Santa Clara Unit project, ending two-year permitting

process (Graves and Simon 1980: 334).

1980: County completes Regional Growth Impact Study.

1980: Congress establishes Channel Islands National Park and

Santa Barbara Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary extending

seaward six miles from the islands.

1980: Ellwood processing plant expanded.

1980: Gas processing plant proposed for Las Flores Canyon.

1980: Chevron opens pipeline to Ventura (Sollen 1980a).

1980: Union Oil's Platforms Gilda and Gina erected off Ventura

County in the Hueneme and Santa Clara fields, respectively

(Sollen forthcoming: appendix B).

1980.06: OCS Lease Sale 68 set for 1981. BLM gives "highest

priority development" designation to the buffer zone adjacent to

118
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventl

the Santa Barbara Ecological Preserve, and recommends its

inclusion in OCS Lease Sale 68 (Meade 1980).

e 1980.12: OCS Lease Sale 73 set for 1983. Sale would exempt

Channel Islands sanctuary and the ecological preserve.

1981: $2.088 billion bid in Lease Sale 53 for federal tracts off Santa

Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. A Federal Judge blocks

leases on 29 tracts off San Luis Obispo County, in response to a suit

filed by the State and COO (Sollen forthcoming: appendix A;

1981b).

1981: Texaco's Platform Habitat installed off Carpinteria.

1981.03: Exxon moors its floating processing plant to avoid Coastal

Commission restrictions (Thermos 1981).

1981.03: President Reagan calls for review of the ban on Channel

Islands drilling (Sollen 1981a).

1982: $117.9 million bid in Lease Sale 68 for tracts from the

Channel to the Mexican border.

1982.9: Arco caps oil and gas seepage area off Coal Oil Point with 2

steel pyramids as part of an emissions trade-off (Oltman 1982).

1982.10: Chevron exploration discovers and confirms huge size of

the Point Arguello oil field (Sinfti Barbani News-Press, October 21,

1982).

1982.11: Santa Barbara voters amend city charter (Measure K) to require

"land development (not exceed) public services and physical and natural

resources" and for future rezonings to require a "super-majority" (five of

seven city council votes) (Warner and Molotch 1992: 125).

1983: Santa Barbara County creates Resource Management

Department's Energy Division to deal with explosive growth of oil

development.

1983: Las Flores Canyon gas plant opened. In December, deadly

hydrogen sulfide enters residential gas supplies (Harper and

Steiger 1983).

1983: Union Oil's dehydration facility speeds through the

county's permitting process, eventually located in Lompoc area

(Kronman 1986).

119
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate nan-local event I

1983.01: Getty Oil proposes a Gaviota oil facility and a Gaviota-toBakersfield pipeline (Sollen 1983a).

1983.09: Eight fishing and environmental groups sue CCC for

authorizing tidelands leases (Aguirre 1983).

1983.10.20: Congress approves buffer zone 20 miles along the

Southern California coast, with a one-year drilling ban (Santa

Barbara News-Press, October 21, 1983).

1983.11: Lease Sale 73 (Santa Maria Basin) brings $16.0 million in

bids (Sollen forthcoming: appendix A).

1984: EIR released for Exxon's expansion project (which includes

construction of an onshore processing facility and storage tanks).

1984.04: Supervisors unanimously approve county policies

requiring offshore operators to transport oil by pipeline (San ía

&thmz News-Press, April 17, 1984).

1984.08: In Lease Sale 80, oil companies bid $62.1 million for 25

OCS lease tracts in the Channel (Sollen forthcoming: appendix A).

1985: County Board of Supervisors approve Hyatt Hotel Project in four-toone vote. Hyatt also approved unanimously by California Coastal

Comniission (Warner and Molotch 1992: 127).

1985: Three offshore platforms installed in Santa Maria Basin:

Harvest (Texaco) and Hermosa (Chevron) in the Point Arguello

field, and Irene (Unocal) in the Point Pedernales field.

1985.03: Interior Department announces plans to slow leasing of

OCS tracts (Santa Barbara News-Press, March 21, 1985).

1985.07: County Planners approve Chevron (formerly Getty)

Gaviota onshore processing facility (Sania &zrtwu News & Review,

August 1, 1985).

1985.08: Sierra Club sues Chevron in Santa Barbara Superior

Court to block Gaviota oil and gas plant (Santa Barlxznz News-Press,

August 11, 1985).

1985.11: County voters reject Measure A (which would subject all new

onshore industrialization to public vote) but approve a second advisory

measure which mandates that the County Board of Supervisors consolidate

all onshore industrialization to two sites: Las Flores Canyon and Gaviota.

120
Community event

Oil industiy/development event

[Italics indicate non-local event I

1985.03: Santa Barbara city voters approve a permit for controversial Red

Lion Inn on the waterfront (Warner and Molotch 1992: 125).

1985.11: Two pro-growth candidat?s defeat slow-growth candidates for the

Goleta Water Board. New majority vows to relinquish responsibility for

growth management (Warner and Molotch 1992: 127).

1985.11: Supervisors unanimously support a target Goleta population

growth rate of .9%. (Warner and Molotch 1992: 127).

1986: Santa Barbara city council bars new development projects requiring

new water(Warner and Molotch 1992: 125).

1986: Chevron's Platform Hidalgo installed in the Point Arguello

field of Santa Maria Basin (Soilen forthcoming: appendix A).

1986.07: Construction begins on tJnocal's dehydration facility two

miles north of Lompoc. Unocal agrees to offset air emissions in

OCS waters (Kronman 1986).

1986.08: Price of oil plummets in 8 months from $22 a barrel to $6, resulting

in massive oil well closings in Santa Maria Valley.

1987: County supervisors decide to include non-residential development in

growth management EW. Public hearings are held in the early months of

1989.

1987: Celeron completes pipeline connecting Las Flores Canyon

facility to Texas refineries (Cartiere 1987).

1987: Chevron's Platform Gail installed in the Sockeye field off

Ventura County (Sollen forthcoming: appendix A).

1987: Price of heavy crude oil surges again, spurring Unocal and

Texaco to reactivate wells (Mann 1987).

1987.03: Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties sue CCC over

approval of Platform Julius in March (Dalton 1987a).

1987.05: SLC rejects Arco's Coal Oil Point project (Dalton 198Th).

1987.06: County and Exxon reach accord over the Santa Ynez Unit

project after Exxon compromises on air pollution (Dalton 1987c).

1987.09: The tanker PacBaroness spills oil off Point Conception,

the biggest spill since 1969 (Hauser 1987).

1987.11: Goleta voters elect a trio of water board candidates on a slowgrowth ticket, shifting the majority again (Warner and Molotch 1992: 127).

121
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-local eventj

1988.01: SLC approves Exxon Gaviota project after a seven-year

delay (Dalton 1988).

1988.07: Federal one-year OCS moratorium announced (Mecoy

1988).

1989: City of Santa Barbara enacts a housing mitigation program requiring

developers to replace any housing units that they demolish and to provide

for the "new demand units" (Warner and Molotch 1992: 126).

1989: Exxon's Platforms Heritage and Harmony are installed in

the Santa Ynez Unit (Sollen forthcoming appendix B).

1989: OCS Lease Sale 95 of 5 million acres opposed by local groups;

sale held up by a task force investigation (Santa &thim Independent,

July 6, 1989).

1989.05: Unocal joins with other oil companies in routing tankers

outside the Channel (Cannon 1989).

1989.08: CCC denies Chevron's tankering plan (Weyermann

1989).

1989.11: City of Santa Barbara voters approve Measure E by 11,784 to 9,285,

setting limits on commercial development to 3 million square feet for 20

years (Warner and Molotch 1992: 126).

1989.11: Slow-growth candidates take over the Board of Supervisors, as

incumbents are defeated in two districts by slow-growth rivals. Board passes

a Goleta growth management ordinance (Warner and Molotch 1992: 127).

1989.12: SLC declares oil sanctuary from Newport Beach to

northern Santa Barbara County, barring development of all

unleased tidelands (Joseph 1989).

1990.01: Arco's efforts to build two offshore platforms (for Coal

Oil Point project) is stopped when court upholds 1987 permit

denial (Joseph 1990).

1990.02: British Petroleum agrees to route tankers outside the

Channel, in the wake of an oil spill at Huntington Beach (Estrada

1990).

1990.02: City of Santa Barbara declares a Stage ifi drought, putting severe

restrictions on water use (Warner and Molotch 1992: 126).

1990.04: Interior Department announces lease policy shift to

increase coastal exploration and drilling, in April (Shabecoff 1990).

122
Community event

Oil industry! development event

[Italics indicate non-local event]

1990.05: Federal offshore oil task force recommends a "go-slow"

approach to development.

1990.11: County rejects Chevron tankering plan. Chevron uses

pipelines instead of tankering at Point Arguello (Little 1990).

1991.11: EPA issues new regulations on oil drilling, affecting ten

channel platforms (Lankford 1991).

1991.01: Arco drops plans for Coal Oil Point rigs.

1991.05: Chevron sues Santa Barbara County over tankering plan

denial (Santa &zrbam News-Press, May 11, 1991).

1991.06: Federal OCS drilling ban extended by one year (Santa

Barbara News-Press, June 20, 1991).

1991.06: In the midst of severe drought, county voters in all but Lompoc,

Mission Hills and Vandenberg Vifiage approve joining State Water Project.

1992.01: President Bush extends one-year OCS oil-drilling ban

(Santa Barbara News-Press, January 24, 1992).

1992.05: Department of Interior announces that Channel OCS

Lease Sales are to be shelved for 5 years (Parker 1992).

1992.08: Chevron tankering is allowed (Walker-Klein 1992).

1993: SLC approves oil tanker loading at Gaviota.

1993.01: SLC announces its intention to reopen Coal Oil Point

field (Welsh 1993).

1993.03: Montecito voters reject reducing communitys State Water

entitlement.

1993.04: Mobil Oil takes over Arco's Platform Holly and Eliwood

developments (Green 1993a).

1993.06: Mobil proposes to remove Platform Holly in exchange for

approval of the "Clearview" onshore slant-drilling project (Green

1993b).

1993.08: First tanker arrives for Point Arguello oil (Satzta thzni

News-Press, August 10, 1993).

1993.08: Chevron, Exxon, and others agree to use the AllAmerican pipeline instead of tankering (Green 1993c).

123
Community event

Oil industry/development event

[Italics indicate non-lcal eventI

1993.12: Mobil announces plans to abandon oil piers near the

Santa Barbara-Ventura County line.

1994.01: 23-count civil complaint ified against Unocal for diluent

leak at Guadalupe Dunes (Finucane 1994).

1994.02: County rejects tankering request (Welsh 1994).

1996.02: Mobil withdraws Clearview application after UCSB

refuses access to land needed as slant-drilling site (LePage 1996a).

1996.03: Santa Barbara County voters approve (by 53.7 percent)

initiative requiring voter approval for future onshore projects.

(LePage 1996b).

124
Appendix B:

Federal OCS Lease Sale hearings -- a case study

This section describes our rn-depth case study of two federal OCS lease

sale hearings - for Lease Sale 53 (in San Luis Obispo on June 27, 1980) and

Lease Sale 68 (in Santa Barbara on July 28-29, 1981) - including the public

comments received there and newspaper coverage, to measure the content

and pervasiveness of attitudes in Santa Barbara County concerning offshore

drilling and the oil industry. Quantitative and content analyses of the draft

EISs, the hearing transcripts, and additional written statements concerning

the draft EISs arid the lease sales in general provide a useful way to measure and compare the sentiments of various groups in the county, at one point in

time, towards offshore oil drilling (Gundry and Heberlein 1984).

Additionally, this case study examines newspaper coverage of the hearing to

indicate how the printed media depicts and influences the county's

sentiments. The case study looks at: the draft ETS documents; who

commented in the county (e.g. government units; spokespersons from

environmentalist groups, oil industry organizations, or other associations;

the general public); whether their statements were generally supportive or

opposed/critical of the draft EIS and the proposed lease sale (and the home

community of each type of coinmentor); which themes or substantive

concerns they addressed; and how two county newspapers covered the

hearings and the lease sale in general. The findings reported here are culled

from our larger comparative case study of equivalent "local" OCS lease sale

hearings in San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties; where relevant,

comparisons wifi be made to those two counties.

We looked for and coded six categories or themes in this case study -

environment, air quality, way of life, national energy needs, physical

infrastructure, and economic base54 - as they were addressed in hearing

San Luis Obispo's equivalent 'local" hearing was the 1980 Draft Environmental Impact

Statement (EIS) hearing for federal OCS Lease Sale 53, held in San Luis Obispo on June 27, 1980.

Ventura County's equivalent "local" hearing was the same 1981 Draft EIS hearings for federal

OCS Lease Sale 68 discussed in this appendix, which, as the dosest hearing, Ventura County

officials and residents participated in. The Lease Sale 53 and 68 hearings were chosen for

comparative analysis because of their similar stage in the administrative process (public

review of first Draft FTS for the initial federal proposal of OCS tract leasing) and their

roughly concurrent time period (1 980-81, which was the first federal offering of new OCS tracts

since the 1969 Santa Barbara Channel spill). For a more detailed discussion on the hearings,

public comments, and media coverage of the lease sales in San Luis Obispo and Ventura

Counties, see our respective reports on those counties.

54Environment includes almost every concern for offshore oil drilling's impact on the physical

environment: endangered species, other plant and animal species, water quality, and sensitive

125
transcripts and written statements (quantitatively measured as lines of text).

Freudenburg and Gramling (1994) used these categories were in a comparable

quantitative study of public responses to offshore oil drilling. A seventh

category, Legithnacy/pnxedure, represents this case study's addition to this line

of research. Critical comments on the inadequacy and undemocratic nature

of the environmental impact analysis process and what opponents perceived

as the larger intentions of the BLM, the oil industry, the Department of

Interior, and even the U.S. government for the lease sales emerged as a robust

theme in our tn-counties research. This theme's significance here suggested

that such daims should not be subsumed into the more concrete categories, as

they had in prior research.

The Lease Sale Draft EIS: In addition to providing scientific estimates

of potential impacts on the local environment, air quality, economic base,

infrastructure, and way of life, the draft EIS serves another important yet less

visible function. Specifically, it lays the ground for future comment by

various groups (government units, the oil industry, environmental

organizations, the public, etc.) not only through the scientific evidence it

presents but in what it neglects or fails to say. In the latter regard, two themes

are largely absent from both lease sale draft EISs; we discuss them here to

frame our subsequent analysis of the hearing, comments, and newspaper

coverage. First, national energy needs, as a brief section at the beginning of

each document indicates, provided the rationale for the entire lease sale.

While this theme's treatment in the draft EISs was so terse that it literally

approached 0 percent of both documents, national energy needs proved to be

environments. Statements predicting probabilities of impact upon the environment (e.g. oil

spill models, drilling cut analyses) were coded under this category, as were statements about

indirect environmental threats (e.g. seismic fault mapping, concerns for the use of oil tankers,

fear that oil might contaminate the cooling systems of the Diablo Canyon nudear reactor).

Finally, sentiments considered "biocentric" or generally environmentalist were coded under this

category. Air quality indudes statements concerning air quality, its measurement, and the

impact offshore oil drilling could have upon air quality. Way of life concerns for offshore oil

drilling's impact upon social and sentimental facets of the "quality of life" in the affected

communities: the "character" of a community, aesthetics (i.e. visual impairment of the

coastline by offshore platforms), recreational uses of the coast and other impacted areas,

residents' health and well-being, etc. The unity of categories that are typically implied when

people state "1 moved here to breathe dean air..." or "the beauty of this region is appreciated

by both tourists and local residents..." - that is, when human actors recognize the connectedness

of specific concerns for impacts upon their residence and measure them in personal terms - is

coded here as way of life. National energy needs includes statements about the political and

policy-oriented goals for offshore oil development which presumably are the reasons the Lease

Sales are being proposed: to reduce the need for imported oil, to protect national security, to

fuel the growth of the national economy, etc. Infrastructure indudes statements about impacts

upon public services and facilities as provided by local governments, housing, schools, land use,

planning, ports, highways, and local roads. Economic base indudes concerns about local

economies, employment, and revenues resulting from offshore oil drilling. Comments about the

potential impacts and benefits of drilling upon commercial fishing and tourism, two major

industries for much of the tn-county area, are coded here.

126
an immensely provocative subject for both supporters and opponents of the

lease sales, many of whom devote a significant proportion of their comments

to this very issue. Second, a substantive discussion of legitimacy! procedural

themes is absent in both draft EISs. This is perhaps predictable; as a technical

document, the draft EISs tended to either reduce this theme to strictly

technical issues or refer the commentor to its lengthy citations of laws and

provisions, which address the responsibilities of the BLM and the rights of

the public in the EIS process. However, as witnessed in subsequent

comments and newspaper coverage, legitimacy! procedural questions proved

to be a very salient theme that framed not only Santa Barbara County's

response to the draft EISs and the lease sales, but its attitudes towards the oil

industry and offshore oil drilling from the lease sale on.

Who commented: In letters and oral statements, 6 Santa Barbara

County parties used the LS 53 draft EIS comment period, and 51 Santa Barbara

County parties used the IS 68 draft EIS comment period, as the occasion to

express their sentiments about the document, the lease sales, and the general

prospect of offshore oil drilling in the county, for a total of 57 county

commentors. Of the 57 commentors, 11 represented local or county

government agencies, one represented a local oil industry organization, 24

represented organizations,55 7 represented oil industry organizations, and 15

spoke or wrote on their own behalf as unaffiliated county residents (i.e. the

public). Among the equivalent "local" lease sale hearings in the fri-counties,

Santa Barbara County brought forth the greatest number of non-oil

organizational representatives of any county in the comparative tn-county

case study. The high turnout of organizational representatives ifiustrates

the organized character of Santa Barbara County oil opponents - one facet of

the county's consistently high organizational density (see "Organizations,

Organizations, Organizations" above).

Supportive/opposed: Of these 57 commentors, 29 (or 51 percent)

expressed opposition to the lease sale and! or criticisms of the draft EIS; 28 (or

55The Santa Barbara County organizations represented induded: League of Women Voters,

Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce, Building Trades Council, Santa Barbara Painters Union,

Get Oil Out (two commentors), Carpinteria Valley Association, Save Our Shellfish (two

commentors), Scenic ShorelinePreservation Conference (three commeritors), California Abalone

Association, Nature Conservancy (two commentors), Coastwatch, Environmental Defense

Center (two commentors), Sierra Club, Network, Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce, Santa

Maria Developers Association (two commentors), Friends of the Earth, and Santa Barbara

Indian Center (two commentors).

In equivalent hearings, San Luis Obispo County was represented by 128 comrnentors, in which

15 represented local or county government agencies, 1 represented an oil industry organization,

11 represented other organizations, and 101 represented themselves (i.e. the public). 29

commentors were Ventura County was represented by 15 commentors, in which three

represented local or county government agencies, five represented oil industry organizations,

three represented other organizations, and four represented themselves (i.e. the public).

127
49 percent) expressed support of the lease sale arid/or the draft EIS; and no

one gave a "neutral" statement Here it should be noted that, among

equivalent lease sale hearings in the tn-counties, Santa Barbara County was

the most evenly split in its attitudes toward the lease sale: by comparison, of

128 commentors from San Luis Obispo County, 92 percent were

opposed! critical, six percent were supportive, and two percent were neutral;

of 16 Ventura County commentors, 13 percent were opposed! critical, 69

percent were supportive, and 19 percent were neutral. Santa Barbara

County's north/south split in oil sentiments was particularly in effect during

the LS 68 comment period, as most of the opposed! critical commentors were

South Coast-based, while speakers from Santa Maria and Lompoc were

consistently supportive.

Themes of comments: Our analysis here focuses most prominently on

the LS 68 hearing, where the volume of Santa Barbara County comments was

greatest. Among county opponents' comments, the primary theme sounded

by government units and environmentalist organizations was the

environment, accounting for 37 and 64 percent of comments, respectively.

The prominence of this theme is perhaps to be expected, given the nature of

the environmental impact analysis process and the controversies in the

county surrounding threatened species, drilling muds, and the technological

capacity of the oil industry to safeguard the marine environment.

Governmental units also gave voice to legitimacy/procedural issues (22

percent) with an emphasis on procedure; for example, government

representatives critiqued the BLM's perceived failure to incorporate or

respond to earlier governmental comments solicited in the prior EIS

"scoping" period. Finally, governmental units expressed themes of national

energy needs (20 percent), and, to a lesser extent (10 percent or less) the

county's physical infrastructure, economic base, air quality, and way of life.

Most opposed commentors from Santa Barbara County spoke through

some sort of organizational affiliation, environmental or otherwise. For

environmentalist organizations, the environment was (not surprisingly) the

most dominant theme; environmentalists expressed all other themes

cursorily (under 10 percent) except for legitimacy/procedural issues (18

percent). Santa Barbara County is perhaps unique among the tn-counties in

that groups whose organizing principles may not include oil or the

environment per se actively participate in the offshore drilling debate.

During the LS 68 comment period, these groups took up divergent sides of

the debate, from the anti-oil League of Women Voters to the pro-oil Santa

Maria Developers Association; their comments reflect these divergent

interests. Whereas the environment was a primary concern for these groups

(57 percent of comments), they also sounded an. almost even concern for

legitimacy! procedural issues and national energy needs (13 and 12 percent).

128
The last theme reflects the prominence of lease sale supporters in the

organizational category (e.g. economic development associations).57

In Santa Barbara County, commentors representing themselves were

relatively few - again,, only 15 individuals, or 27 percent of county

commentors - and were as likely to be north county oil supporters as South

Coast opponents. The relative prominence of lease sale supporters among

members of the public reflects the converse of the South Coast's

organizational density - the comparative lack of north county organizing.

This phenomenon also explains the prominence of national energy needs

among these speakers: advocates generally restated in their own words the

same rationale for energy development (domestic energy independence,

national security, etc.) that the EIS makes note of in its introduction.

Supporters secondarily invoked the benefits to the county's economic base (12

percent) that the lease sale could provide (primarily jobs and revenues).58

Public oil opponents, by contrast, distributed their comments across a wide

range of themes. These commentors were concerned with the environment

(28 percent); also of importance were concerns for way of life (16 percent), a

"resource' that oil opponents argued was threatened by further offshore oil

development. Public opponents also sounded legitimacy! procedural themes

(11 percent), for example, regarding the oil industry's and federal

government's perceived dismissal of county offshore drilling concerns and of

"democracy" in general.

Newspaper coverage: The case study looked at the amount and content

of coverage by the Santa Batham News-Press and the Santa Maria Times regarding

the lease sales, as found in news articles, editorials, and letters to the editor

published in a ten day period around the hearings, from two days before to

seven days after. An important note: while many papers covered both

hearings, much of our descriptions of newspaper behavior is based upon the hearing closest to the newspaper's home, where coverage is likely to be

heaviest (i.e. Lease Sale 68 for the News-Press). One finding is striking: in

comparison to the San Luis Obispo County newspapers, the depth of coverage

provided by the News-Press and Times is average to negligible. The News-Press

(Santa Barbara County's major daily newspaper) devoted 334 column lines of

coverage to Lease Sale 68; the Santa Maria Times (also a daily paper) provided n a

coverage of this event, although it did provide 158 column lines for the LS 53

hearing at San Luis Obispo, 30 miles to the north. By comparison, the Five

57Notably, the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce spoke out against Lease Sale 68. In this

respect, the chamber was unlike all other tn-county economic organization except the San Luis

Obispo Chamber of Commerce.

58A note of comparison: under this category, the Santa Barbara County fishermen who

commented on Lease Sale 53 were generally supportive of the lease sale and the oil industry's

assurance that fishing would not be negatively impacted. This contrasts with the unanimous

opposition to offshore oil drilling expressed by San Luis Obispo County fishermen.

129
Cilies Tim es-Press-Rewrder devoted 546 column lines of text, and the Sm bus

Giispo Telegram -Tribune devoted 443 column lines, and the Ventura Skzr-Free Press

devoted 423 column lines, to utheir!? lease sale hearings.

In regards to the content of coverage (in news articles as well as

editorials and letters), the anki Paiiiu News-Press devoted almost 70 percent of

its LS 68 coverage to the comments of offshore drilling opponents. This is

one way in which the News-P,rss amplifies anti-oil sentiments; compare this

coverage, for example, with the fact that 65 percent of the LS 68 speakers

(including oil industry and other non-county speakers) spoke in support of

the lease sale. The News-Press also amplified a particular theme of opponents,

legitimacy/procedural issues, by the prominence it gave to state

Assemblyman Gary Hart's comment that the BLM's accelerated OCS

development had made a "sham" of democracy; Harfs comment not only

dominated in column lines of coverage but stole the day's headline ("Hart,

Lagomarsino protest channel oil lease policy"). Hart's prominence in the

News-Thss coverage also conforms to another pattern of news reporting, the

"habitual access" of government representatives and other privileged

newsrnakers to newspapers.59

Conclusion: Table 20 shows the proportions of comments devoted to

environment (Env), air quality (AQ), way of life (WOL), legitimacy! procedure

(LIP), national energy needs (NEN), infrastructure (Jnf), and economic base

(EcB) themes in the Lease Sales 53 and 68 draft EISs; the oral statements of all

speakers at the "local" draft EIS hearings in Santa Barbara; the oral and

written statements of Santa Barbara County commentors regarding the lease

sales and their respective draft EISs; and the coverage of the Sin ía Eariwu NewsPress and the Sin In Maria Times regarding both lease sale hearings.

59We are hesitant to interpret the media effects of the Santa Maria Times due to the paucity of

data to analyze. Its lack of LS 68 hearing coverage could be seen as a pro-oil issue

amplification; specifically, its silence on a local event that other papers (from even outside the

county) found newsworthy can be interpreted as the paper's support for the status quo of

accelerated OCS development. However, another interpretation could attribute its lack of

coverage to accident or other external factors, such as a lack of reporters on that news day.

130
Table 20: Proportions of comments and themes regarding Lease Sales 53 and

68 in Santa Barbara County (lines of text from documents and transcripts)

Source: BLM, Final EIS,6° Proposed 1981 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Lease Sale,

Offshore Central and Northern California: OCS Sale No. 53; ELM, Final EIS, Proposed 1982

Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Lease Sale, Offshore Central and Northern California:

OCS Sale No. 68; ELM,. Public Hearing on Draft Environmental Statement for Proposed Outer

Continental Shelf Lease Sale No. 53, Central and Northern California: San Luis Obispo,

California, June 27, 7980; ELM, Public Hearing on Draft Environmental Statement for Proposed

Outer Continental Shelf Lease Sale No. 68: Santa Barbara, California, July 28-29, 1987; letters

from Santa Barbara County regarding Lease Sales 53 and 68, held at Minerals Management

Service library, Camarillo, California; Santa Barbara News-Press, 6/25-7/5/80 and 7/26-

8/4/81; Santa Maria Times, 6/25-7/5/80 and 7/26-8/4/81

As this quantitative data indicates, Santa Barbara County concerns

regarding offshore oil drilling stayed relatively focused on substantive issues

raised in the draft EISs, such as the environment, local infrastructure,

economic base, and air quality. An analysis of comments made by opponents

in government, organizations, and the general public indicates their frequent

use of a technical/scientific language of environmental impact analysis that,

among all three counties, most closely matches the caliber (if not the

conclusions) of statements found in the draft EIS. Whether opponents are

60 A methodological qualification: Strictly speaking, the final EISs for the lease sales were

the product of public responses to two previous versions of the EJSs, and so the documents coded

in this case study were published at the end of the respective EIS/public comments/media

coverage sequence investigated in the comparative tn-county study. While there is room for

some speculation that the final ES might have produced fewer questions of legitimacy and

procedure from the public than its draft versions in fact produced, there are two reasons why we

feel coding the final EISs was justified. First, we did not code the public comments sections of

the final versions, and so what remained was structurally the same document as the draft

versions. Second, the final versions of the lease sales' EISs reached the same conclusions of

negligible environmental impact and showed the same naiveté about the social impact of the

ES process itself which resulted in the public outcry in the first place. That is, despite their

modifications in substance, the Final EIS was essentially the same document used to reach the

same conclusions as the draft ES was.

131

Env AQ WOL L/P NEN lnf EcB

Lease Sale 68 and 60% 5% 9% 0% 0% 9% 17%

Lease Sale 53 draft EISs [13110] [11571 [1997] [0] [31] [18741 [36141

Lease Sale 68 hearing 55% 3% 4% 11% 16% 3% 8%

in Santa Barbara [2576} [120] [2051 [494] [766] [135] [381]

Santa Barbara County 45% 2% 5% 16% 21% 4% 7%

commentors [1580] [:;1 [195] [562] [764] [151] [270]

Santa Barbara 31% 0% 7% 50% 9% 1% 8%

News-Press [1221 [1] [] [197] [2] [4] [33]

Santa Maria Times 38% 3% 7% 6% 22% 0% 25%

[261 [21 [5] [4] [15] [0] [17]
talking about air emissions "parts per million" or offshore drilling's impacts

on fishing, most offshore drilling opponents achieve a level of sophistication

in their comments, presentation, and larger strategy that is unparalleled in

San Luis Obispo and Ventura Counties. This most likely reflects the

organizational density of Santa Barbara; this pervasiveness of sophisticated

public comments requires the diffusion of information achieved by

organizing across many spheres - not just government, but environmental,

"good government, "and other stripes of organization.

Yet the comments of Santa Barbara County oil opponents also indicate

that technical and bureaucratic proficiency did not replace alarm, concern, or

other sentiments beyond the purview of the substantive issues addressed in

the lease sales' draft EISs. Like their counterparts in San Luis Obispo County,

commentors of all stripes also raised less scientifically manageable issues

about national energy needs, way of life, and especially legitimacy! procedure.

As our qualitative analysis of their comments and additional interviews

corroborate, the emergent legitimacy! procedure theme expressed opponents'

concern (and often anger) that the county might be on the short end of OCS

decision-making conducted far from the Central Coast, and that this decisionmaking failed to consider local concerns that county representatives had

raised in preliminary scoping and environmental impact analysis

(particularly for LS 68), as well as earlier oil industrialization controversies

Way of life arguments also strayed beyond a scientifically proper discourse,

invoking the unity of social and natural amenities that cannot be measured

simply as "aesthetics" (the BLM's term) yet which constitute another

"resource" threatened by offshore drilling By contrast, offshore drilling

supporters regularly invoked national energy needs beyond its brief mention

in the draft EIS to reinforce legitimacy and assert the need for further OCS

development.

Through the filter of the major daily newspaper, the

legitimacy/procedure theme continued to loom large in representations of

the county's altitudes toward offshore oil drilling. This case study's tracking

of the treatment of themes, through quantitative and qualitative methods,

from document to comments to newspaper coverage makes visible the Santa

Barbara County paftem of issueainplt1czthon. The finding that

legitimacy! procedure and, to a lesser extent, way of life emerged and were

sustained during the lease sale hearings as a prominent "counter-argument"

among county commentors is more than academic. Legitimacy! procedural

issues conveyed at this hearing would parallel subsequent themes of county

opposition to offshore oil drilling. The perceived failure of the federal

government and the oil industry to address this theme during the lease sales

and future events would lead to the call among county offshore drilling

opponents to exert stronger control over the decision-making process.

132
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142
List of those consulted or interviewed

(Partial list)

Persons are listed according to the county with which they are most knowlegable (usually the county

where they live or work). Many informants, however, provided useful information on other

communities or counties with which they were familiar.

Santa Barbara County:

Robert Almy, Former Manager, County Resource Management

Douglas Anthony, County Energy Division

Dorothy Benlord, Santa Maria Historical Museum

Barney Brantingham, Columnist, Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ross Bruneffi, Engineer, California Division of Oil and Gas.

Melinda Burns, Reporter, Santa Barbara News-Press.

Andy Caidwell, Director, Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business (COLAB)

Richard Chenoweth, Santa Maria Historical Museum

Larry Crandell, Real estate developer, civic volunteer.

Kevin Drude, County Energy Division

Fred Eissler, Scenic Shoreline Preservation Conference

Scott Ernathius, Geologist, Mobil Corporation.

Michael D. Fox, Former Attorney, Environmental Defense Center.

Carla Friske, Office of State Senator, Jack O'Connell.

David Gebhard, Professor Architectural History (late), UCSB

Jean Holmes, League of Women Voters.

George Hobbs, Former Mayor, Santa Maria.

Olga Howard, Santa Maria Citizens Planning Association

Joyce Howerton, Mayor, City of Lompoc

Barbara Hutchins, Office of Planning and Development, Santa Maria

Robert Kailman, Former MMS official, Former County Supervisor

Joan Kerris, President, Get Oil Out.

Robert Klausner, businessman, civic volunteer.

Linda Krop, Attorney, Environmenal Defense Center.

Stephan B. Logan, Building Contractor, Board of Directors, South Coast Congregate

Care.

Sheila Lodge, Former Mayor, Santa Barbara

Morton Maizlish, President, Board of Realtors.

Mark McGinnes, Lawyer, UCSB Lecturer, Environmental Studies.

Michael McGinnis, Dames and Moore

Stephan L. Miles, Attorney.

Paul Mills, Former Director, Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Torn Miyoshi, Former county supervisor, City Council Member, Santa Maria

Donald Olson, City Planner, Santa Barbara

Luis Perez, County Energy Division

Michael Powers, Deputy Director, Santa Barbara County Association of

Governments.

I1'±3
Gail Rappaport, Attorney, Former Board member, Center Stage Theatre.

Albert Reynolds, Former Director, County Office of Environmental Quality.

Lesley Ridley-Tree, Director, Santa Barbara Museum of Art philanthropist.

Jim Ryerson Former Official1 County Air Pollution Control District

Darwin Sainz, Unocal official, rancher..

Francis Sarguis, Attorney, Former President, Get Oil Out.

Patricia Schewczyk. Santa Barbara League of Women Voters

Mark Schniepp, UCSB Economic Forecast Project.

Robert Sollen, Former environmental reporter, Santa Barbara News-Press

John Stahl, Official, Molino Oil Corporation.

Robert Campbell-Taylor, County Assessor's Office

Alexander Velto, Realtor (late).

Gaye Warren, Western States Petroleum Assocation (WSPA)

Glenn Wharton, businessman, Board of Directors, Fund for Santa Barbara.

Nick Welsh, News Editor, Santa Barbara Independent.

San Luis Obispo County:

Joseph Amanzio, Professor of Architecture, Cal Poly

Patricia Beck, County Planner

Phyllis Beggs, Finance Director, Pismo Beach

Richard Boyle, Official, Unocal.

George Brand, Former Editor, San Luis Obispo Telegrczni-Tribune

James Bray, Official, Unocal

Jerry Bunin, county reporter, San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune

Ellen Carroll, County Environmental Coordinator

Allan Cooper, Professor and Director, Architecture, Cal Poly

Ken Curtis, City Planner, Pismo Beach.

Sheree Davis, Director of Governmental Affairs, SLO Chamber of Commerce

Bill Dejamette, President, Grover City Chamber of Commerce.

Evelyn Delany, County Supervisor

Jerry Diefenderfer, Former County Supervisor, Rancher, Paso Robles

John Euphrat, County Planner, Energy Division.

Janet Farris, Local Historian, Avila Beach.

Nicholas Ferravanti, Businessman, Activist, Paso Robles

David Garth, Executive Director, SLO Chamber of Commerce

Brian Haley, Department of Anthropology, UCSanta Barbara

Walter Harris, Associate Director of admissions, Cal Poly

Ampie Hayberg, County Auditor's Office

vfike Hodgson, Editor, Five Cities Times-Press-Recorder.

Jean Hubbard, South County Historical Society

Daniel Krieger, Professor of History, Cal Poly, President, County Historical Society

Bonnie Krupp, Institutional Studies Office, Cal Poly

Kurt Kupper, Former County Supervisor, Director, ECOSLO.

Sam Leonard, County Assessor's Office

Dorine Liberto-Blanck, City Planner, Arroyo Grande.

144
Howard Mankins, Former County Supervisor, Former Mayor of Arroyo Grande,

rancher

Ken McCall, Reporter, San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune.

Carolyn Moffett, Port San Luis Harbor District.

Robert Nimmo, Former State Assemblyman, former State Senator, Atascadero.

Gerard Parsons, Former Commissioner, Pt. San Luis Harbor

David Ryal, Director, Pismo Beach Chamber of Commerce

Kenneth Schwartz, Former Mayor of SLO, Professor of Architecture, Cal Poly

Sandy Sidah, Records & Information Office, Cal Poly

Sandy Silver, civic activist, Mothers For Peace.

Ernest Smith, Rancher, Smith Drilling, Paso Robles,.

Marcia SIillman, County Assessor's Office

Michael Stover, Editor, San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune.

Thomas Sullivan, City Planner, Grover City.

William Weldon, Unocal

Ventura County:

Jeff Attebury, Unocal

Lee Bafalon, Attorney, Chevron.

Pat Baggerly, Environmental Activist

Russ Baggerly, Aide to County Supervisor.

Doris Black. Civic Volunteer.

Phil Blackburn, Staff, Texaco

Linda Brewster, Mayor, Fillmore.

Mark Capeffi, Staff, California Coastal Commission

Steve Chawkins, Columnist, Ventura Star.

Bill Clawson, Tourism Bureau, Ventura.

Terry Covington,. California Coastal Operators Group (CCOG).

Joseph DeVito, Mayor, Ojai.

Glenna Deane Dovey, Oxnard League of Women Voters

David Eaton, Former County Supervisor.

Don Gluyas, Unocal.

Stan Greene, Citizens to Preserve the Ojai

Dorothy Haaze, Fillmore Historical Society

EdWard Hall, Petroleum Geologist, Unocal.

Jean Harris, Ormond Beach Task Force

Charles Johnson, Ventura County Historical Society

Gene Kjellberg, County Planner

Barbara Kornylo, Staff, Texaco

Ed Laughman County Assessor's Office.

Judy Lazar, City Council member, Thousand Oaks.

Cynthia Leake, Civic volunteer, Ventura.

Bernard Leavitt, Civic volunteer, Ventura.

Isabel Leavitt, Civic volunteer, Ventura

Greg Mansfield, Reporter, Ventura Star

145
Lou Mazarrio, Staff, County Planning (oil division).

Robert McKinney, City Council, Ojai.

John McWherter, Former Ventura City Council member

Spence Mitchell, Petroleum Geologist

Jim Monahan, Oil supply company owner, Former Ventura City Council member.

Neil Moyer, Texaco, Former member, County Air Pollution Control District.

Jeff SanMarchi, Editor, The Voice (Ojai/Ventura independent newspaper)

John Sterling, Staff, Patagonia Incorporated

Greg Stratton, Mayor, Simi Valley

Burton Swope, City Editor, Ventura Star

Paul Tebble, Staff, Patagoma Incorporated.

John Thompson, Oil industry businessman (compressor repair)

Judith Triem,. Historian, Ventura County.

Richard Warchol, Reporter, Ventura Star.

Dorill Wright, California Coastal Commissioner (Pt. Hueneme).

Non-local Informants:

Svein Andersen, Professor of Business, Oslo University (Norway)

David Brown, State lands Commission

Gray Brechin, Dept of Geography, UC Berkeley.

Faye Cox, Staff, Texaco

Avery Guest, Population Reseach Center, IJniverity of Washington, Seattle.

Dan Haifley, Former Director, Save Our Shores

Brenda Hearing, Carnegie Foundation Library (Columbia University)

Susan Hershberger, Shell

Paul Langland, ARCO

Paul Leonard, Deputy Assistant Secretary, US Department of Housing and Urban

Development, Washington DC.

Shaun-Michael Morse, Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco

William Tanner, Exxon

146
The Department of the Interior Mission

As the Nation's principal conservation agency, the Department of the Interior has responsibility

for most of our nationally owned public lands and natural resources. This includes fostering

sound use of our land and water resources; protecting our fish, wildlife, and biological diversity;

preserving the environmental and cultural values of our national parks and historical places;

and providing for the enjoyment of life through outdoor recreation. The Department assesses our

energy and mineral resources and works to ensure that their development is in the best interests

of all our people by encouraging stewardship and citizen participation in their care. The

Department also has a major responsibility for American Indian reservation communities and for

people who live in island territories under U.S. administration.

The Minerals Management Service Mission

As a bureau of the Department of the Interior, the Minerals Management Service's (MMS) primary

responsibilities are to manage the mineral resources located on the Nation's Outer Continental

Shelf (OCS), collect revenue from the Federal OCS and onshore Federal and Indian lands, and

distribute those revenues.

Moreover, in working to meet its responsibilities, the Offshore Minerals Management Program

administers the OCS competitive leasing program and oversees the safe and environmentally sound

exploration and production of our Nation's offshore natural gas, oil and other mineral resources.

The MMS Royalty Management Program meets its responsibilities by ensuring the efficient, timely

and accurate collection and disbursement of revenue from mineral leasing and production due to

Indian tribes and allottees, States and the U.S. Treasury.

The MMS strives to fulfill its responsibilities through the general guiding principles of: 1) being

responsive to the public's concerns and interests by maintaining a dialogue with all potentially

affected parties and (2) carrying out its programs with an emphasis on working to enhance the

quality of life for all Americans by lending MMS assistance and expertise to economic development

and environmental protection.