Supervisors Oppose New Offshore Rigs : Resolution Points to Risks of Pollution, Aesthetic Concerns

The Orange County Board of Supervisors Wednesday joined the outcry against the proposed compromise that would open 54 square miles off the county coast to oil drilling.

Supervisors Thomas F. Riley, Ralph Clark and Harriett Wieder adopted a resolution, written by Wieder, backing coastal cities in the county in opposing the plan approved last week by a key congressional subcommittee.

“This ‘compromise’ agreement was conceived without any input from local constituencies,” Wieder said in a letter to the other supervisors. “No public hearings have been held in the affected areas. This needs to be remedied. Even our local legislators were not all party to the negotiations.”

The compromise, adopted by the House appropriations subcommittee on the interior, was worked out between a small group of House members, most of them Democrats from Northern California, and Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel.

Terms of Compromise

It would open 1,350 square miles, most of them off the Northern California coast, to oil drilling, but would spare most of the coastal waters now protected by a four-year-old moratorium.

When Riley suggested Wednesday that the supervisors might want to wait a week until their colleagues, Bruce Nestande and Roger Stanton, return from out-of-town trips and could vote on the resolution, Wieder advised against it.

She cited the example of Orange County’s all-Republican congressional delegation, saying that “their absence of participation and their absence of comment reflects or is perceived as not being supportive” of the fight against offshore oil exploration.

Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach), whose coastal district lies closest to the proposed drilling area and who opposes the drilling plan, has drawn criticism from some of his constituents for not taking part in the negotiations that led to the compromise.

Riley said that he tried unsuccessfully several years ago to get fellow board members to join him in opposing oil exploration off the county’s coast, and that he is still concerned. Clark pronounced himself “totally opposed to this offshore drilling for a long, long time.”

‘A Vital Concern’

Wieder is a former mayor of Huntington Beach, which does have oil wells off its shore. She said she realized that the county did not have jurisdiction in the matter, but that, because it was of “vital concern to county residents,” the board should express its opposition.

The board resolution spoke of the “aesthetically unpleasing specter of massive oil drilling platforms,” as well as “the prospect of irreversible damage to the environment as a result of air and water pollution resulting from oil drilling operations.”

Hodel has agreed to travel the California coast at the end of August, and to conduct hearings on the oil drilling plan.

But he has warned that he may reject the compromise and open even more of the coastal waters to drilling.