Foes of Offshore Drilling Criticize Loss of 1-Year Ban

Anti-drilling forces in California reacted with anger and disappointment at news of Thursday’s defeat in Washington of a one-year ban on oil exploration.

Several, including Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Laguna Beach Councilwoman Bobbie L. Minkin, blamed an 11th-hour lobbying effort by Gov. George Deukmejian.

Others, meanwhile, threatened legal action should efforts to win a one-year extension of the ban fail on the floor of the House of Representatives. A House Appropriations Committee voted 27 to 26 Thursday to deny the moratorium extension.

“The only alternative is court action,” said Mayor Bob Mandic of Huntington Beach, a city that has oil wells in operation both onshore and in state and federal waters offshore but has joined a coalition of Orange County cities opposing further exploration.

In Newport Beach, Councilwoman Evelyn Hart vowed Thursday: “We are not going to have offshore oil drilling off California, and we will do what we have to to prevent it.

“There is no way to mitigate the environmental concerns we have here. They want to take away our beauty and our view. Our sandy beaches and our coves are just too sensitive for that. . . . I continue to hope we will not have to go to litigation on it. But it is something we are prepared to do if we need to.”

But oil industry officials greeted the defeat of the moratorium with cautious optimism. Jack Knowlton, senior vice president for the oil drilling firm of Smith International in Orange County, said it may mean the oil industry can explore the nation’s energy resources in a rational way in the near future.

“I think it’s just great,” Knowlton said.

Legislators tried Thursday to resurrect the moratorium by attaching it to a $480-billion stopgap funding bill. Its defeat appears to open 58,000 square miles of ocean floor, including areas off Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, to Interior Department leasing to oil companies.

Disappointed California legislators said they would try to reverse the vote on the House or Senate floors, but most conceded a turnaround was unlikely.

Pro-moratorium forces had anticipated a close vote and had mounted an intense bipartisan lobbying effort of more than a dozen swing committee members.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors and the cities of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach sent a last-minute barrage of telegrams to undecided committee members, urging them to support their effort to buy time in negotiations with Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel.

Some said they had underestimated the effectiveness of a lobbying blitz by the White House and the oil industry. Others charged that Deukmejian’s last-minute lobbying swayed key votes.

“The one man who destroyed any chance we had (to extend the moratorium) was George Deukmejian,” said Mayor Bradley, who in 1982 narrowly lost the gubernatorial race and who is widely expected to seek a rematch in 1986.

Lt. Gov. McCarthy, in a statement issued Thursday deploring the committee vote, said “tremendous pressure from the oil industry, the Reagan Administration--and in the final 48 hours from Gov. Deukmejian--combined to undermine broad congressional support for extending the current moratorium.”

“The telling blow to us,” Laguna Beach Councilwoman Minkin said Thursday, was Deukmejian’s telegram to Appropriations Committee Chairman Jamie L. Whitten (D-Miss.) opposing a moratorium and similar statements in a speech to the American Petroleum Institute earlier this week .

In the telegram sent Wednesday, Deukmejian told Whitten: “A moratorium merely delays the hard decisions that eventually must be made. If policymakers avoid these decisions now and the nation is confronted with another energy emergency, there will be great pressure to open up California’s Outer Continental Shelf immediately without adequate time to include necessary environmental protections.

“I don’t want that to happen. I am concerned that a blanket moratorium could produce that result.”

Minkin said that many felt betrayed that the governor, who had taken no position all summer on a proposed lease agreement between Hodel and the California delegation, suddenly chose the week before a vote on the moratorium extension to make public his opposition.

But a Deukmejian aide denied that the governor’s position was a new one.

“If someone is insinuating that the governor has just arrived at this position, they are dead wrong,” Deukmejian press spokesman Kevin Brett said Thursday.

“The governor ran in 1982, advocating an area-by-area analysis to determine which areas are too environmentally sensitive,” Brett said. The telegram sent to Whitten Wednesday, he added, was a reiteration of that position.

“Our position is cooperation and negotiation, not confrontation with Interior,” Brett said.

But McCarthy, a Bay Area Democrat, said he “fears” the moratorium’s defeat may herald a “return to the days of (former Interior Secretary) James Watt.”

Minkin added that she was “very disappointed” that Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) reneged on his promise to support a one-year extension of the ban.

Kemp, who did not cast a vote Thursday, recently held a press conference in Washington with Minkin and Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach) to announce his support for a temporary moratorium to allow California legislators time to negotiate an agreement with Hodel.

Had Kemp kept his word, Minkin said, there would have been a tie vote and pro-moratorium forces could have tried to persuade others.