Offshore Oil Drilling Ban Suffers Blow

A House committee dealt a potentially mortal blow Thursday to foes of oil exploration off California, voting 27 to 26 not to renew a four-year ban on petroleum leasing and drilling off much of the state’s ecologically sensitive coastline.

The defeat of the drilling ban, which legislators had sought to attach to a $480-billion stopgap funding bill, marked the first time in five years that the House Appropriations Committee had failed to pass a one-year moratorium on exploration off California’s shores. The action could open vast stretches of ocean bottom, including most coastal lands north of Los Angeles, to leasing by the Department of the Interior to oil companies.

New Meetings

Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel said the vote would allow “environmentally sound” development of the state’s offshore oil reserves and called for new meetings with Congress to designate areas fit for leasing and exploration. A Hodel aide later pledged that no leasing of ocean floor tracts in moratorium areas will be conducted until late 1987 at the earliest.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles-based Western Oil and Gas Assn., which lobbied hard against the moratorium, said the moratorium’s defeat “reflects growing support in California and across the country for development of these offshore resources.”

But embittered California legislators and environmentalists said they may seek another vote on a drilling ban when the stopgap fund bill reaches the House floor, probably after Thanksgiving, or in the Senate.

“This is by no means the end of the war,” an angry Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley) said after the vote. “It just means we’re going to have to conduct some guerrilla warfare.”

Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego), one of the moratorium’s chief sponsors, said he had warned Hodel and others that a defeat of the moratorium would only delay offshore exploration, not hasten it.

“With protracted litigation, it could be another 10 to 20 years before drilling could begin,” he said. “We’re not going to be hurting for plaintiffs.”

The narrow defeat capped a three-month reversal of fortunes for opponents of offshore oil exploration, who believed in August that they had struck an enviable bargain with Hodel to delay drilling in all but about 1,300 square miles of the 58,000-square-mile restricted area until after the year 2000.

But Hodel scrapped the bargain in September after outraged oil companies complained that few of the 150 3-mile-by-3-mile tracts granted to them in the agreement were worth exploring. The Interior Department and California legislators have worked toward a middle ground since then, but hope for a new agreement faded last month as oil-state congressmen and other industry supporters demanded a role in the California negotiations.

Had Been Confident

Panetta, Lowery and other opponents of offshore exploration had been confident Thursday that the Appropriations Committee would vote to extend the drilling ban for another year, in the absence of an agreement with Hodel.

They said later that they had underestimated the lobbying clout of the oil industry, the White House and oil-state legislators who depicted Californians as seeking special favors.

“Mr. Fazio doesn’t want an oil slick on his hot tub,” Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Tex.), whose state’s coast hosts many oil rigs, said during Thursday’s debate with Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), a leading supporters of the moratorium. “But we need the steel production, we need the jobs and we need the oil.”

President Reagan’s legislative office said Thursday that it had assigned a lobbyist to the moratorium issue. And the Reagan Administration’s point man, Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), told panel members that Californians had already had four years to reach a compromise, and had failed.

“We’re talking about jobs in the 1990s. We’re talking about gas lines in the 1990s. We’re talking about the trade deficit and what impact it has on this economy,” he said. “The time to deal with this issue is not during a time of crisis.”

Blame Deukmejian

Despite the rhetoric, most California lawmakers laid their defeat to California Gov. George Deukmejian and a couple of Massachusetts congressmen, Republican Silvio O. Conte and Democrat Joseph D. Early.

Deukmejian, never a moratorium supporter, weighed in Thursday with a telegram to Appropriations Committee Chairman Jamie L. Whitten (D-Miss.) strongly favoring an end to the drilling ban.

And Conte and Early--two committee members who had long backed the moratorium in exchange for California’s support of a similar ban off Massachusetts--suddenly switched sides Thursday, giving moratorium foes the winning margin.

“It was an utterly amazing change of votes in Massachusetts,” Fazio said. “We had always supported them on the Georges Bank (ban off New England), but they abandoned us.”

“I think we’re all feeling a bit snookered,” said Lisa Speer, senior staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had favored the moratorium.

Bradley Echoes View

Speer said Deukmejian “must shoulder a major portion of the responsibility” for the moratorium defeat, a view expressed by Mayor Tom Bradley at a hastily called City Hall news conference in response to the vote, which he labeled a “heartbreaker for all Californians.”

“In my judgment the one man in California that destroyed any chance we had of winning that victory was George Deukmejian,’ said Bradley, who is an unannounced but likely Democratic candidate in next year’s gubernatorial contest.

During a telephone conversation with Bradley during the mayor’s news conference, Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) referred to the Republican governor as “The Duke of Oil.” Bradley, indicating that the label could become part of later campaign oratory, called the remark a “a fitting comment.”

Deukmejian spokesman Kevin Brett said claims that the governor was suddenly entering the offshore battle were “dead wrong.”

Governor’s Position

“The governor ran in 1982 advocating an area-by-area analysis” of offshore sites, he said. “The governor has also insisted on meeting air quality standards offshore, as well. Our position is cooperation and negotiation, not confrontation with Interior.”

The Appropriations Committee later decided on a voice vote to send the stopgap funding bill to the House Rules Committee, where California legislators must seek approval before placing the issue of an oil-drilling ban before the full House.

The spending bill would allot about $480 billion to finance most federal government operations for the rest of the 1986 fiscal year, which ends next Sept. 30. The bill would succeed similar stopgap legislation which is financing current federal operations until Dec. 13.