Coast : 4 City Officials Lobby for Offshore Drilling Ban

A delegation representing four county coastal cities was in Washington Tuesday, seeking congressional support before a key House committee vote to reinstate a ban on offshore oil and gas exploration in California.

Laguna Beach City Councilman Robert F. Gentry, San Clemente Mayor William C. Mecham and San Clemente City Councilman G. Scott Diehl were lobbying as many of the 57 members of the House Appropriations Committee as possible before a vote on the moratorium, expected Thursday morning.

“We are telling them it is a matter of fairness,” Gentry said Tuesday in an interview from Washington. “Now there is no protection for the California coast while we are trying to negotiate a long-term solution to this problem. It’s just not fair to negotiate a solution with our coast in jeopardy of oil development.”

A 4-year-old ban on leasing tracts off most of California was defeated last year by one vote. But Congress also directed Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel to negotiate with an 18-member House task force on a plan that would protect environmentally sensitive areas and still permit some exploration.

When talks collapsed last week over the Interior Department’s refusal to delay a lease sale planned off Northern California in 1988, Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley) and others won reinstatement of the ban in the Interior Department’s budget bill in a House Appropriations subcommittee.

The trio of municipal lobbyists were representing their cities, as well as Newport Beach and Huntington Beach. The four cities created a coalition opposed to new offshore drilling last summer when a now-dead agreement between Hodel and California congressmen called for leasing six tracts off Orange County.

Gentry predicted that Thursday’s vote will be “very close.”

“I am cautiously optimistic, but it’s a very hard vote to call,” he said. “If we win it (a moratorium), it will be by one or two votes at the most.”