2 on State Lands Commission Threaten Suit to Block Offshore Drilling

Declaring that the federal government is about to “auction off the California coastline” to the oil companies, two of the three members of the state Lands Commission said Wednesday that they will vote to sue the U.S. Interior Department to prevent drilling in waters off the state’s coast.

Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy and Controller Gray Davis contended at a news conference that the Interior Department’s five-year plan for oil drilling fails to consider the increased air pollution that the drilling would cause and does not take into account potential environmental damage to coastal communities that would be home to pipelines and oil refineries.

State Finance Director Jesse R. Huff, an appointee of Gov. George Deukmejian and the third member of the Lands Commission, did not participate in the news conference and could not be reached for comment. The commission is expected to take up the issue today in executive session. “California should be a testing ground for alternative energy, not a dumping ground for an imbalanced policy tied solely to oil dependence,” McCarthy said, adding that he believed Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel had “blithely ignored” California’s pleas for more environmental protection.

Davis said the danger that oil drilling poses to the air and beaches, and thus the state’s lucrative tourist industry, might be dwarfed by the possible impact on coastal cities and towns that would receive the brunt of the day-to-day effects from a buildup of the oil industry.

“Nowhere in the plan do they take into account the onshore consequences of this massive drilling,” Davis said. “Those areas most adversely affected are the least prepared for the massive industrialization” that could result.

Bob Walker, a spokesman for Hodel, said any lawsuit to stop the Interior Department’s five-year plan would be premature because the plan merely represents a schedule for considering the lease of 750 million acres of offshore tracts for oil and gas drilling.

Although a congressional moratorium prevents additional drilling off California until 1989, the department, under the plan made final July 2, has begun preliminary review of the potential lease sites.

When each specific area has its final review before drilling is approved, “the community out there and the state government can certainly weigh in with all these concerns about what the onshore impacts are going to be and raise those questions,” Walker said.

Walker said the Interior Department “can’t consider every possible impact to every possible area nationwide or we’d never be able to move a plan forward. We’d spend all our time doing studies and we’d never have a leasing program for the country.”

Davis conceded that one goal of the proposed lawsuit would be to tie up the department’s plan in the courts until it can be changed in a more favorable political climate.

“Hopefully we will win on the merits, but at the very least, this will allow time for a new Administration to come into power (in 1989) and hopefully take a more benign and enlightened view of the coastal states,” Davis said.

Davis and McCarthy also said they would support legislation in Congress to give states veto power over offshore oil drilling in federal jurisdiction if the drilling would “significantly affect” state waters.