Mobil Settlement and the Voters

As details of the pretrial settlement of Torrance’s public nuisance lawsuit with Mobil Oil trickle out, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Torrance electorate was deceived on March 6, 1990. On that day, three of four Torrance voters rejected the Walker Initiative, which would have banned the use of hydrofluoric acid at the Mobil refinery, because they relied in large part upon the formal ballot arguments and campaign literature of Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert and five of the six remaining city council members. Mayor Geissert and her council allies were successful in persuading Torrance citizens to reject the Walker Initiative and to trust the mayor and council’s judgment that a public nuisance lawsuit was the better vehicle for quickly ending the use of hydrofluoric acid and exposing any and all other hazardous activities at the Mobil refinery.

The terms of the pretrial settlement confirm that the electorate’s trust was betrayed.

The settlement agreement allows Mobil to continue using hydrofluoric acid for seven years. The city of Torrance has made it abundantly clear that it is deathly afraid of engaging in protracted litigation with Mobil. Mayor Geissert’s opposition to the Walker Initiative was predicated upon the premise that the city could not afford the costs of defending the initiative against Mobil’s inevitable legal challenge. Torrance City Atty. Kenneth Nelson has fended off criticism of the terms of the pretrial settlement with Mobil by claiming that the settlement was “cost-effective.”

Does anyone doubt that Mobil will be able to secure an extension of the use of hydrofluoric acid at the end of seven years? Will not Torrance be faced with the same set of alternatives in seven years, either to engage Mobil in protracted litigation over breach of the settlement agreement or to agree to another postponement? Is there anything about the manner in which Torrance has behaved during this affair that would lead Mobil to doubt that Torrance will cave in once again at the prospect of funding protracted litigation?

Thus far, the settlement agreement has completely locked out the public from access to information about the refinery. The city of Torrance never bothered to challenge Mobil’s designation of confidentiality of more than one-third of the 70,000 pages of documentation that Mobil turned over to the city during the discovery phase of the lawsuit. For this reason, Mobil may be allowed to conceal all of this “confidential” information from the public. Mobil may be allowed to conceal from the public the court-supervised safety adviser’s reports, which are intended to keep the city informed about what goes on behind the refinery’s gates, because the terms of the settlement agreement contain no guarantee that these reports are to be made public. Furthermore, Torrance officials have yet to decide whether their recommendation of a safety adviser will be debated publicly or behind closed doors.

The fruits of Torrance’s public nuisance lawsuits are proving to be more cosmetic than fundamental. The sad truth is that Torrance’s mayor, council and city attorney probably knew that this was the best that such a lawsuit could hope to yield. The important question is why they sold it to the citizens of Torrance as a better vehicle for change than the Walker Initiative, whose passage would have carried the imprimatur of the people of Torrance.

A cynical person might conclude that this was what Mayor Geissert and her council allies intended, that the nuisance lawsuit was a clever device to neutralize the Walker Initiative and give the appearance of doing something while in fact doing next to nothing. A more congenial person might conclude merely that Torrance leaders lacked the will and vision to tackle such a difficult problem. In either case, the conclusions are disturbing.

CRAIG KESSLER

Torrance