PORT HUENEME : Harbor Commission OKs 20-Year Lease

The Port of Hueneme took a major step closer to becoming the nation’s first regional cleanup center for catastrophic oil spills as Oxnard Harbor District commissioners agreed to lease a section of the port to an oil industry consortium for the next 20 years.

At their meeting Monday, harbor commissioners agreed to lease 6.3 acres of the port to the oil industry’s Marine Spill Response Corp. beginning at $1.03 million a year. The lease includes a 104,000-square-foot building, berths for two vessels and an operations center at the deep-water port.

If the lease is approved by the corporation’s governing board, the port will gain national prestige as the training center for the oil industry’s preparations to handle spills the size of the one created by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska last year.

The 20-year lease has a 10-year renewal option. The first year represents an increase of $600,000 over rents being paid by 10 tenants, who will need to relocate, said Anthony Taormina, port executive director.

By 1992, the corporation, financed by a consortium of large oil companies, would have invested more than $60 million in equipment and improvements at the port. The center is expected to bring 65 full-time jobs as well as temporary and training positions.

The corporation also plans to build a 12,000-square-foot operations center in Port Hueneme. The Oxnard Harbor District agreed to reimburse the corporation for $275,000 of the building’s costs. The district will also pay $35,000 to improve its mooring system to handle a 240-foot spill recovery barge and a 200-foot cleanup vessel.

As part of the lease agreement, the harbor district also promised to spend $5,000 to $8,000 to clean up a stretch of pavement contaminated with high levels of oil-based waste. The suspected source of the contamination is a former spray-painting booth on the property and the past practice of spraying oil on the ground to control dust, Taormina said.

“With the marine spill center, our port is certainly in the big leagues now,” Commissioner Bob Jennings said.

The commissioners passed a resolution Monday asking the county to exempt the lease from environmental reviews under the California Environmental Quality Act, arguing that the center would be housed in existing buildings that have been used for similar purposes.

Under established financial agreements, the city of Port Hueneme will get about $50,000 for the first five years from the deal.