Some Fear Victim of Oil Drilling Deal Will Be Long Beach

An offer by the Atlantic Richfield Co. to abandon oil exploration in waters off Santa Barbara in exchange for the right to double the number of offshore wells in Long Beach has been hailed by local city officials as an idea where “everybody wins.”

Why then, Long Beach environmentalist Luanne Pryor asks, are there sometimes little slicks of oil on the ocean surface when she takes her daily swim?

“In Santa Barbara they put up a huge fight against offshore drilling. Oil is not as dirty a word in Long Beach as it is in Santa Barbara,” said Pryor, president of Beach Area Concerned Citizens.

The proposal unveiled by Arco last week would seem to solve a lot of problems. It would end a 3-year-old lawsuit between Arco and Santa Barbara County over the right to drill at Coal Oil Point next to UC Santa Barbara.

And it could rescue from bankruptcy the tidelands fund that maintains the shorelines and waterways of Long Beach, a fund that survives on oil money.

But local environmentalists wonder whether Arco’s proposal is really just a way to end Santa Barbara’s environmental battle at Long Beach’s expense.

“When I read of Arco’s plans I thought, ‘Here we go again, they’re going to dump on Long Beach,’ ” Pryor said. “The city, of course, is drawn into this for the usual reason--money.”

Under the proposal unveiled by oil executives last week, Arco would spend at least $100 million injecting water underground in hopes of squeezing more black gold from the coastal area and the ocean floor. If the plan fails, Arco assumes all the losses. If it succeeds, the city and state would repay their share of the exploration costs out of millions of dollars of profits.

Arco would add 300 wells to the 300 that already sit, disguised by trees and colored lights, on four man-made islands off Ocean Boulevard. City officials said the safety record on those platforms has been “excellent” since they were built in 1964, and that the patches of oil sometimes seen on the water come from passing ships, not the platforms.

Arco executives said the new wells would not be seen, heard or smelled any more than those that exist today. It would be an environmental good deed, they say, because it would use only existing oil platforms and would enable the company to give the Santa Barbara leases back to the state, possibly paving the way for Coal Oil Point to be designated a marine sanctuary.

Nevertheless, organizations such as the Sierra Club and Long Beach Area Citizens Involved--a political watchdog group--plan to take a look. Among their concerns are a greater risk of spills, air pollution and subsidence--the sinking of the ground that results when oil is pumped out. (That very problem caused parts of Long Beach to sink as much as 29 feet in 1965.)

“I’m not sure what the environmental impacts would be,” said Mel Nutter, chairman of the statewide League of Coastal Protection and a Long Beach attorney. “(But) there is certainly the potential in this community to have people come out of the woodwork if there appears to be some serious issues or questions.”

Although offshore oil drilling has been spurned by most coastal cities, Long Beach has been an oil town for decades. At times, it meant wealth so staggering that the Saturday Evening Post was prompted to dub Long Beach “The Town With Too Much Money.”

Some of that money built a convention center, a harbor and an Olympic swimming pool. But legislation passed in 1964 gave most of the profits to the state. Ever since, the money--and the oil--have been drying up.

Now city officials say the tidelands fund that pays for lifeguards, cleaning the beaches and maintaining the shoreline will be bankrupt this year without help.

“A natural resource would go to waste,” Xenophon Colazas, director of the city’s Department of Oil Properties, said of the shoreline. “Oil was good to Long Beach once. We’ll see if it can be good to Long Beach again.”

Although the profits from Arco’s new venture could be hefty--as much as $650 million over the next 20 years--little of that would go to the city. According to Colazas, Long Beach would get just 5% of the state’s net profit--about $5 million the first year depending on the market price of oil, and less every year after that.

“We feel we should utilize our natural resources. There is a tremendous shortage of oil and we are contributing,” Colazas said.

City officials said they will not agree to Arco’s proposal unless it is declared environmentally safe. But, they add, the city is already facing an environmental crisis brought on by years of oil drilling, problems like sinking land and abandoned wells that were overlooked or never envisioned when the platforms were built more than 25 years ago.

According to the Arco proposal, $2 million a year would be contributed to an existing $90-million city fund to be used to inject water underground to prevent the inevitable sinking and to close off wells as they dry up over the next two decades.

“We’ve had oil production for years and we know there will be costs of eventually closing down those oil fields,” Assistant City Manager John Shirey said. “We already have a burden.”