Buy Wetlands, Group Urges State

Environmental activists, local officials, a Chumash spiritual leader and actor Beau Bridges issued a plea to the state Friday from the sandy fringe of a wetland area near Oxnard: To save this land, buy it.

The group’s news conference at Ormond Beach came less than a week before the state Coastal Conservancy is to decide whether to acquire 265 acres being sought by Occidental Petroleum Corp. for the West Coast’s first liquefied natural gas receiving terminal.

“This wetland extended for miles,” said Bridges, president of a group called Ventura CoastKeeper. “It would really be a shame to lose what little we have left.”

The race to buy the wetlands pits the need for energy against the need for preservation in a state whose environmental resources seem under constant siege.

Coastal Conservancy staff members side with the preservationists. On Friday, the agency’s staff recommended that board members approve the $9.7-million purchase from Southern California Edison, said senior project manager Peter Brand, the conservancy’s point man in Ventura County. Negotiations involving 500 acres nearby are continuing, he said.

“Wetlands experts have told us this is the most important preservation opportunity in Southern California,” Brand said.

For years, environmental agencies have studied the possibility of preserving a 4,000-acre swath of wetlands extending from Port Hueneme to the Mugu Lagoon. Ormond Beach, a marshy expanse dotted with a power plant and a number of long-standing industrial installations, would be a key part of the plan, and Occidental’s proposed $250-million facility would not.

To drive home their claim that the Occidental plant would be unsafe, Bridges’ group and the Santa Barbara Coast Keeper, played a radio commercial that will air locally before the Coastal Conservancy’s hearing Thursday.

“Ormond Beach in California,” the narrator intones. “Come here and there’s a good chance you’ll see an endangered plant or animal.” On the other hand, he says, there’s also “the horrific fireball you’d see if things went terribly wrong at a natural gas receiving terminal.”

The ad was later denounced by the company. “It’s irresponsible to use scare tactics to kill a project before it’s had an opportunity to be heard in fair and open public hearings,” Occidental spokeswoman Jan Sieving said.

Three similar facilities are on the East Coast and one is on the Gulf Coast, she said. In the 45 years since such facilities have operated worldwide, “there has never been a significant incident,” Sieving said.

Sieving said she knows of no recourse for Occidental if the state approves the site’s purchase. The conservancy has a contract with Edison allowing it “the right of first refusal,” or the first crack at purchasing the property.

With 14 power plants under construction in California, Occidental’s plant would provide some of the natural gas that runs the machinery producing the state’s electricity. Liquefied natural gas would be shipped by tanker to a dock off the Port of Hueneme, pumped through a pipeline to Occidental’s plant, converted back into a gas and then distributed statewide.

“This site offers unique benefits,” Sieving said, citing the proximity of the port, high-voltage lines from the adjacent Reliant Energy power plant and an existing web of underground pipes.

But such advantages were not persuasive to the 50 opponents at Friday’s news conference, who contended the plant would degrade a fragile environment that over the years has suffered enough.