SB 1137 Passed the California Senate on 8/31/2022 by a 24:10 Vote!!!
Assuming Governor Newsom signs the bill into law (and there’s no reason to expect he won’t), we will soon have a 3,200 foot public health and safety setback to protect our families’ homes, children’s schools and playgrounds, hospitals, and other sensitive sites from new oil and gas extraction in California — the strongest setback in the nation! The measure will also require pollution controls on existing wells within the buffer zone.
More than 2,700,000 Californians live within 3,200 feet of an operational oil or gas well but, unlike other oil-producing states including Colorado, Wyoming and Pennsylvania, as the nation’s 7th largest oil producer, California has never before imposed any separation between residential communities and industrial fossil fuel operations.
Here in Ventura County, the fossil fuel industry waged an $8,000,000 disinformation campaign against two June ballot measures which would have strengthened local oil and gas ordinances by, among other protections, enacting a 2,500 foot setback. The defeat of both Measures A and B assured the industry “forever drilling rights” on a limitless number of wells, approved over the counter, without review, using extreme extraction methodologies, and drilled anywhere on permits that never expire. As a result, local health and climate justice advocates feared a renewed extraction frenzy, multiplying the dangers from 8,197 recorded wells already drilled in Ventura County (more than 5,283 of those on antiquated permits issued before the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) was passed in 1970) — and direct impacts to an estimated 8,555 residents (as of 2016) living within 2,500 feet of those wells. So the passage of SB 1137 provides hope that VC residents can now avoid some of that damage.
As mounting evidence reveals significant and troubling health impacts from living near to both conventional and unconventional oil and gas wells, including increased cancer risk, a Response to CalGEM Questions for the California Oil and Gas Public Health Rulemaking Scientific Advisory Panel concluded last year that such proximity also raises the risk of asthma, heart attacks and preterm birth, and that, “neither setbacks or engineering controls alone are sufficient to reduce the health hazards and risks from OGD [oil and gas development] activities.”
SB 1137 is the third iteration of the setbacks law that frontline environmental justice communities have fought to pass in as many years … following decades of lobbying and organizing before that. Their dogged efforts and coalition-building created the momentum without which Wednesday’s win would never have been possible. Credit also goes to Senators Lena Gonzalez (Democrat, District 33) and Monique Limón (Democrat, District 19), who authored the successful bill.
As Dr. Catherine Garoupa White, Executive Director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition, was quoted in a joint VISION and CRPE Press Release after the historic vote, “After years of frontline community members demanding the most basic public health and safety protections, California legislators have finally listened. We’re glad the legislature has at last taken action for setbacks. This win belongs to frontline communities who’ve been fighting for setbacks for years, and it’s a big indicator that our movement is growing and that the tide is turning on Big Oil in Sacramento.”
The win is a testament to what grassroots efforts can accomplish when we all work together in common cause. That’s the power of community and coalitions!
Please thank your Senator if he or she came though … and let him or her know how disappointed you are if he or she didn’t deliver for We The People. (916/510–0486)
