Supes may rein in Greka

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Santa Barbara County officials have had five days to digest the numbers: nearly 8,000 barrels or 336,000 gallons of crude oil has spewed onto local soil in the past four years by Greka Energy. Since 1999, the County Fire Department has responded to 400 incidents at Greka facilities at a cost to taxpayers of $450 per hour.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” said First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal, the board’s chair. “The facts stand on their own merit and paint a picture that every resident in Santa Barbara County ought to outraged with and concerned about.”

The numbers, and the mounting commentary about what they mean, will be the focus of a two-hour hearing at the Board of Supervisor’s meeting tomorrow in Santa Maria.
While Greka officials will no doubt be on hand to defend the energy company’s shaky track record, the board will be considering five recommendations from county staff that, if passed, would tighten the reins on energy companies when violations occur.
The report and its recommendations arrived last Thursday in the wake of at least five incidents at Greka Energy facilities in the past two months that have resulted in 158,000 gallons of spilled crude oil and polluted water.
The two largest incidents, one on Dec. 7 near Santa Maria that spilled 67,000 gallons of crude oil and the other on Jan. 5 at the Firestone Vineyard that resulted in 84,000 gallons of spillage, both flowed down seasonal creek beds.
Despite county staff’s recommendations urging the board to clamp down on gas and energy companies, Carbajal said he thinks the recommendations need more teeth.
“I think the report identifies a number of strategies that could help us address this situation,” Carbajal said. “However, I’m not sure that the recommendations [are] aggressive enough.”

THE RECOMMENDATIONS
The first recommendation is for the board to approve a multiple response ordinance that would make it easier for the county to recoup expenses associated with responding to incidents at oil facilities that aren’t up to snuff.
Because there is a cost to taxpayers each time a county agency responds to an emergency at an energy facility, the report says, “…It is clear that when an onshore oil facility fails to make improvements or upgrades to its facilities thereby causing extraordinary responses from the County Fire Department and Petroleum Unit, they should be charged for the excess service.”
The second recommendation is to develop a “high risk offender ordinance.” This ordinance, the report says, calls for more intensive inspections and higher penalties and fines for companies that are continually plagued with violations.
And according to the report, Greka is the poster child for repeated violations – especially when compared to other energy companies operating in the county.
Stacked up next to 11 other energy companies, Greka’s total of nearly 8,000 barrels of spilled oil since 2003 towers above the second highest number of 400 barrels spilled by Sierra Resources. The third highest is 357 spilled barrels by Nuevo Energy Company and in fourth is ERG Operating Co. with 348 barrels spilled.
“Greka Energy is responsible for the largest segment of oilfield releases in the County,” the report says. “In fact, they are responsible for more oilfield releases than all of the other companies combined.”
The third recommendation calls for the development of a centralized database to compile violation history – a concept Assemblyman Pedro Nava said needs to carry with it a regular report to the Board of Supervisors.
“It seems to me that you have supervisors who have the ultimate policy making responsibility who I think would be better prepared if they had information about environmental violations on a regular basis,” Nava said.
The need for such a database is evident in the county report.
“During our preparation for this report, it became evident that pertinent regulatory agencies responsible for onshore oil keep their violation history in different databases,” the report says. “This lack of coordination hinders coordination of inspections, sharing violation history, and preparing coordinated plans for remedying violations.”
Because the County Fire Department has only one full-time employee who oversees the permitting process for energy facilities, the fourth recommendation calls for increased inspection and permitting fees for facilities that require extraordinary time for inspection.
If this recommendation is approved, it would give the fire department and other regulatory agencies the ability to seek outside help in the inspection process from contractors. It would also call for an assessment of the necessary staffing levels in the fire department and petroleum unit.
Simply put, one person can’t handle the workload.
“Under normal conditions, it would be difficult for this individual to keep pace with inspections of all facilities,” the report says. “Due to the ongoing problems at Greka Energy facilities over the years, this individual works almost exclusively on Greka Energy facilities.”
A fifth recommendation would allow staff to undertake a series of efforts to improve communication between the board and agencies responsible for energy company oversight.

GREKA’S RESPONSE
With 77 oil leases in the county, Greka is the largest onshore energy company operating locally. The company is also a multinational corporation with operations and offices scattered from Rome, to New York and from Beijing to Hong Kong.
Former second and fourth district county supervisor Mike Stoker, the company’s spokesman, has argued that the company with the largest number of holdings will naturally have the most incidents.
Stoker has also compared Greka’s recent spills to NASA’s space program, which despite having hefty resources, has lost two shuttles in fatal explosions.
Stoker declined to comment on the specifics of the county report, but said he believes much of the information is inaccurate.
“There is, I think, major inaccuracies in the report that we will hopefully bring to the board’s attention on Tuesday,” he said.
Stoker also said the details surrounding the two largest and most recent oil spills are being looked into by a former FBI investigator hired by Greka.
“There’s questionable facts that have arisen that are very hard to explain,” Stoker said. “The bottom line is he’s doing his job and there’s some very troubling information he’s been coming up with.”
Stoker stopped short of saying Greka had been sabotaged, but noted that the injection pumps that failed at both facilities were “brand new.” He also said alarms that were supposed to notify a private firm of the pump failures were also new. In the Dec. 7 incident the alarm failed. On Jan. 5, Stoker said the alarm notified the alarm company, HSM Electronic Monitoring Services of Minneapolis, but the company failed to notify Greka.
Stoker said the perception that Greka’s facilities are dilapidated and outdated is false. He said the company has spent $16 million on improving its infrastructure and plans to do more in the future.
At the end of the day, Stoker said neither Nava, who held a briefing on recent Greka spills the day before the Jan. 5 incident occurred, or the Board of Supervisors can create a law that makes past incidents go away.
Stoker said he hopes Greka will receive at least 45 minutes of time to present its own report to the board on Tuesday and rebut the county report.
Both of the last two Greka spills were several thousand gallons larger than the recent San Francisco Bay spill which received national and international attention. But Stoker said the onslaught of media attention the Greka spills have spurred in the Santa Barbara area would not have made the evening news in other counties.
“Things [that get] huge media attention here wouldn’t even get the time of day anywhere else,” he said.

THE FIRESTONE FACTOR
Greka’s Jan. 5 incident spilled 84,000 gallons of crude oil and dirty water into a creek on land owned by Third District Supervisor Brooks Firestone.
For years, Firestone has leased a portion of his Zaca Road vineyard to Greka and as a result, has recused himself from Tuesday’s discussion due to this conflict of interest.
“Every time Greka comes up I have to think about that,” Firestone said. “It’s a close call about my percentage of ownership. I discovered it did meet the threshold [for a conflict of interest].”
But his ownership or interest in matters related to Greka didn’t stop him from thwarting an effort by Second District Supervisor Janet Wolf to hold a briefing by various county agencies about Greka at the board’s Dec. 11 meeting.
Saying she thought the size and magnitude of the Dec. 7 spill warranted an immediate briefing on Greka, Wolf put the matter on the board’s ex-agenda. A discussion item on the ex-agenda requires a majority 4-5 vote in order to appear on the board’s action agenda. Supervisor Joni Gray was absent from the meeting and Wolf’s effort failed with a 2-2 vote.
Firestone didn’t shy away from addressing the ex-agenda item then or last Thursday during an interview with the Daily Sound.
“One of the reasons I didn’t want to have an ex-agenda item was because nobody was ready for it,” Firestone said. “It was just kind of a reaction and I didn’t think that was appropriate on the face of it.”
Firestone said he checked with county legal counsel after the Dec. 11 meeting to see if his interest in Greka constituted a conflict of interest. He said it was determined that it did indeed do just that.
But with that in mind, Firestone, who was the chair of the board at the time, said he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong by actively preventing the ex-agenda item from making its way onto the board’s official agenda.
He noted that had he recused himself on Dec. 11, Supervisor Joe Centeno likely would have still voted against moving the ex-agenda item and a 2-1 vote wouldn’t have been enough.
Noting that many of Greka’s leases are within his district, Centeno said at the Dec. 11 meeting that he wanted to spearhead a larger, more formal meeting that all parties had adequate time to prepare for, the result of which is tomorrow’s meeting.
After the Dec. 11 meeting, Wolf said she was “dumbfounded” that her fellow supervisors didn’t want to have an agendized discussion about the spill.
Instead of giving an official briefing of the spill, representatives from county agencies that attended the meeting used the public comment period to communicate with the board.
Nava, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of Greka since taking a tour of the Dec. 7 spill, said he wants to see swift reform. And he believes Greka and the county have the resources to do it.
“This is a very well funded, international oil company with plenty of resources available to do the job right in Santa Barbara County and they obviously have not done it,” Nava said, adding that the county has the ultimate authority to shut Greka down if need be. “What I think is promising is that there are avenues available through civil actions by the county that empower the county to take steps that get us to that result.”