[Note from BenIndy: A quick reminder, shortened a bit from the first posting. This meeting is free and open to all, regardless of Party preference or city of residence. This should be a fascinating discussion.]
Smoke from the Valero Benicia refinery wafts over residential neighborhoods during a 2017 incident. | Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
From Progressive Dems of Benicia Meeting Notice, sent April 2, 2024:
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), or “the Air District,” is our local regulatory agency when it comes to air pollution. It’s been around for decades, but its mission and activities are a mystery to many. Luckily, our amazing panel of Air District representatives will be on hand to guide us through what it does, how it does it, and what it’s working on to keep Bay Area residents healthy and safe.
Air District Panel
We are pleased to share that our panel will include BAAQMD’s Executive Officer/Air Pollution Control Officer, Dr. Philip Fine, formerly a presidential appointment to the EPA and the South Coast Air Management Quality District; Deputy Executive Officer of Public Affairs; BAAQMD Board of Directors member and Benicia Mayor Steve Young; and BAAQMD’s Community Advisory Council Co-Chair Ken Szutu, who also founded the Citizen Air Monitoring Network in Vallejo before serving as its director. We also expect that other staff members of the Air District will join us.
[Note from BenIndy: This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from Air District insiders what the District does, how it does it, and what might be next. This is a free public meeting open to all, regardless of party preference or city of residence.]
Smoke from the Valero Benicia refinery wafts over residential neighborhoods during a 2017 incident. | Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
From Progressive Dems of Benicia Meeting Notice, sent April 2, 2024:
Dear members and supporters—
We’re delighted to share more information about our April 9th meeting at 7pm, which we revealed last week will focus on the quality of our air – a hot topic given the warming weather and the recent Level-3 Incident at a local refinery. (The picture here is not from that incident, it is from a 2017 incident; click the image to be redirected to a YouTube news report.)
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), or “the Air District,” is our local regulatory agency when it comes to air pollution. It’s been around for decades, but its mission and activities are a mystery to many. Luckily, our amazing panel of Air District representatives will be on hand to guide us through what it does, how it does it, and what it’s working on to keep Bay Area residents healthy and safe.
Air District Panel
We are pleased to share that our panel will include BAAQMD’s Executive Officer/Air Pollution Control Officer, Dr. Philip Fine, formerly a presidential appointment to the EPA and the South Coast Air Management Quality District; Deputy Executive Officer of Public Affairs Viet Tran; BAAQMD Board of Directors member and Benicia Mayor Steve Young; and BAAQMD’s Community Advisory Council Co-Chair Ken Szutu, who also founded the Citizen Air Monitoring Network in Vallejo before serving as its director. We also expect that other staff members of the Air District will join us.
Benicia Industrial Health and Safety Ordinance (BISHO) spokesperson Terry Mollica spoke passionately in favor of adopting an ISO in Benicia, calling existing agreements with Valero “toothless.” | Image still from City of Benicia Dec. 19, 2023 City Council meeting.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 21, 2023 – Benicia, CA – On Tuesday, the Benicia City Council unanimously approved a proposal by Vice Mayor Terry Scott and Councilwoman Kari Birdseye to instruct staff, under the direction of a Council subcommittee led by the two, to conduct research, solicit substantial expert and public input and produce a resulting draft Industrial Safety Ordinance (ISO) for the city. If the Council then adopts the ISO, it will cover Valero Benicia Refinery as well as other industrial sites in Benicia that meet the determined criteria.
“City Council’s primary responsibility is to safeguard the health, safety and well-being of our residents, businesses and visitors,” said Vice Mayor Scott. “That includes policing, fire protection, clean water, and now we have the opportunity to create an Industrial Safety Ordinance that provides common-sense legislation to transparently monitor and protect the air we breathe.”
“Benicia deserves a ‘state of the art’ industrial safety and health ordinance that will best protect our community,” said Councilwoman Birdseye. “We will take the lessons learned in other refinery towns, from county experts, and local community members who have been impacted by refinery pollution for decades.”
Benicia is the only Bay Area refinery city without an ISO, as other communities have realized the importance and value of strengthening their relationships with and oversight of their resident refineries. In lieu of an ISO, Benicia currently has a Cooperation Agreement (CA) with Valero, initiated in 2019 and due to expire in 2025. Many citizens and city leaders believe the CA has not been strong enough, given Valero’s continued lack of transparency in reporting numerous violations of federal and state law.
Well over a dozen Benicians testified about the issue at the Council meeting, almost all in favor of a strong ISO, providing both scientific data and personal experiences. One resident of Benicia’s East Side, the area most affected by Valero emissions and fumes, spoke movingly about his family’s and neighbors’ experiences in which his son’s elementary school was evacuated because of an air spill of toxic oil pollution from the Valero Asphalt plant. “The county gave us an emergency order to lock down. A teacher went to the hospital. Valero denied all responsibility. The City and state appeared powerless to do anything substantial to protect against another incident,” he said.
Benicia Vice Mayor Terry Scott
“We can’t protect public health without knowing what is in the air we breathe,” Scott said. “Moving forward with an ISO gives the city an effective tool for providing our community with an additional level of enforcement and trust.”
Earlier this year, a call for the passage of an ISO was launched by a group of concerned citizens who believe that Benicia needs ways of monitoring, obtaining information about and taking enforcement actions regarding Valero emissions. Called the Benicia Industrial Safey and Health Ordinance (BISHO) working group, the initiative has more than 150 supporters in the community.
Benicia City Council Member Kari Birdseye.
“We are grateful to Vice Mayor Scott and Councilwoman Birdseye for bringing this critical concern to City Council and for the entire Council for their support,” said Terry Mollica, a leader of BISHO. “We need to make sure our community is notified immediately of refinery and other industrial emergencies or failures to meet state and federal regulations. We also need strong, enforceable penalties for the failure to do so.”
“It is our hope that everyone involved, the City, Valero, and the community, will have a seat at the table,” continued Mollica. “It is in all our best interest that we work together to make Benicia a safer, healthier place for all of us.”
To find out more about the issue, BISHO, and how to get involved, go to the organization’s website, www.bisho.org.
“We want as many people as possible to read the materials, recognize how important this issue is to our community and become supporters of a strong Industrial Safety and Health Ordinance,” Mollica said.
BENICIA – The Benicia City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to begin a community engagement process to create stronger regulations of the Valero refinery and other industries in the city through an industrial safety ordinance.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the council chambers were filled with community members who expressed concerns about deficiencies in Valero’s fence line monitoring, accident reporting and the company’s dismissal of community input.
Many felt that state and regional regulatory agencies have allowed delays in monitoring programs and had not followed through on key avenues of enforcement. Mistrust was also fueled by a revelation in 2022 that the Bay Area Air Quality Management District had discovered that Valero illegally released toxic emissions for 16 years but the agency failed to notify Benicia residents until three years after the discovery.
In 2018, the city council considered adopting an ordinance to regulate the refinery similar to legislation in Contra Costa County and Richmond, but instead formed a cooperative agreement with Valero which is set to expire in 2025. After four years of the cooperative agreement, residents said that it has not provided sufficient oversight of industrial practices in the city.
Mayor Steve Young encouraged residents to define the areas where the current agreement falls short to indicate a direction for provisions that could be included in an ordinance.
Benicia resident Terry Mollica, who was involved in the drafting 2018 ordinance proposal and spoke on behalf of the Benicia Industrial Safety and Health Ordinance working group, said that the deficiencies are too numerous to list at the meeting. But he highlighted a key issue that the working group found to be particularly problematic.“It has absolutely no enforcement mechanism,” Mollica said. “In fact it includes a provision that allows Valero to unilaterally terminate the entire cooperative agreement at any time if it thinks it is being over-regulated.”
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