Category Archives: Benicia Industrial Park

Benicia City Council, Benicia Industrial Park, Benicia Planning Commission, Crude By Rail, Federal pre-emption, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Local Regulation, Public permitting, Surface Transportation Board, Valero Benicia Appeal, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

FAIRFIELD DAILY REPUBLIC: Valero taking oil-by-rail to feds; Benicia stays its course

Repost from the Fairfield Daily Reporter

Valero taking oil-by-rail to feds; Benicia stays its course

By Todd R. Hansen, March 18, 2016
Tank cars sit on the railroad tracks, near Cordelia Road and Chadbourne Road on January 1, 2016. Benicia's Planning Commission denied Valero's bid to build a rail offloading facility for crude oil, and now the company is seeking the opinion of the federal Surface Transportation Board. (Robinson Kuntz/Daily Republic file)
Tank cars sit on the railroad tracks, near Cordelia Road and Chadbourne Road on January 1, 2016. Benicia’s Planning Commission denied Valero’s bid to build a rail offloading facility for crude oil, and now the company is seeking the opinion of the federal Surface Transportation Board. (Robinson Kuntz/Daily Republic file)

BENICIA — More than four hours of staff and Valero testimony this week ended with the oil company asking the Benicia City Council for a delay and the city moving forward with its public hearing process.

Valero will seek an opinion from the federal Surface Transportation Board to determine if the city has any authority to require environmental impact mitigation for a proposed railway off-loading facility at its refinery.

The company wants to move crude oil on trains to its refinery in the Benicia Industrial Park. It has applied to the city for a use permit to construct the necessary off-loading facility.

Planning commissioners in February denied the use permit, stating in its resolution:

“(T)he proposed location of the conditional use and the proposed conditions under which it would be operated and maintained would not be consistent with the General Plan as it would be detrimental to the public health, safety or welfare of persons residing or working in or adjacent to the neighborhood of the use, or to the general welfare of the city as well as uprail communities.”

Valero appealed that decision to the City Council, which started its public hearing process Tuesday. The hearing was continued to April 4 to receive comments from the public. April 6 and April 19 are also dates set aside as needed.

Valero representatives told the city it would take a month or more to submit material to the federal board, and that the decision-making process could take three to six months more.

Valero officials could not be reached Thursday. A message was left seeking comment.

Essentially, the company does not believe the city has the authority to impose conditions on railway matters, which typically falls under federal authority, according to city documents.

The city, while admitting it does not have any authority about what happens on the railways themselves, believes it does have planning and land-use authority over the refinery facility.

“The issue is where does (the railway pre-emption) start, and where does it stop,” said Amy Million, principal planner for Benicia.

Pre-emption, in this case, is basically a concept in which state and local laws are pre-empted in favor of interstate commerce regulations, which are governed under federal authority.

The Surface Transportation Board was given its authority in the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act of 1995, which “pre-empts state and local regulation, i.e., ‘those state laws that may reasonably be said to have the effect of ‘managing’ or ‘governing’ rail transportation.’ ”

The act gives “the Surface Transportation Board exclusive jurisdiction over: (1) transportation by rail carriers and the remedies provided with respect to rates, classifications, rules (including car service, interchange, and other operating rules), practices, routes, services, and facilities of such carriers; and (2) the construction, acquisition, operation, abandonment, or discontinuance of spur, industrial, team, switching, or side tracks, or facilities, even if the tracks are located, or intended to be located, entirely in one state.”

Transportation board spokesman Dennis Watson said he could not comment on a project that had not yet been received by the agency.

The proposal is for oil to be transported on 50-car trains, twice daily, using Pacific Union tracks, which would pass through Fairfield, Suisun City, Dixon and into Benicia.

The shipments would replace about 70,000 barrels of oil currently brought in daily by ship.

The project has generated a great deal of comment. The city reports it tallied 1,800 substantive comments on the Environmental Impact Report, of which 550 discussed hazards, 260 focused on air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, 80 on transportation, 60 on biological resources, 50 on hydrology and geology and 40 on noise.

Benicia Industrial Park, Solano County CA

Benicia, county to study industrial park’s economic future

Repost from the Fairfield Daily Reporter

Benicia, county to study industrial park’s economic future

By Todd R. Hansen, March 09, 2016
The Valero refinery in operation in Benicia’s Industrial Park. (Daily Republic file)

FAIRFIELD — Smoke stacks and refinery buildings rise up from what was once a military arsenal site, and five decades later, the evolution of what is now the Benicia Industrial Park continues.

“Our industrial park is quite old,” said Jasmin Powell, president of the Benicia Industrial Park Association and head of operations at Dunlop Manufacturing, which has been at the park since 1972.

“So some of the issues that we have been bringing up (as an association) is higher-speed Internet access, which has gotten better over the last couple of years,” Powell said in a phone interview Tuesday. “And our roads are in need of repair.”

The Solano County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a letter of intent for a Collaborative Economic Development Initiative with Benicia, which could eventually create a redevelopment-style district to finance infrastructure improvements at the industrial park.

The city approved the initiative Feb. 23 and has earmarked $25,000 for a feasibility study that will likely come back to the City Council in June or July, Mario Giuliani, the Benicia Economic Development manager, said in a phone interview Monday.

The central focus of the study is the potential value of establishing an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District to use property tax increments toward improving and building infrastructure at the industrial park.

“Essentially it is another tool . . . for the city to utilize to try to get financing into the industrial park,” Giuliani said. “It is probably the one (option) we are focusing on the most, but that’s not to say that when we do our feasibility study there won’t be other (financing) options.”

In essence, the city would be taking its share of increased property tax in the district area and investing it toward infrastructure. Unlike the defunct redevelopment system, that property does not have to be considered blighted.

Benicia receives 24 cents on each dollar of property tax, money that is typically spread across all general fund uses that include police, fire and city administration, as well as parks and recreation.

Giuliani said one of the things the feasibility study will address is the impact – if any – the loss of tax increments would have on other city services. However, the ultimate goal is that the improvements made would generate even greater tax revenue for all of those services.

“That is a policy decision the City Council will have to make,” Giuliani said.

Also to be determined is whether the county would appropriate its share of the property tax from within the district toward the infrastructure improvements.

Supervisor Linda Seifert, who represents the area, said she will wait and see what the feasibility study shows before deciding what role she would lobby the county to take – including funding options.

“I do have an interest in the county doing what it can to improve (the industrial park),” Seifert said Monday.

Powell said the association has not been part of the city-county discussions, but she was aware such talks were taking place.

On the same night the Benicia council approved the development initiative with the county, it conducted a workshop on a proposed 547-acre mixed-use development within the industrial park.

The Northern Gateway Project, proposed by the Shorts Development Group, targets the same area of the failed Seeno project several years ago. The Shorts Group has a purchasing option on the property. Like the Seeno project, the new proposal does include a residential element.

Seifert said she would not base her decision about county financial support on a specific project, decisions about which she said should be left up to the city and its residents.

The port-oriented industrial park is comprised of 3,000 acres and 7 million square feet of developed space near the junction of Interstates 680 and 780, according to the city’s Office of Economic Development. The park has 450 businesses that employ 6,500 people.

Powell said the park has lost companies because of infrastructure problems, noting specifically Internet access. The city provided about $750,000 for broadband installation in its 2012 budget, and approved $625,000 in a grant/loan program to help park businesses upgrade equipment and buildings.

The law establishing the Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2014 and went into effect Jan. 1, 2015. It does not include school district shares of property tax.

Reach Todd R. Hansen at 427-6936 or thansen@dailyrepublic.net.

This version updates the original to reflect action taken Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors.

Click the image for more Industrial Park photos …
Air Quality, Bakken Crude, Benicia Industrial Park, Carbon emissions, Climate Change, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Environmental review, Explosion, Public Health, Public permitting, Public Safety, Revised Draft EIR (RDEIR), Tar sands crude, Valero Crude By Rail

An Ethical Case Against Valero Crude By Rail

By Roger D. Straw, Benicia Herald Editor
October 30, 2015

Roger D. StrawIn June of 2013, I wrote a guest opinion for the Benicia Herald, “Do Benicians want tar-sands oil brought here?” I had just learned that the City of Benicia staff was proposing to give Valero Refinery a quick and easy pass to begin construction of an offloading rack for oil trains carrying “North American crude.” Valero was seeking permission to begin bringing in two 50-car Union Pacific trains every day, filled with a crude oil. Valero and the City would not disclose where the oil was coming from, but everyone knew of the boom in production in Canada (tar-sands crude) and North Dakota (Bakken crude).

At that time, my most pressing concern was that Benicia, my home town, not be the cause of destruction elsewhere. Tar-sands oil strip mining is the dirtiest, most energy-intensive and environmentally destructive oil production method in the world. It struck me then, and it still does, as a moral issue. Our beautiful small City on the Carquinez has a conscience. We have a global awareness and a responsibility to all who live uprail of our fair city. Our decisions have consequences beyond our border.

My article, and my conscience-driven concern, came BEFORE the massive and deadly oil train explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. That wreck and the many horrific explosions that followed involving Bakken crude oil and tar-sands “dilbit” (diluted bitumen) became the sad poster children of a movement to STOP crude by rail. It became all too easy for Benicians to base our opposition on a very legitimate self-protective fear. Not here. Not in our back yard. No explosions in OUR Industrial Park, in our town, on our pristine bit of coastal waters.

But fear mustn’t deaden our heart.

I was encouraged to read in the City’s recent Revised Draft EIR, that the document would analyze environmental impacts all the way to the train’s point of origin, including North Dakota and Canada:

“In response to requests made in comments on the DEIR, the City is issuing this Revised DEIR for public input to consider potential impacts that could occur “uprail” of Roseville, California (i.e., between a crude oil train’s point of origin and the California State border, and from the border to Roseville) and to supplement the DEIR’s evaluation of the potential consequences of upsets or accidents involving crude oil trains based on new information that has become available since the DEIR was published.” [emphasis added]

Sadly, the City’s consultants never made good on their intention. Our moral obligation to those uprail of Benicia extends, according to the consultants, to our neighbors in Fairfield, Vacaville, Davis, Sacramento, Roseville and to the good folks and mountain treasures beyond, but ONLY TO CALIFORNIA’S BORDER. What happens at the source, in Canada where boreal forests and humans and wildlife are dying; what happens in North Dakota where the night is now lit and the earth is polluted wholesale with oil fracking machinery – what happens there is of no concern to Benicians. Too far away to care. Their air, their land, their water is not our air, land and water. Evidently, according to our highly paid consultants, this is not, after all, one planet.

Or is it?

Our Planning Commissioners have more than a civic duty. They and we are called morally and ethically to understand our larger role in climate change and to protect the earth and its inhabitants. Our decision has consequences.

Together, we can STOP crude by rail.

Air Quality, Benicia City Council, Benicia Industrial Park, Benicia Planning Commission, CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fossil fuels, Global warming, Greenhouse gas emissions, Oil spill, Revised Draft EIR (RDEIR), Significant and unavoidable risks, Tank car design, Valero Crude By Rail

OPEN LETTER: Oppose Valero Crude By Rail

Letter received by email from the author, Lawrence (Larnie) Reid Fox

To the Benicia City Planning Commission and City Council:

By Larnie Fox, October 12, 2015

I’m writing to request that you oppose Valero’s Crude Oil by Rail project.

The Revised Draft EIR states that:

    • Potential train derailment would result in significant and unavoidable adverse effects to people and secondary effects to biological, cultural, and hydrological resources, and geology.
    • Impacts to air quality would be significant and unavoidable because the Project would contribute to an existing or projected air quality violation and result in a cumulatively considerable increase in ozone precursor emissions.
    • Impacts to greenhouse gas emissions would be significant and unavoidable because the Project would generate significant levels of GHG and conflict with plans adopted for reducing GHG emissions.

What more do you need to know?

There have been more crude-by-rail explosions and spills in the last two years than in the previous 40 years. The new crudes are demonstrably more hazardous than the crudes that have been processed in our community in the past, and have led to many horrendous accidents in other parts of North America. Accidents can and will happen.

The Revised Draft EIR states that Valero proposes to use non-jacketed Casualty Prevention Circular (CPC)-1232-compliant tank cars.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said that the CPC-1232 standard is only a minimal improvement over the older tank DOT-111s. NTSB officials say they are “not convinced that these modifications offer significant safety improvements.”

There is overwhelming and passionate opposition to the project here in Benicia. There is also strong opposition from hundreds of individuals who live up-rail and from all over our state, and also from government entities including the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and our state’s Attorney General.

If there is a spill or an explosion and fire, I for one, do not want my community to be culpable. We need to show the state and the world that we stand for safety and environmental responsibility, even if it cuts into corporate profits and tax revenues.

The bottom line is that fossil fuels are going away, sooner or later, and Benicia will need to adapt, sooner or later. We need to take a longer-term and wider-scope view of the issue. We may reap short-term local gains by approving this project, but the cost is unacceptably high. In doing so, we would be putting our Industrial Park at risk, and inconveniencing them with the long trains. This area should be the economic engine for the next 100 years. We would be ignoring the legitimate concerns of communities up-rail from us. We would be responsible for putting environmentally sensitive areas at risk. We would be contributing to global warming and thus sea level rise, which poses a clear threat to our community and the rest of the world as well. We would be contributing to decimation of the old-growth forests in Northern Canada.

It’s up to us to guard our own welfare, and also, as a City, to be responsible citizens of California, the USA and our fragile planet.

Sincerely,

Lawrence (Larnie) Reid Fox