BREAKING: Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) highly critical of Valero oil train EIR
The Benicia Independent is in receipt of a Sacramento Area Council of Government letter sent on February 4, 2016 to the City of Benicia, but not as yet posted on the City’s website. The letter is severely critical of the City’s Final EIR, and calls for the Benicia Planning Commission to “provide full and adequate responses to our comment letters,” and “to fully evaluate all measures to mitigate the significant environmental impacts that this Project will inevitably have on our communities and our residents.”
The letter is signed by SACOG Immediate Past Chair Don Saylor. SACOG represents 22 cities and 6 counties in the Sacramento area.
The letter begins by summarizing two previous letters sent to Benicia, one in 2014 commenting on the original Draft EIR, and another in 2015 commenting on the Revised DEIR. The 2015 letter claimed that the City did not adequately respond to their first letter. “…we submitted a second comment letter citing the mandate in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to describe all mitigation measures that could, if implemented, minimize significant environmental effects. (CEQA Guidelines, §§ 15 I26(c), 15126.1 (a).) We urged the City to adopt all feasible mitigation measures that will protect our communities before the catastrophic events forecast by the RDEIR occur. We noted that nearly one quarter of our region’s population lives within one-half mile of the crude oil shipments.”
This new 2016 letter continues with criticism of the Final Draft EIR, “…we appreciate that the City finally acknowledges the substantial risk to our region resulting from the crude oil shipments. However, the FEIR still fails to adopt a single mitigation measure to address the impacts of the Project and the FEIR fails to adequately respond to our letters.”
The letter concludes with five detailed examples of “the inadequacies and misstatements in the Responses to our comment letters.”
Taken together, these inadequacies point out what may be understood as “fatal flaws,” indicating that the EIR should be revised and recirculated yet again, or thrown out for a fresh start.
Or … as in my opinion, the project should simply be dropped.
BREAKING: City of Davis urges Benicia to refuse to certify Valero oil train EIR
The Benicia Independent is in receipt of a City of Davis letter sent on February 3, 2016 to the City of Benicia, but not as yet posted on the City’s website. The letter is severely critical of the City’s Final EIR, and calls for the Benicia Planning Commission to decline to certify the massive 3-volume document.
If Benicia declines to certify the EIR, Valero would have to revise the environmental study yet again, or withdraw. Many believe that Valero would instead appeal the Planning Commission’s decision to the Benicia City Council in hopes of a more favorable hearing.
The Davis letter is signed by Assistant City Manager Mike Webb, who writes, “These trains will travel…on the UPRR main railroad track which runs through the city of Davis, immediately adjacent to the Davis downtown area and to residential areas. The rail line also runs immediately adjacent to the University of California Davis campus.”
The heart of the letter reads, “Davis requests that Benicia reject the adequacy of the Final EIR (FEIR), decline to certify the FEIR, and send it back to staff to fully analyze mitigation measures for safety, as set forth in Davis’ and SACOG’s earlier letters and then to impose the measures suggested by SACOG and Davis, as well as any additional measures that are feasible.”
Webb calls upon Benicia to act responsibly: “As we have seen occur in other communities, a derailment and the potential for fire, explosion, and train upset is real and should not be ignored. It is the obligation of public agencies to safeguard all their communities to the best of their abilities.”
The letter continues with highly critical comments about the EIR, “Davis submits that the Final ElR is legally inadequate….When a lead agency disagrees with a comment, the response must address comment in detail. The lead agency must provide a good-faith, reasoned analysis; conclusory statements without facts are not adequate. The FElR fails to meet this standard.”
Giving two detailed examples of the FEIR’s failure to address Davis’ previous comments, the letter concludes, “Benicia and Valero have the authority and ability to adopt measures that will be effective. The City of Davis again urges Benicia, for the safety of all the residents of this region, to reject the Final ElR as inadequate under CEQA and to analyze and adopt the feasible mitigation measures that are available in order to reduce the significant adverse impacts posed by this Project.”
BREAKING: Yolo County urges Benicia to mitigate impacts before approving Valero oil train project
The Benicia Independent is in receipt of a Yolo County letter sent on January 26, 2016 to the City of Benicia, but not as yet posted on the City’s website. The letter is severely critical of the City’s Final EIR, and calls for the Benicia Planning Commission to insist on measures that would offset significant environmental, health and safety impacts to communities along the Union-Pacific rail line.
Jim Provenza, Chair of the Yolo County Board of Supervisors writes, “Although the City’s revised analysis correctly acknowledges that the project will have significant impacts to communities along the Union-Pacific rail line, the County is concerned that these significant impacts are not sufficiently mitigated. Indeed, the City eschews its responsibility to consider possible mitigation measures on the incorrect premise that any such efforts would be preempted by federal law.”
The letter goes on to reference a letter sent to Benicia by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), in which the legal case is made that such mitigations are not preempted by federal law.
The letter concludes, “In light of the significant impacts identified in the Revised Draft EIR, we ask that the City of Benicia reconsider its position on preemption and not approve the project until the impacts are mitigated. SACOG’s October 30, 2015 letter provides mitigation measures that are both feasible and necessary to lessen the impact on our local communities. Without these mitigation measures in place, the project should not be approved.”
OPINION | Jessie Mehrhoff, November 12, 2015 11:21 a.m. EST
(Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
It’s the fundamental connection between environmental degradation and human health that has me concerned about the prospect of Congress lifting the U.S. oil export ban, which will worsen climate change and threaten our communities with toxic spills.
The list of risks climate change poses to human health is long. Increased temperatures will spread tropical diseases to new latitudes. Heat waves will cause more deaths across the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to more health-threatening smog and decrease crop yields. Detailing these impacts and more in 2009, “The Lancet,” one of the world’s most respected medical journals, labeled climate change ‘the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
These aren’t just future consequences, to be experienced on the other side of the globe. In New Jersey, we still face the impacts of superstorm Sandy three years later. Climate scientists at Rutgers University predict even more extreme weather if climate change goes unchecked.
In addition to these consequences, the American Lung Association’s 2015 State of the Air report card has given Monmouth County an “F” for the number of high-ozone level days, and finds more than 56,000 people in the county suffer from asthma. Climate change is only going to make numbers such as this climb as our air quality worsens.
To avoid global warming’s most devastating health impacts, we must end our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to pollution-free, renewable energy. Lifting our decades-old ban on the export of U.S.-produced oil represents the opposite course.
If the oil companies have a larger distribution market for oil produced in the U.S., they will drill more — upward of another 3.3 million barrels per day for the next 20 years, by some General Accounting Office estimates. Even if only a fraction of all this extra oil is burned, global warming pollution could still increase 22 million metric tons per year — the equivalent of five average-sized coal power plants.
In addition to worsening climate change, there’s the public health threat of transporting additional oil across the country. While most crude oil is shipped around the U.S. by pipeline, shipments by rail have been increasing. To keep up with increased demand, oil trains have grown larger and tow more tanker cars than ever before.
Currently, trains carrying highly flammable crude oil travel through 11 of the 21 counties in New Jersey —Mercer, Middlesex, Gloucester, Somerset, Hunterdon, Bergen, Camden, Essex, Hudson, Union and Warren — en route to refineries. These oil trains are an accident waiting to happen, and have spurred trainings across the state where firefighters, police and other emergency responders have prepared courses of action in an oil derailment emergency.
The fear of oil train accidents — where toxic crude oil is spilled into our communities — is not hyperbole. Accidents have been on the rise, with more oil accidentally dumped into our environment in 2013 alone than during the previous three decades combined.
In 2015, we’ve already seen three major oil train accidents. In Mount Carbon, West Virginia, a rail oil spill led to evacuations and a governor-declared state of emergency. In Galena, Illinois, a spill threatened to pollute the Mississippi River. A spill in Heimdal, North Dakota, forced the evacuation of a town.
If we are to prevent these accidents from taking place in the 11 New Jersey counties through which these trains travel, we must work to reduce the amount of oil these trains carry. Transporting the increased oil we would produce domestically if the oil export ban were lifted could require enough trains to span the country from Los Angeles to Boston seven times over.
Increasing our nation’s crude oil drilling and transportation by lifting our decades’ old ban on exports leads to more risk, not less. And the inconvenient truth of lifting the oil export ban means more drilling, more global warming pollution, and more threats to public health.
There is a way around lifting the oil export ban in the first place. President Obama is against lifting the ban, and the measure only narrowly cleared a Senate committee earlier in the month. That’s why we need Sen. Cory Booker to join Sen. Bob Menendez in standing strong against the oil industry and to vote to keep the ban in place — for the sake of the environment and public health.
Jessie Mehrhoff is lead organizer with Environment New Jersey, a citizen-based environmental advocacy organization.
The Benicia Independent is in receipt of a Sacramento Area Council of Government letter sent on February 4, 2016 to the City of Benicia, but not as yet posted on the City’s website. The letter is severely critical of the City’s Final EIR, and calls for the Benicia Planning Commission to “provide full and adequate responses to our comment letters,” and “to fully evaluate all measures to mitigate the significant environmental impacts that this Project will inevitably have on our communities and our residents.”
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