The Benicia refinery has gone dark. Questions about what comes next will define our city for a generation.
The Valero Benicia Refinery in Benicia, Calif., on Thursday, June 5, 2014. As Benicia confronts refinery contamination and redevelopment, the Refinery Transparency Act would give local leaders access to cleanup and cost details. Manny Crisostomo Sacramento Bee file.
Last month, the Valero refinery in Benicia officially ceased refining fuel. For more than half a century, this refinery has defined our city’s skyline, provided jobs and anchored our tax base. For those of us who govern this community, the work of figuring out what comes next is just beginning — and we are doing it largely in the dark.
I know this firsthand: When Valero announced its intent to close last April, the news arrived swiftly and without warning. We have been scrambling ever since, trying to plan around the closure and figure out what our future looks like without the refinery.
That process has been extraordinarily difficult in an information vacuum. But that vacuum is not an accident: It is a choice that the oil and gas industry has made, and one that California law has (so far) allowed them to make.
But the California State Senate did the right thing this week in passing Senate Bill 1259, the Refinery Transparency Act.
Our residents breathed that pollution every day, and now, as Valero walks away from their mess, it is us alone who is left to reckon with whatever contamination remains in the soil and groundwater.
We are excited by the potential to redevelop the site in a way that diversifies our economy, but we do not have the luxury of decades to let the site’s future play out in slow motion while viable opportunities slip away. We need to begin coordinating with residents and Valero’s selected developer, Signature Development Group, now.
However, it is difficult to do so without hard information about what it will take to clean the site up: how long it will take, how it will happen and how much it will cost.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other energy industries — solar, coal mines and nuclear — are required to create and fund cleanup plans before they close. Why are refineries the exception?
The very least these companies owe us on their way out is transparency.
This is exactly the problem that the Refinery Transparency Act is designed to solve. The bill, co-authored by senators Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, and Lena Gonzalez, D-Long Beach, would provide that information to every local government in California if and when refineries close. It would ensure that refinery communities across the state can begin long-term planning for a diversified economy as oil refining inevitably diminishes over time.
For other communities across California with a refinery in their backyard, including Martinez and Richmond, this is vital information.
These are some of the most profitable corporations in the world. While Californians pay $6 a gallon at the pump amid the global oil shock driven by the war on Iran, big oil companies are making record profits.
Big Oil lobbyists have argued that requiring cleanup disclosures is too burdensome and costly for refiners and that bills like SB 1259 send a signal to the market that California wants its remaining refineries gone, accelerating closures. The Western States Petroleum Association has claimed the reporting requirements would impose new costs on their members. But this is a false narrative: Any company planning for an eventual business transition already tracks the financial obligations associated with that transition.
Refiners know what cleanup will cost them; SB 1259 simply requires them to share it.
What Big Oil is resisting is not the burden of calculating that information — miniscule against their profit margins — but the obligation of sharing it with the communities they are leaving behind.
The Benicia refinery has gone dark. The questions about what comes next will define our city for a generation. By passing SB 1259, California can give communities like mine a fighting chance to answer them.
Kari Birdseye is a member of the Benicia City Council.
The potential permanent closure and redevelopment of the Valero Refinery site could prove to be one of the most significant events in the future of Benicia. The 900+ acre site is being planned for redevelopment by Signature Development Group on behalf of Valero. Signature Development’s founder, Mike Ghielmetti, and his colleague, Jonathan Fearn, will explain the general aim of the redevelopment plan, the timeline and the challenges and opportunities presented. There will be time set aside for questions following the presentation.
THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 6:30 P.M.
In Person Meeting
DONA BENICIA ROOM OF THE BENICIA PUBLIC LIBRARY The meeting will begin at 6:30 for a social half hour with the program starting at 7 p.m. More about Progressive Democrats of Benicia
Valero contracted with Oakland-based real estate development firm Signature Development Group to create plans for the 900 acres it owns, including its now-idled refinery and surrounding land. Signature submitted preliminary plans to the City of Benicia on Friday. Read Signature’s overview here.
Reposted with permission, The Benicia Bridge Excellent reporting from Benicia’s newest award-winning journalism duo, Monica Vaughan and Laura López González. – Roger Straw Learn more and subscribe to the newsletter here.
BACKGROUND (by BenIndy Editor): On October 1, City Councilmember Terry Scott distributed without comment a link to a website, “Moving Benicia Forward”, movebeniciaforward.com. The front page invitation there reads, “We invite you to share your thoughts” and offers visitors to click on “Share Feedback.” This goes to a page with information about Signature Development Group, which is under contract with Valero “to evaluate redevelopment opportunities for the Benicia refinery property.” The page also offers a blank box for “FEEDBACK – Share your thoughts about the potential redevelopment.”
In my view, Signature Development Group’s setting up of an online platform inviting the public to submit ideas and comments for post-closure redevelopment of Valero’s ~900 acres seems like a well-meant gesture toward public involvement. I say “gesture” because such an approach to communication can lead to one-directional, top-down decision-making.
Since Valero’s announcement in April, Signature has been under contract with Valero to come up with a comprehensive re-development plan whose options would presumably be contingent upon, and possibly limited by, findings from investigations of soil and water contamination remaining from all uses by Responsible Parties, including the military. Yet, since April, the public has learned little or nothing from Signature about their initial thoughts, their approach, and preliminary reviews of conditions. What have the mayor and council members learned in conversation with Signature?
I’m seasoned in this: we’re well past the point of needing more info than has been spoken in generalities. We must get conversations out into the open.
BENICIA’S GENERAL PLAN AND A CITIZEN TASK FORCE
I don’t believe there is any substitute for the kind of “roll-up-your-sleeves-put-on-your-thinking caps” work done in person, when learning and respectful deliberation can take place among a broad-spectrum of community stakeholders. Any discussions on this momentous venture should be under guidance of the goals and policies of the Benicia General Plan.
Such a public oversight process is necessary and foundational to any plans for the Valero properties if those plans are to gain public approval. I believe Elizabeth Patterson’s reasoning and recommendation for establishing a community stakeholder task force now is absolutely sound, based on a proven record of what such an open deliberative process nets.
The task force could resemble a modified version of the General Plan Oversight Committee [GPOC], a council-appointed 17-member committee charged in 1995 to rewrite the city’s outdated 1978 general plan. (Note: in 1978, the refinery, then owned by Exxon, was new—only 10 years old!). As a professional planner, Elizabeth was appointed to facilitate the committee’s work, and under her leadership, GPOC members dove into discussions and debates on often contentious issues concerning land use, sustainable economic development, community health and safety, and community identity. Outside speakers offered expertise to inform GPOC and the public. The goals, policies and programs hammered out by consensus became the integrated guidance document required by the state, with legal standing, that we have today, inclusive of periodic updates. Our Benicia General Plan has stood the test of time and will keep evolving.
In effect, any decisions made for the Valero properties will shape the city’s future, for good or ill, and could represent a significant general plan “update”, thus invoking need for such a citizen task force.
The visions we collectively hold for our city’s sustainability and future development must entail hard-nosed assessments of prospective major changes over the next 5 – 10 years: changes that will be cumulative. (Think large-scale residential development currently proposed for Seeno property, the Arsenal, and now, possibly for portions of Valero property). Such changes deserve open public discussion that an on-going task force would serve as vehicle for: a public process oriented toward specific goals to ensure far-sighted oversight of what will unfold through cleanup investigations and redevelopment planning, inclusive of CEQA reviews.
While it may seem early in the game, so far, five months into it, no such public process has been set up by the city council to proactively engage residents as full participants in an endeavor that has apparently already begun.
CLOSURE CLEANUP BONDING — AND A NEVER IMAGINED REFINERY CLOSURE
In 1995, Koch Industries had come to town exclaiming the benefits of permitting a development proposal for a massive petroleum coke storage and shipping terminal at the port, which would serve all five Bay Area refineries. The public’s outcry in protest was enormous, and successful. Notable at that time, activists spoke up about the need for a secure bond to be required of Exxon that would pay for a future refinery cleanup. While Koch failed in its development bid, nothing came of recommendations for a “closure cleanup bond” to be put up by the refinery.
In 1999, the new general plan was adopted, just when Valero was negotiating terms with Exxon for purchase of the refinery. Though the general plan did not directly incorporate goals that specifically addressed the refinery’s possible closure, key policies addressed the need to protect residents from exposure to contaminated soils—the concern expressed based on the city’s oversight debacles revealed by the Rose Drive/Braito Landfill investigation and cleanup.
All that said, Valero Energy Corp’s announcement of its options for shutting down by April 2026, was a stunner. It became the hottest concern of the city, and respectively for the governor and legislature: nobody was prepared. The city instantly worried about projected serious “gap” in revenues, and the state, the significant “gaps” in the gasoline supply chain that shuttering production at the Benicia refinery would/could cause. Once it was determined that Valero wasn’t “taking” any of the state’s offers to stay open, the state seemed to walk away from the problems for the City raised by prospects of closure.
So, unfortunately, the city never imagined a future refinery closure, and thus, what legal obligations attendant on such an undertaking should be raised, such as a condition of any future development permit applied for by Valero. (For example, Valero’s permit for the 10-year Valero Improvement Project begun in 2003.) Thus, the city missed several key opportunities to impose a permitting condition that would, at the very least, require that Valero put up a bond dedicated for funding of closure and thorough cleanup of refinery properties.
As City Manager Giuliani said to me recently when I met with him to discuss my concerns, “We’re on our own now”. I’d just stated that there is no state law that requires full disclosure of total costs of a thorough cleanup. This bears repeating: there’s nothing in either our municipal laws or state law that would protect the City from any Valero failure to meet what the state and city should have formerly considered firm obligations for refinery closures and cleanups. Expecting a lawsuit to resolve such issues would be a David and Goliath contest.
WE’RE LEFT WITH QUESTIONS…
Will a citizen task force be established by council for the long-haul, to be dedicated to oversight of a cleanup process, and, ultimately, for reviewing re-development plans as proposed?
We of the Benicia community are now in the responsible position to publicly model what we mean by a process that oversees “refinery closure, cleanup and restoration” and appropriate sustainable future land uses for former refinery/military lands.
Marilyn Bardet Good Neighbor Steering Committee BCAMP Board Member BISHO Working Group Valero Community Advisory Panel
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