Page 13 - Sonoma County Gazette 11-19

COAST cont’d from page 12
But even the pre-existing protections inherent
in the Sonoma County onshore facilities ordinance could hypothetically
be circumvented were
the California Coastal Commission ever to approve such a facility. Currently, the Trump Administration is proposing two new Outer Continental Shelf
(OCS) offshore oil
and gas drilling
lease sales along
our region’s coast
as part of their
Five-Year OCS
Offshore Oil
and Gas Leasing
Plan, but that
drilling plan has
become politically
controversial in so
many states that it
has been temporarily placed “on hold” by the White House until after the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, in a national response to the renewed threat of offshore
drilling to regional clean-coast economies in a host of states, the U.S. House
of Representatives on September 11, 2019 passed with bipartisan support
HR 1941, the Coastal and Marine Economies Protection Act, which would permanently ban offshore drilling along the entirety of the U.S. Pacific and Atlantic coasts. In Washington, the Senate has now been forwarded the House bill and has many legislative opportunities in which to also act to further this important legislation and send it to the President. We’ll see what happens.
Maps © Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary
The Public and the LCP: The Sonoma Coast is an irreplaceable public asset and deserves the kind of respect and due process that it was accorded during the thorough public participation by which the first LCP was initially formulated and adopted. After a County-requested pause in the LCP update process following the 2017 Tubbs fire, Permit Sonoma is now pushing through an artificially-rushed public review of hundreds of pages of binding planning guidance and formal regulatory language in the aftermath of this year’s new fire season. How the updated LCP is to be reformulated at this time will determine, more than any other single County policy, the future fate of our coastal environment.
There is a lot at stake here right now. The inspiration our coast provides to each of us compels us to defend it. The health and well-being of our communities requires our participation at this critical time.
PART 2 ONLINE @ SonomaCountyGazette.com & the December Gazette
+ Richard Charter, Senior Fellow, The Ocean Foundation, Bodega Bay | LocalCoastalPlan.org
Separately, in 2015, President Obama added our coastline from Bodega Head up to Point Arena to the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (https://farallones.noaa.gov/ ) in order to permanently protect our nearshore waters from offshore drilling and other damaging pollution.
However, for unknown reasons, these expanded Sanctuary boundaries and the critical environmental protections they provide for the Sonoma Coast and the Southern Mendocino Coast currently remain under review by Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, with no indication of when or what the Administration may decide.
11/19 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 13