“That’s a loaded question,” Bob Geis told Salud Carbajal at a county budget hearing last week. “Oil is a very complicated subject.”
Carbajal, who is supervisor for the county’s 1st District and is running for Congress, asked Geis, the county’s auditor-controller, if the loss in tax revenues would impact school districts after oil production at seven offshore platforms shut down following the Refugio Oil Spill in May. Specifically, Carbajal asked, will Plains All American Pipeline, the company responsible for the spill, repay schools and other government entities for lost tax dollars?
The question is at the heart of the lasting economic impact of the May spill. Earlier this month at the Economic Action Summit, Mark Schniepp, director of California Economic Forecast, which is funded in part by oil companies, grabbed headlines when he said the ruptured pipeline could be shut down for up to five years. Further, he claimed, school districts — namely Goleta Union School District — could suffer property-tax losses to the tune of $26 million dollars over three years. “These numbers are preliminary,” Schneipp said in an interview this week. “They may end up going higher.” He added the annual loss in federal and state royalties translates to about $5 million absent from county coffers.