The seventh wedding anniversary is typically celebrated with gifts of copper and wool. But the seventh anniversary of Santa Barbara’s late, great 2015 oil spill off the Refugio coast — the second-worst in county history — has been marked by two massive legal developments that demonstrate just how much green there is burbling under all that black gold. After seven years of intense legal warfare, the property owners and fishing businesses that had been damaged by the 142,000 gallons of oil that gushed into the ocean finally agreed to a settlement with Plains All American Pipeline, the owners of that corroded pipeline, for $230 million.
At the same time, ExxonMobil sued the Santa Barbara County Supervisors in federal court for denying its request to truck oil from its Santa Ynez Unit, which has been landlocked and shut down since that Plains All American pipeline spill of seven years ago. ExxonMobil contended that the supervisors had abused their discretionary authority — “arbitrary,” “capricious,” “prejudicial,” and “unlawful,” ExxonMobil’s attorneys called it in legal papers — in denying its trucking request. “The Project denial was not based on any purported flaw or safety concern,” ExxonMobil attorneys argued, “but rather on the Board’s unofficial policy to oust oil commerce from Santa Barbara County.” Elsewhere in its legal papers, ExxonMobil charged the supervisors “improperly treated the consideration of the project as a referendum on offshore oil production.”
While the lawsuit was totally expected — ExxonMobil had vowed to sue before the supervisors voted 3-2 to deny on March 8 — what was surprising was some of the financial information alleged in the lawsuit. For example, ExxonMobil claims to have spent $100 million per year every year since the 2015 spill — just to keep its operation at Las Flores Canyon maintained at a functional level. Perhaps just as striking is that ExxonMobil has not seen fit to sue Plains All American even though the pipeline company’s criminal negligence — a Santa Barbara jury found it guilty of one felony and eight misdemeanor charges in connection with the spill — is most directly responsible for ExxonMobil’s massive loss of revenues.