Workers Voice Support for Oil Pipeline Plan

Saying the project would put Ventura County’s unemployed back to work, nearly 100 construction and trade workers packed a public hearing Thursday to support a proposed crude-oil pipeline from Santa Barbara through the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys to the southern Los Angeles Basin.

In work clothes and hard hats, the mostly unemployed laborers jammed a Ventura County Government Center auditorium in Ventura and told the California Public Utilities Commission that the $215-million Pacific Pipeline would be environmentally safe.

“It’s the most environmentally sensitive way to get oil from one place to the other,” said Bob Hassebrock, branch manager for H & H Oil Tool Co. of Santa Paula. “We need jobs for our people and to restore the faith in the large companies so they can invest capital in California.”

Norman Rooney, president of Pacific Pipeline Systems of Ventura, said construction of the underground pipeline would create nearly 600 jobs.

The 171-mile pipeline would carry up to 130,000 barrels of oil a day from pumping stations in Santa Barbara County, along the Santa Clara River, through Santa Clarita and Burbank and onward to refineries in Wilmington and El Segundo.

If there are no delays, construction could start as early as next spring and be completed by May the following year, Rooney said.

Gloria Glenn, vice president of planning for the Newhall Land and Farming Co. of Valencia, was the only speaker out of nearly 15 at Thursday’s hearing to question the project. She said the report did not take into account other lines running under her company’s land.

“This project should have acknowledged all other projects that are basically running along the same alignment,” said Glenn, whose company owns 37,000 acres of land. “We’re not opposed to the Pacific Pipeline . . . but you’ve got to do planning to fit them all in and figure out the best routes.”

Earlier this year, the California Coastal Commission said oil companies could continue to use tankers in the Santa Barbara Channel to transport the oil, but would have to phase out the tankers and build a pipeline by Jan. 1, 1996.

After another hearing today in Santa Barbara, the Public Utilities Commission is scheduled to decide on the project in July. If given the green light, the pipeline then must be approved by each city and county it crosses.

The commission, which has held hearings all along the route in the past few months, will weigh public input as well as the project’s environmental impact report before it reaches a decision.