Nearly 11,000 comments filed over Phillips 66 rail project in Nipomo
Nearly 11,000 comments — from throughout the state, and even abroad — have been received on a proposed rail project at a Nipomo Mesa refinery, prompting San Luis Obispo County planners to push back a hearing on the plan.
Phillips 66 is proposing to add 1.3 miles of track to an existing rail spur, including five parallel tracks, an unloading facility and on-site pipelines for trains to deliver crude oil for processing.
Comments were due Nov. 24 on the project’s revised environmental impact report, which was re-circulated in October to expand the analysis of impacts from the project beyond San Luis Obispo County.
The Planning Commission meeting, originally scheduled for Jan. 29, has been pushed back to Feb. 5 — a date that’s still tentative.
“At this point we’re hoping to stay on track but it’s hard to say until the consultant really gets through all of these (comments) and we have a better idea of the substance and number of individual comments that need response,” said Murry Wilson, project manager with the county’s Department of Planning and Building.
County planners received about 10,600 emailed comments as well as 50 to 100 written comments, Wilson said.
Many of those comments — “a heck of a lot,” Wilson said — were five different types of form letters that came through different advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Climate Parents and ForestEthics.
“They were from throughout California, throughout the U.S. and even some from abroad,” Wilson said. “The Internet is a powerful thing.”
Many of the advocacy groups sent alerts to members who live along the rail routes, wrote Ethan Buckner, U.S. organizer for ForestEthics, in an email.
“Given that there are approximately 5.5 million Californians that live within the blast zone of an oil train, the outpouring of opposition to this project is unsurprising,” he wrote.
Nipomo resident Laurance Shinderman said some comments addressed air pollution concerns, contended the environmental impact report does not adequately assess the risks of a spill, or challenged statements in the report that the county may be pre-empted by federal law from requiring mitigations or conditions on the Union Pacific mainline tracks.
“If you don’t stop them (Phillips 66) now, then we have a problem,” said Shinderman, a member of Mesa Refinery Watch, a group opposed to the Phillips 66 project. “The idea of having a (rail) terminal down here will open the floodgates. They’ll go right back into the EIR process and make it 10 trains a week.”
The 1,780-acre refinery, located off Highway 1 on the Nipomo Mesa, now receives crude by pipeline. Company officials have said that oil production in California is dropping, and bringing in crude oil by rail from other sources would allow them to offset any reduction in deliveries.
“We understand that there may be opposition to the project, and we look forward to San Luis Obispo County providing responses to new issues that are raised and addressing them in compliance with CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act),” Phillips 66 spokesman Dennis Nuss wrote to The Tribune on Friday.
In a previous interview, he said the process used to refine the crude oil will not change, nor will the project generate an increase in production.
Phillips 66 anticipates unloading up to five trains a week with about 80 tank cars each, with a maximum of about 250 trains arriving each year.
Crude oil would be transferred from the new unloading facility to existing storage tanks via a new on-site, above-ground pipeline. Each train is expected to be at the refinery between 10 and 12 hours.
No crude oil or refined product would be transported out of the refinery by rail.
The comments should be posted on the county’s website in about 10 days, after its consultant, Ventura-based Marine Research Specialists, finishes numbering them and preparing them for responses.
The county has contracted with Marine Research Specialists to prepare the environmental impact report, but Phillips 66 pays the bill. The first environmental impact report draft cost about $560,000; the additional work on the revised draft will cost about $470,000.
In addition, the oil company is paying for an assistant project manager from SWCA Environmental Consultant’s San Luis Obispo office to work with Wilson. That contract is about $120,000, Wilson said.
This story was originally published December 6, 2014 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Nearly 11,000 comments filed over Phillips 66 rail project in Nipomo."