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Super Burke Fighting with Residents Over LA’s Oil Fields |
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ViewPoint
By Betty Pleasant (Posted first in the WAVE Newspapers.)
The communities surrounding the Baldwin Hills Oil Fields are another collective hot spot where residents are doing battle with their elected representative, Supervisor Yvonne Burke. Residents decry Burke’s intent to rush approval of a controversial and greatly maligned environmental impact report that permits the erection of 1,065 additional oil wells in the fields.
Despite the countless pleas for more time to review the highly technical 1,000-plus page document that the county released nine months late, Burke refuses to grant an extension for more public comment and review and appears hell bent on rushing it through.
Rep. Diane Watson and state Sen. Ridley-Thomas have pressed Burke and other officials to extend the EIR comment period on behalf of the community. But so far, nothing’s doing.
In another hot spot, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is paying people to collect residents’ signatures on petitions to create a false sense of community support for its racist Expo Line at street level.
These signature-gatherers, recruited by Dakota Communications, were seen in abundance outside Home Depot, another one of the clients of Dakota, whose attempts to get a Home Depot built in Sunland failed miserably last year.
The Baldwin Hills oil company, PXP, is also a Dakota Communications client, which explains why PXP employees have been flooding community meetings with talk about how the oil field’s expansion would be great for the economy.
I still say that if support for a nuclear power plant on Crenshaw Boulevard is needed, Dakota Communications can be counted on to whip it up. (Betty Pleasant writes Soulvine and is published in the WAVE Newspapers. More of this Soulvine column here. ◘
CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 70
Pub: Aug 29, 2008
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