Green Party of Ventura

LOCAL "CORPORADOS"
Last Updated April 2002

Feb. 2002: Halaco has been the single greatest source of environmental complaints in Ventura County over the course of many years. For the last three decades, the company has operated a metal smelting facility in Oxnard that violates both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Halaco has piped contaminated wastewater from its recycling facility into a series of waste ponds located inside a 25-acre dump directly adjacent to the Ormond Wetlands. The facility is located just a few feet from Ormond Beach, a quarter-mile from a large condominium complex, and less than a half-mile from a neighborhood of single family homes. Neighbors complain of health problems and physical damage to their property from the air emissions that come from Halaco stacks, as well as emissions from their slagheap and other emission control buildings. Unlined settling ponds are full of chemical and radioactive wastes - posing a threat to groundwater, surface water, and ocean water quality. In January 2001, EDC-representing Santa Barbara ChannelKeepers -filed a citizen enforcement suit, charging Halaco with violations of numerous environmental laws. The lawsuit charges Halaco with violating the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and Proposition 65-all of which are laws enacted to protect public health. The lawsuit will force Halaco to clean up the toxic chemicals that have been leaking into the air, water and ground at the site.

May 2001: EDC brought a successful legal challenge to the Newhall Ranch Project, a massive 22,000-unit "new city" development located on the Santa Clara River with severe environmental impacts, on behalf of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Santa Clara River and the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment. The legal victory has drawn state and national attention to the project as a symbol of sprawl, inadequate water supply, and fake "new urbanism." Primary issues concern the project's impacts on the resources of the Santa Clara River, the adequacy of the water supply, and inconsistencies with the L.A. County General Plan. At an enormous human and ecological cost, the development is sited on high quality habitat and agricultural lands at the Ventura/Los Angeles County border, rather than existing urban centers. As designed, the Newhall project would require extensive modification of the Santa Clara River channel and would eliminate sensitive river habitat for species, such as the endangered least Bell's vireo, southwestern willow flycatcher, and unarmored three spine stickleback. In May 2001, the court ordered additional environmental studies and modification of the project, which vindicated the legal claims of EDC and Ventura County. In response to the ruling, the City prepared additional environmental review and is conducting additional public hearings. Despite additional review, the project will most likely be approved and EDC's continued involvement will be necessary.

Washington Mutual is the financial power behind the humongous Ahmanson Ranch development, planned to sit in the Simi Hills north of Calabasas and west of Woodland Hills.

This planned community of some 3,000 luxury homes, plus industrial parks and two golf courses, is being touted by Washington Mutual (WaMu) as an important and needed development to ease the local housing shortage. But independent reviews of the Ahmanson Ranch development plans have revealed that less then 300 of the planned homes will be considered "affordable" (below 80% of the median income range in the area); and of those, most will either be 'granny flats' included on the property of larger homes or studio apartments reserved for use by golf course employees. The main traffic artery through the area, Highway 101, is already at the traffic level projected by the original (1992) Environemental Impact Report to be reached in 2007 (and at 40% over its designed capacity); and building has not yet even begun.

Scientific, traffic-engineering, legal and cultural experts have testified that Ventura County's 1992 project approval does not give them relief from current California Environmental Quality Act regulations, and that a Subsequent EIR is required when major changes are required in the original EIR. Community groups are demanding that the Ventura County Board of Supervisors require a brand-new EIR before WaMu go forward with its development.

Congressman Brad Sherman summed up the development plan of the WaMu susidary, Ahmanson Land Company: "Scrape up the [spine]flower, dump it on the frogs". Botanists have raised many questions about WaMu's spineflower plans such as what will be the effect on the rare San Fernando Valley Spineflower (petitioned by the Environemental Defense Center to be placed on the federal Endangered Species list) of argentine ants that will follow the housing development. Experts stated that 90 percent of all mitigation projects fail. The endangered red legged frog, the other rare species residing in the Ahmanson Ranch area, has already been wiped out from 99 percent of its California habitat, and threatened amphibians do not do well below developments.

On Jan. 10, 2002, a state administrative judge ruled that Pictsweet Mushroom Farms in Ventura County had illegally fired mushroom picker Fidel Andrade in retaliation for his support of the United Farm Workers and for engaging in other activities protected by California's farm labor law. The judge ordered Andrade to be offered his job back and that he be reimbursed for all lost wages and other losses "suffered as a result of his unlawful discharge."

Conditions at Pictsweet in Ventura are cruel and dangerous. Mushroom workers labor in dark and damp rooms. Floors are slippery. They only have the lights on their helmets to guide them. Many suffer vision problems. Such conduct is why workers have called for a boycott Pictsweet mushrooms. Pictsweet has lost many major customers, including Vons, Safeway and Ralphs supermarkets; yet it still refuses to negotiate a fair contract with UFW for its workers. The last UFW contract expired in 1988, and wages have remained at 1988 levels. Since then, workers at Pictsweet Mushroom Farms in Ventura County have tried to negotiate a United Farm Workers contract. Pictsweet has ignored its workers' desires and violated a host of state labor laws:

* A detailed nine-count complaint issued on June 26, 2001 by prosecutors with California's Agricultural Labor Relations Board included bad faith bargaining and illegally acting to get rid of the union.

* Pictsweet was recently fined $7,475 by the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division for safety violations at its Salem plant, which was being organized by the UFW's sister union, PCUN. One of them caused Enrique Diaz Lupian, 46, to lose his right hand in an accident. Other workers in both Oregon and California have been disciplined or fired for supporting unions.

The UFW is currently calling for pressure to be put on Pizza Hut, one of Pictsweet's largest remaining customers, to drop Pictsweet as a supplier for its restaurant chain unless/until Pictsweet negotiates a new UFW contract.

Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the three major private energy utilities in the state who basically wrote California's energy deregulation bill in the 1990's under Governor Pete Wilson and got a whopping $71 Billion windfall of 'recovery costs' to allow them to decommission their nuclear power plants, which they passed right on to their parent company for stockholder distribution, got caught in California's energy 'crisis' last year and ended up pleading insolvency with the state having to bail them out.

After having its pleas for a public bailout rejected by a skeptical public and a scared legislature, Southern California Edison made an end run around the Legislature and consumers in October 2001 with the help of the California Public Utilities Commission. The Commission and the utility conspired to get Edison the bailout it wanted without any public participation. The plan agreed to in a closed door settlement between the utility and the CPUC included no input from consumers, who will be forced to pony up $3.3 billion to fix Edison's financial problems. Federal District Court Judge Ronald Lew approved that plan despite consumer protests over the terms of the settlement and the time frame in which it was approved. Incredibly enough, in March 2002 current California Governor Gray Davis named former SCE President Michael Peevey to the CPUC, where he immediately engineered a vote allowing large businesses to bypass the SCE bailout and buy their power directly from out-of-state companies, putting the burden of the SCE bailout almost entirely on small business and residential users.

Boeing/Rocketdyne

In 1959, Rocketdyne Corp. set up some of the earliest experiments done with nuclear power fission reactors in the Santa Susana hills overlooking what is now Simi Valley. Over a 32-year period, ten reactors of various designs were constructed and operated on the site. The site boasted in late 1959 of reaching a first of powering an entire town (Moorpark, CA) entirely from a nuclear power plant. It also earned the infamy of having the first nuclear plant in the United States to suffer a core meltdown, which also happened in 1959. The map to the left shows the Rocketdyne Santa Susana Field Laboratory site, as situated on the Ventura / Los Angeles County borders between Simi Valley in the upper left and the Los Angeles enclaves of Chatsworth and West Hills on the right. Area IV of the red zone is the area where all nuclear testing was conducted. All of the nuclear reactors were broken down and taken off-site in 1991. Since then, Rocketdyne (now a subsidiary of Boeing Corp.) has been making cleanup efforts in the expectation that the site will be made available for commercial and residential development sometime in the future. The Center for Disease Control's Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR) held 'public availability sessions' on the Santa Susana site in 1999 as well as reviewed other records, and compiled a report of the nuclear potential of the Santa Susana site later that year. The report included data on the nuclear accidents and other history that occurred during the course of the Rocketdyne nuclear program; but ultimately concluded that there was no evidence of any ground contamination that could reach the local residents. (Nonetheless, most residents of the area purchase their water from local distillers rather than draw from local wells.)

There have been troubling revelations about the site of late. In 2001, it was disclosed that the Department of Energy was preparing new regulations that would allow Rocketdyne to resell its low-level metal nuclear waste to commercial recyclers, which in turn could be used in the manufacture of commercial and personal items. When this news leaked out of the DOE, US Congressman Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) called for local public hearings to explain these proposed regulations and to solicit public feedback on the idea. The hearings held in Simi Valley have been quite rancorous, subjecting DOE and Rocketdyne representatives to angry accusations and complaints about these proposals. However, the DOE has not shown any sign to-date of rescinding these proposed regulations.

There has also been a lingering issue of what to do to clean up the Rocketdyne site of non-metallic nuclear residuals. Boeing has proposed removing the contaminated soil from the site, carting it to an undisclosed site, with the intention of lowering the possible site health risk to a level that might cause 1 additional cancer death per 300,000 cancer victims. Local environmental groups have been demanding a measured health risk of 1 per 1,000,000 cancer victims, and have expressed great concern at the prospect of having contaminated soil trucked out of the area for parts unknown.

It was thought that these issues were merely in the discussion stage. However, An April 10, 2002 article by the Ventura County Star disclosed that Rocketdyne has apparently been acting on its proposed solution to clean up the site by dumping low-level nuclear waste in Los Angeles landfills, unbeknownst to all but a few people in the US Department of Energy and the California Department of Health Services. Even the landfill operators who received the waste weren't made aware of the nature of the dump materials.

Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn has expressed outrage at this disclosed practice and ordered an investigation of the matter in conjunction with the California Integrated Waste Management Agency. Simi Valley officials, who have said repreatedly that they have no legal authority to demand anything of Boeing or Rocketdyne, nonetheless are closely monitoring the situation.

 

Page Last Updated: April 2002