Monday night, November 6th, the Culver City Council will decide if they want to allow further discussion and comment on 1000+ pages of a Specific Plan showing where they will allow oil wells to be drilled & fracked within Culver City and its Environmental Impact Report (EIR).
The EIR and Specific Plan cost over a million dollars of Culver City taxpayers' money and took more than nine years to prepare.
Have you even heard of it? What the effects will be on you, your home, your loved ones? By law, the City is supposed to inform the Public so that we can weigh in on decisions that will affect us the rest of our lives. This voluminous document was made public on September 15th with barely enough time (60 days) to wade through it. Two City sponsored workshops came late in the game and were not widely announced for the Public to get more involved.
By law, the Public comment period can be extended for another 6o days. Kudos to Council members Sahli-Wells and Small who moved to agendize (aka have City Council discuss & then vote on) whether to give us another 60 days to weigh in on these critical decisions. The decisions the City Council will make have the potential to protect our health and safety, or they could cost us our lives via a catastrophic earthquake do not adequately deal with this reality.
If you voted for Councilmen Jim Clarke, Jeff Cooper, and/or Goran Eriksson, please contact them and ask that they agendize & then vote to approve the 60 day extension of the Comment Period. This will give them and the Public more time to study, understand, and give input on this document from which they will make regulations that will affect everything from our property values to our very lives.
Remind them that “haste makes waste.” Please email your request to the City ASAP asking the City Council to please extend the comment period for another 60 days. Subject: 60 days extension on the Comment Period. Send to IOFSpecificPlanProject@culvercity.org. You can also fax it to (310) 253-5664.
I also encourage you to email the City Council members a copy of the email you send. You may want to thank Small and Sahli-Wells for speaking out on behalf of the people to give us more of a voice in decisions that will affect the rest of our lives.
You may want to ask, Clarke, Cooper, and Eriksson what moral or democratic principle has kept them from supporting the need for more public involvement.
Remember it will take three votes on November 6 to get the 60 day extension of the Public Comment process going.
Let's fill Culver City Hall on Monday night, November 6 to have our voices heard as if our lives depended on it – because they indeed do! Let's all join in! Your presence and your requests are what keeps democracy alive!
Dr Suzanne DeBenedittis, PhD
Culver City
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