Brentwood has moved forward with banning any oil or gas drilling in two built-out parts of its city close to sensitive areas such as homes, parks, daycares and preschools.
Although there are no pending applications for oil and gas operation permits in the city, the City Council on Tuesday unanimously agreed to the new restrictions during a first hearing of the revised regulations. A second hearing in coming weeks will finalize the revised rules that have been many months in the making.
“This is a long time coming; we worked really, really hard on this,” said Councilwoman Jovita Mendoza, who first proposed a moratorium on all oil and gas drilling back in March of 2022.
Mendoza, the only council member to speak on the issue, thanked the Antioch City Council, which paved the way with an earlier ban, along with environmental groups Sunflower Alliance, the Center for Biological Diversity as well as the many local high school students who spoke in favor of such bans at previous meetings.
“I’ve learned more about oil and gas drilling than I ever thought I would in my entire life,” she said.
The council first adopted an interim ban on all oil and gas drilling in the city on April 12, 2022, and later twice extended that moratorium to give staff time to research and prepare rules to target such uses within 3,200 feet of sensitive areas. The temporary ban remains in effect until March 27.
But in August of 2023, the California Supreme Court, in the case Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. County of Monterey, ruled that cities and counties cannot regulate methods and practices of oil production, but left open their ability to regulate where that production takes place.
Brentwood’s revised rules now focus on specific locations in the city where oil and gas development are no longer appropriate as a conditionally permitted uses, including the Garin Ranch development area north of Balfour Road on either side of Garin Parkway, and Sciortino Ranch, a mixed-use community east of Brentwood Boulevard and on both sides of Sand Creek Road.
Planning manager Erik Nolthenius told the council the revised ordinance will also exclude oil and gas development from other planned development areas unless those uses were expressly previously listed as permitted. Under the rules, though, a future city council could decide to allow drilling in some districts, he said.
The new rules also specify a 3,200-foot distance between any new well, storage tank or production site and residents whose health is at greater risk if exposed to air pollution, such as children, the elderly and asthmatics, according to the report.
In January of 2022, Antioch’s council became the first in East Contra Costa County to ban future natural gas and oil drilling, producing and exploratory operations in the city. Like Brentwood, none was currently taking place or pending approval at the time of the vote though there were some operations close by.
The last exploratory drilling in the city of Antioch was in 2007, but in an unincorporated area just to the south on Deer Valley Road near Brentwood, Sunset Exploration has been drilling for crude oil since 2018. In 2020, the company also proposed a portable exploratory well south of Heidorn Ranch Road and Old Sand Creek Road in unincorporated Brentwood, though that project appears to have stalled. In the same area, the old Brentwood Oil and Gas Field, once mined by Shell Oil Company and Occidental Petroleum, boomed in the 1960s and over the years produced 9.8 million barrels of oil.
Environmentalists and some Brentwood council members, including Mendoza, also want to see Contra Costa County revise its rules on oil and gas drilling, and the county is set to do just that as part of its new Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in unincorporated areas.
“I’m hoping that other cities look at this and see that it (oil and gas drilling) is not necessary to do in your city,” she said. “There’s plenty of other land around where you can do it and I’m hoping that our county Supervisor Diane Burgis really looks at this and implements something along these lines at the county level because that is the biggest threat to Brentwood.”