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VISIT CORONANEWSPRESS.COM
MONDAY, JULY 01- JULY 07, 2024
VOL. 8,
NO. 178
How America’s ‘most powerful lobby’ is stifling efforts to reform oil well cleanup in state after state
Report shows highest paid on Riverside County government payroll
By Mark Olalde, ProPublica
By City News Service
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
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he 10 highest paid officials in Riverside County government last year were working in public safety and public health, according to a report released by the California State Controller’s Office and is available Wednesday online at www.publicpay.ca.gov. The agency published its 2023 “Government Compensation in California” analysis, showing how taxpayer funds were spent in the previous year, and who was receiving what for being on the public payroll. The individual who received the largest income in county government was Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose composite compensation last year totaled $593,518, the report said. That amount included base pay and a lump sum disbursal, totaling $286,529, which wasn’t specifically defined on the web portal but could have been banked vacation and sick leave time that wasn’t used, but cashed out, as well as funds from a legal settlement, according to the controller’s office. In a 3-1 vote, with Supervisor Kevin Jeffries opposed and Supervisor Karen Spiegel abstaining, the Board of Supervisors earlier this month approved a raise for the sheriff, boosting his annual salary from $273,463 to 347,771, beginning in the See Payroll Page 28
States see drop in birth control, emergency contraceptives, USC study shows
California oil wells. | Photo by h2kyaks CC BY-NC 2.0
Series: Unplugged: Will Taxpayers Foot the Oil Industry’s Cleanup Bill? nplugged oil and gas wells accelerate climate change, threaten public health and risk hitting taxpayers’ wallets. Money set aside to fix the problem covers less than 2% of the impending cost. Last year, representatives of New Mexico’s oil industry met behind closed doors with the very groups with which they typically clash — state regulators and environmentalists — in search of an answer to the more than 70,000 wells sitting unplugged across the state. Many leak oil, brine and toxic or explosive gasses, and more than 1,700 have already been left to the public to clean up. The situation is so dire
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that oil companies agreed to help try to find a solution. After months of negotiations, the state regulators who ran the meetings emerged with a proposal that they hoped would appease everyone in the room. The bill would instruct drillers to set aside more money to plug their wells, authorize regulators to block risky sales to companies that would be unlikely to afford to clean up their wells and implement a buffer zone between wells and hospitals, schools, homes and other buildings. The industry, unhappy with the state’s final language, turned against the bill it helped shape. The influential New Mexico Oil and Gas Association told its supporters that HB 133 was “a radical
and dangerous approach designed to strangle the oil and gas industry” and asked them to send their elected representatives a form letter opposing it. If passed, the trade group proclaimed, the bill would “Destroy New Mexico.” The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, which represents small oil companies, called the bill “overzealous.” In the face of such opposition, Democrats removed key provisions. The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association eventually changed its position to neutral, but largely stripped of substance, the bill died on the floor of the House of Representatives. “Industry killing the bills was the dynamic I saw,” said Adam Peltz, a senior attorney with the Envi-
ronmental Defense Fund who helped write the New Mexico proposal, as well as similar bills in other oilproducing states. New Mexico faces a multibillion-dollar shortfall between the money companies have set aside to plug wells and the actual cost of doing so, according to state research, a reality mirrored in many states. Across the country, more than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged, but the money held in cleanup funds, called bonds, is many tens of billions of dollars short of the projected costs, ProPublica and Capital & Main found. Now, a once-ina-lifetime effort to shrink that shortfall is underway,
omen living in states with the most restrictive abortion policies after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade experienced steep declines in the use of birth control pills and emergency contraceptives, according to a USC study released Wednesday. The findings, which appear in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, suggest that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case had an even wider impact for women’s reproductive health than previously thought, the authors said. According to the study, states that implemented a full ban on abortion after the ruling saw significant declines in the number of prescriptions filled for birth control pills and emergency contraceptives at pharmacies. These reductions weren’t found in states whose policies were unchanged after the Dobbs decision, according to the findings. The study said many family planning clinics with abortion services closed immediately after the Roe reversal, particularly in the most restrictive states.
See Oil wells Page 14
See Abortion policies Page 27
By City News Service
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