Mike Collins was raised in oil country but dreamed of living at the beach. As a young boy in Bakersfield, he accompanied his father to dusty fields dotted with derricks where he repaired the motors on oil rigs.
On his bedroom wall hung a poster of a house perched atop a cliff, overlooking the ocean waves. "Justification for higher education," his mother called it.
Now a psychologist, Collins bought his dream house four blocks from the seashore in tiny Hermosa Beach nearly five years ago. He surfs or paddleboards daily and often rides his bicycle to work.
Now, he's worried oil will follow him here.
"I know what oil smells like, I know what it looks like, what it sounds like," says Collins, whose house is 100 yards from the spot where an oil company wants to drill. "I don't want that in my backyard."
Like many in this wealthy South Bay beach town, Collins is bracing for the possibility that Hermosa Beach could be opened to oil drilling for the first time in more than 80 years. A citywide election to decide the matter, still almost a year away, is driving residents to opposite corners as they take stock of what kind of place they want their self-proclaimed "best little beach city" to be.
Hermosa Beach has faced this choice before; the oil question has been voted on four times in the town's 106-year history.
But with a multimillion-dollar legal settlement looming, the stakes in this debate are higher than ever, pitting residents who see a potential windfall for the city and its schools against those who fear long-term environmental and health consequences.
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In the waning days of the Los Angeles oil boom, prospectors struck black gold below Torrance and Long Beach, touching off a renewed oil fever in the South Bay.
Beachgoers sunned themselves in the shadow of drilling rigs, and nearby Signal Hill became known as "Porcupine Hill" for its spiny forest of derricks.
But Hermosa Beach remained a 1.5-square-mile oasis, thanks to a 1932 vote that banned new drilling within the city.
More than 50 years later, Santa Monica-based Macpherson Oil dangled the prospect of tens of millions of dollars in royalties, and voters in then-cash-strapped Hermosa voted to lift the ban.
But Macpherson never saw that oil.
Backlash from anti-oil activists changed voters' minds in 1995 and the city halted the project, deeming it unsafe.
Source: E&B Natural Resources
Melissa Roadman
In turn, the company sued the city for breach of contract, claiming as much as $750 million in damages. The legal case dragged on for 14 years, leaving city leaders fearing it might bankrupt the town.
"We were locked in the embrace of death with Macpherson," says Hermosa Beach Mayor Kit Bobko.
In March, one month before a jury trial was scheduled to begin, the city announced it had settled the suit.
As part of the deal, E&B Natural Resources, a Bakersfield-based oil company, would buy Macpherson's stake in the deal for $30 million and limit the city's liability to $17.5 million. But there was one major caveat: E&B could again ask Hermosa voters to overturn the drilling ban. The election, which will be paid for by E&B, could happen as early as next spring.
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