What should be included in the Benicia Industrial Safety Ordinance and why?

December 1, 2024 Dear Benicia Mayor and City Council, We are writing primarily to thank the council for initiating the city’s proposed Industrial Safety Ordinance. This is a law that Benicia has needed ever since we moved here in 1987 and probably for a quarter century before that, and we are excited to see it so close to passage. As the draft ISO itself notes, the “City recognizes that CalARP regulatory requirements alone may not guarantee public health and safety ... (and the) public is directly benefitted by supplementary and non-duplicative local incident prevention, preparedness, and response measures.” We only wish officials had recognized this sooner, like before the 2019 inspection that discovered the Valero Refinery had known since at least 2003 that its hydrogen system was inadequate and was discharging 360 times the legal amount of emissions daily – about 17 million pounds of air pollutants too late. Need we any better proof that the health of Benicia citizens and business employees are insufficiently protected at this time? We are concerned, however, that southern Solano County will remain vulnerable to this type of wanton pollution even after passage of an ISO if the Oversight Commission that it mandates is merely advisory, as currently proposed. Initially, the city’s draft ISO tasked the commission with “[r]eviewing and comparing, on a monthly basis and during emergencies, real-time and archived air monitoring data collected from independently networked and operated community-based air monitoring equipment, and report findings along with graph trends to the public, BFD and City Council, and recommending enforcement actions.” We believe these powers should be restored to the commission as completely as possible, lest it become as useless and ineffectual as the refinery-dominated Community Advisory Panel. Finally on a personal note, after each of you leave the council someday, you will look back on your legacy, the actions you took and votes you made. The aforementioned emissions supposedly started when I (Dan) was on the council and we were considering the “Valero Improvement Project”, which was ten projects in one. I was working for the Contra Costa health department then, and I suggested the city consider an ISO like Contra Costa has. As we know, that did not happen, and it is one of the great regrets of my time in office. So now we ask the council to stick to your guns and strengthen the Oversight Commission to adequately protect public health, then approve an ordinance that does this. Be on the right side of history here, please. Dan and Diana Smith 365 Military East

I concur that monitoring and the provision of air purifiers to at least schools and public facilities

We all have to have smoke detectors and carbon monoxide monitors in our homes to keep us safe. We need to have independent air monitors that automatically alert us when it is unsafe to be outside. Then we have to understand why, so that it does not keep happening, which means consequences.

Martinez and Richmond's ISOs are not perfect but I understand that those cities are currently updating their ordinances. Benicia needs to ask those cities what improvements they are making so that our ISO is based on existing information including any knowledge gained from Martinez and Richmond. We have a chance to make a great ISO. The best. With room for additional safety and health requirements specific to Benicia.

I think the ISO should include robust community air monitoring. These should be independently run with citizen oversight. All monitoring should be accessible 24/7 and have historical data available. All raw data should be available to the public in an easily machine readable form. Monitors of this sort could alert us to many possible harmful chemcals like ozone and pm 2.5. There could also be a public education campaing to let people know what the hazards are. An ISO should be able to add on to the fines that BAAQMD might issue. It should be able to independenly set fines for air quality violations and other safety threats. There have been 2 fires at the Port. Was anyone ever fined for those?

Question: can the City impose regulations and penalties, or is that exclusively in the domain of the BAAQMD, CalEPA and CalOSHA? Do the Richmond and CoCo County ISOs impose penalties? If so, why hasn't that worked?

We get very little local information when accidents occur. Presently, our air is regulated from BAAQMD housed in San Francisco, the statewide Industrial Safety Ordinance ISO is run from Fairfield, and the EPA is a federal program not in Benicia. The state level ISO copied from CC county needs to be run from Benicia, so we ( the public and our city representatives) know what is happening in real time. This is not different then when the schools were using AirNow in Fairfield to judge Benicia's air to decide when schools should be closed during the fires. THAT was not working and our state ISO is also not working. The schools put in local purple air monitors at the schools and are now getting real time data to know what's happening. This with real time reporting to the community, more air monitor, more oversight and penalties to continued incidents would make our city safer.