What benefits or drawbacks could arise from the City adopting an ISO?

Benicia is remiss as a refinery community in not having an ISO. This leaves the City and Citizens at the mercy of the refinery and outdated government policies. A city's chief responsibility is the health and safety of its citizens and those who work and visit our city. Yet, there is little that can be done without an ordinance that provides the City with the oversight and authority to insure health and safety compliance

There are many benefits, to start out with Benicia is the only refinery town in the SF bay area without a local ISO. We presently have no local industrial governing agency. When Incidents happen we get delayed reporting of it, endangering our health and our families health. The local ISO would give us More air monitoring, more local real-time notifications when incidents occur and prevention thru follow up penalties when faculty equipment is not fixed.

There are existing regulations (CalOSHA/Fed OSHA PSM and CalARP/RMP). The county determines the program level, and suspect Valero is program level 3 that is PSM plus. Once again, these facilities have to conduct a process hazard analysis, where the county or it's designated agency representatives participate in the sessions, and these results plus air dispersion models are included in the facility plans for the community to review. The local fire department should have access, and work with the industrial facility that is in scope to be able to assist, and initiate the local area alarms plus coordination in an incident. The facility should have a communication plan to the local community. The industrial safety ordinance is a waste of resources for city and facilities plus an added financial burden on the facility to pay for the fees for the city oversite. However, if the county and city agreed that the fire department takes over the CalARP piece, it should be OK plus the Fire Department will hire a consultant with an industrial safety background (CalAPR/Fed RMP) for all three program levels. Also, the city can require the program level based on the level of risk, and suspect the program level is program level 3 that is PSM plus.

The positives for a strongBenicia ISO is to ensure polluting industries are held accountable and will be enforced to clean up their operations, with the ultimate goal to improve the health and safety of our community. Our current MOU has no enforcement. Without enforceable consequences, polluting industries will continue business as usual. Misdeeds without consequences only escalate.

I question whether the city, in its current financial state should even be considered an ISO. Contra Costa COUNTY has an ISO, shouldn’t this be handled at the Solano County level? The city has no experts, this is a Solano County issue. A county ISO could then be enforced on other industries county wide. Even then, has the CCC ISO made anything better in Martinez? Doesn’t seem like it.

Our city deserves real independent oversight! I have heard about proposing an ISO in Benicia ever since I moved here in 2013, it's overdue!!!

Our community deserves transparency and independent oversight. An ISO will provide that for Benicia.

The city needs to have experts who can help analyze problems and monitoring results. The worst thing that the ISO could do is provide a false sense of security. Without having people work on problems with knowledge of the industry we won't know if problems are really being fixed. These people need to be completely independent of the industry. Industry should pay for them, but they should be hired by the city with residents oversight.

More air monitoring, more local real-time notifications when incidents occur and prevention thru follow up penalties when faculty equipment is not fixed.