Santa Barbara County has a bit of a split personality when it comes to offshore oil development.

On the one hand, the Board of Supervisors today is expected to sign off on a letter to the U.S. Interior Department opposing a federal scheme to open large areas of the Pacific Ocean to more oil and gas development 8 possibly a lot more development.

On the other hand, these same local officials enthusiastically endorsed a recent proposal for a slant-drilling operation within sight of the coast.

A casual observer might conclude that supervisors are suffering from a bad case of hypocrisy, backing one oil development plan, but opposing others.

There are, however, significant differences in the competing plans 8 differences that could affect local residents far into the future.

The slant-drilling deal was shot down by the state Legislature as part of the highly politicized budget agreement process.

In doing so, lawmakers deprived California and Santa Barbara County of a significant source of revenue and other perks, in exchange for a single project that would not change, even a little, the ocean vistas from shore, and that would have had minimal effects on the local environment, in large part because most of the industrial infrastructure is already in place.

Here?s how good the slant-drilling plan really was 8 it was endorsed by a wide range of local groups and organizations, including the Environmental Defense Center, Get Oil Out, and the Citizens Planning Association.

Even mentioning the names of those groups with any effort to increase offshore oil development is almost unbelievable, and speaks to the efficacy of the proposal.

The bottom line is that these ardently anti-oil folks understood the benefits of the slant-drilling offer, both in terms of dollars and cents, and in common sense 8 as in, approving the proposal would not have done any harm to the local ecology, while bringing hundreds of millions in revenues to a county that desperately needs the money.

Instead, mostly because of the politics involved, Central Coast residents now face the prospect of large-scale oil and gas development in federal waters, if the plan endorsed and made possible last year by the Bush administration is carried out.

What is now a Santa Barbara Channel dotted with a handful of oil rigs, could become a massive fossil-fuel-extracting energy farm.

And where that slant-drilling notion would have been supported by existing off and onshore infrastructure, if the feds carry out a plan to sell those remaining lease plots, up to 130 million acres of California?s coastline could be vulnerable to construction needed to support the oil and gas extraction effort.

Think Chevron?s huge Point Arguello processing facility on the Gaviota Coast, vastly multiplied.

The Central Coast needed the revenue from that single development proposal 8 it doesn?t need what could turn out to be runaway growth of the oil business in California. We?ve been through that in the past. It was not pleasant, and the industry left lasting scars on the environment.

It should be clear to everyone by now 8 at least to those who have actually enjoyed the coast and its many wonders 8 that our beaches and rocky coastline are among this state?s most important assets, a treasured franchise to be protected, not exploited for profit.

The Board of Supervisors doesn?t need to waste a lot of its time today talking about whether to send that letter to the Interior Department.

Take a quick vote to send that letter of protest to the feds. We recommend sending it Express Mail.

September 1, 2009