P Protects County Funds

Do you believe Big Oil’s claims that Measure P will cause cuts to county funding? The reality is that we may already be losing money in our county from Big Oil.

The public has to pay for road maintenance from heavy truck traffic, environmental contamination, and other impacts. In the last 15 years, the County Fire Department has responded to over 400 waste leaks and spills from oil production.

Other counties have an oil extraction tax to compensate taxpayers for the high costs of this industry. We don’t. The only direct revenue the county gets from oil companies is property taxes. Those taxes account for only 0.6 percent of our total county budget.

Measure P doesn’t impact current conventional oil extraction, and property taxes would continue regardless; there is no way that Measure P would hurt revenues for emergency services or any other county services, despite what Chevron and other oil interests pouring millions into this election would have you believe.

What Measure P will stop is a boom in thousands of new oil wells using risky and polluting oil extraction techniques, which could increase taxpayer expenses associated with the response and clean up. If Measure P were defeated, Big Oil’s planned expansion of the use of risky production techniques would be unchecked. Expect an increase the number of spills, declining property values, and waste and pollution of our irreplaceable water supplies by toxic chemicals.

We cannot afford those risks in Santa Barbara County. We must stand up to Big Oil. We must pass Measure P in November.