New Look for Nick Welsh
This week, we’d like to invite you on a cruising ride alongside Nick Welsh, pictured above on his bike with Trixie the poodle hanging tight, an image drawn by his son Isaac Welsh. Read how Nick tackled this week’s cover story, and enjoy his exclusive new look.
What does it take to get through writing a huge story like this one about Sable Oil and bring it to the public in a timely manner?
Sable was a beast, because once the county settled its lawsuit with Sable earlier this summer, all the people at the county who had a rich and detailed professional knowledge of what an oil company should and could do to keep the community safe were effectively muzzled as a collateral consequence of the settlement. I get it that the county concluded it had no case, but I think the county supervisors should have stepped up to play the role of information portal for the community at large. As a result, the public — and the media — is forced to navigate a double-helix Rubik’s cube of weird acronyms and multiple state government agencies to find out what’s going on. Each of these agencies have very narrowly circumscribed areas of review and jurisdiction. None of them are really open to what we normally think of as the public process. As a result, the public process here has been oblique and opaque in the extreme.
