Poodle to County: Just Show Up!

AWOL at the Coastal Commission: Briggs, Plowman, and Van Mullem

The California Coastal Commission holds court at the Hilton on April 10, 2025. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

SHOW UP: Sometimes, you just got to show up. In the flesh. Even if — especially if — you don’t want to. Who postulated, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up”?

Sadly, it was Woody Allen. Some say Allen “stole” that line from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard Business School leadership guru. She boiled successful leadership down to six rules. Number One: “Just show up.” Mark Twain — as always — took a dimmer view, concluding that the keys to success on Planet America were “ignorance and confidence.”

I mention this because Twain, Moss Kanter,and Allen would all be rolling over in their, graves — even though Kanter and Allen are still very much alive — because of who did not show up at last Wednesday’s California Coastal Commission showdown over Sable Oil’s shenanigans, specifically for doing major pipeline repair work without the necessary permits. Those hijinks — seen by the commission as a combination of open defiance coupled with bald-faced disrespect — got Sable hit upside the head with an $18 million fine.

That’s the largest fine ever levied in the commission’s 53-year history.

Sable showed up last week — with smart, expensive attorneys in tow — and packed half the house with a few hundred oil workers.

Who did not show up was the County of Santa Barbara. Who did not show up was Errin Briggs, the county’s chief energy planner. Who did not show up was Lisa Plowman, head of the county’s Planning & Development Department. And who did not show up was Rachel Van Mullem, County Counsel.

They shoulda been there.

Plowman and Briggs — whom I know and like — are no strangers to controversy. They are not known for wilting in the face of the hostile questioning they’d surely get from the 12 Coastal Commissioners, who did show up plenty pissed off that the county repeatedly refused to turn over key planning documents relating to the Sable controversy. The Coastal Commission complained they were shined on seven times. The county denies this, claiming they sent everything they relied upon.

But of course, it was way more than that. The county’s fundamental posture in the Sable dispute has veered violently in recent months from “We have absolutely no jurisdiction here,” to “Everything Sable is doing is permitted.”

To the extent Sable has any aces to play in the litigation already under way, it’s because the County of Santa Barbara gave it to them.

If the Coastal Commissioners were bewildered and pissed off by this sudden change, so too am I. So too is Margaux Lovely, who did a massive amount of reporting on the Sable controversy for the Independent.

It was Lovely who took most of the phone calls fromirate county officials and supervisors outraged about her headline last September that said the county “folded” in the face of Sable’s lawsuit against the county — reportedly — for $10 billion. “We did not ‘fold,’ ” they said, incensed at that word. “We had no jurisdiction.”

That lawsuit was about the automatic shutoff valves Sable needed to install on its pipeline and the fact that, at that time, there were not enough votes to approve this either at the planning commission or the Board of Supervisors.

The county’s legal case was definitely problematic. A federal judge who had ruled for the county in a similar dispute with Exxon strongly advised that the county “settle.” And they did.

Or so I am told by people who won’t be quoted. In response to the Sable settlement, the County of Santa Barbara went into an unprecedented information shutdown mode. Any and all info could come only via the county’s public info officer. People who actually knew something within the vast county bureaucracy were under strict gag orders. Even county supervisors — the apex of the county food chain — refused to say anything on the record.

When I pressed for some explanation about the settlement, I was informed that the county had no jurisdiction on any underground work done to the pipeline. That pipeline, in case you forgot, was the one that infamously spilled 142,000 gallons of crude oil in 2015 because of runaway corrosion.

By this February, the Coastal Commission had slapped Sable with multiple notices of violation for doing work in environmentally sensitive habitat — in places where red-legged frogs (endangered species) like to mate, where steelhead trout (also endangered) like to make their upstream spawning runs, and where tidewater goby males (yep, endangered too) spackle underwater mud huts with their body mucus to attract mates — all without permits. By then, the commission had issued at least two cease-and-desist orders.

“The county’s fundamental posture in the Sable dispute has veered violently in recent months from “We have absolutely no jurisdiction here,” to “Everything Sable is doing is permitted.”

But Sable’s work crews — 500 strong — never stopped working. Why? Because Sable didn’t need a Coastal Commission permit, the company argued. The County of Santa Barbara, namely Errin Briggs, told them so. The pipeline rehab work — needed in at least 100 locations — that the Coastal Commission was up in arms over was permitted, said Briggs, by the original permits issued to Exxon in the 1980s.

For those of us endowed with mere mortal intelligence, this now seems like a great big flip-flop. From “no jurisdiction” to taking sides to tipping the scales to moving the needle. And all in Sable’s direction. I got whiplash and will be submitting my PT bills to the county.

Maybe there’s a good explanation. Maybe there’s a bad one. Either way, you got to show up. The county’s explanation was it was never invited. Really? Is that the best you can do?

Everyone knew the Coastal Commission was loaded for bear. I did. The public who packed the room did. And certainly the county did.

If the Coastal Commissioners were exaggerating or lying, then the county officials should have showed up with the evidence to prove it. Maybe they could explain how, all of a sudden, the county now had jurisdiction over underground digging when before it had none.

Just show up. It’s the least you could have done.