Industrial Health and Safety Ordinance: Draft for Public Review

I agree wholeheartedly with Judith Sullivan's comments. I too applaud Vice-Mayor Terry Scott, Council member Kari Birdseye and Chief Josh Chadwick as well as city staff for their amazing work to get us this far. For years, we have begged for transparency from our industrial partners. We need to know in a timely fashion what is being pumped into our air and water. This draft ISO in conjunction with a strong Oversight Commission will finally give us this transparency and hopefully provide incentives for our industries to be better partners and community members.

Benicia is the only refinery city without an ISO. Why is that? Why isn't the health and safety of our citizens just as important as others? The draft ISO is landmark legislation and should be passed immediately by City Council. Thank you again for all your hard work. All of Benicia thanks you.

Vicki Dennis
Eastside Benicia

Is it possible to add here or somewhere in the ordinance an item dealing with fees imposed by the BAAQMD? City leaders have long asked the Air District to allocate some or all of the large penalty fees to the affected City, in our case Benicia. Perhaps the ISO would advocate for this, and call for input from the Oversight Commission and City Council on the distribution of those fees.

Thank you to Terry Scott, Kari Birdseye, Chief Chadwick and his staff for putting together such a comprehensive IHSO and for meeting with citizens, experts, and outside agencies. Very impressive! I appreciate all the work that you have put into this Ordinance.

Love it!

I dont like this. All of these things should be mandatory, otherwise the ordinance has no teeth. What if we get a fire cheif who thinks this is all unimportant?

Shouldn't the commission do this?

Is there a simple way to put in here what the fines could be ?

Do they need to file the copies with the commission simultaneously? If not that should be in there.

Who will determine if evacuation orders should be given?

Does this mean a website with easly accessible data? There has to be a website people can go to.

This is information provide by the Fair Tech Collective of Drexel University on what should be included for data to really be accessiable:
Recommendations
Based on our experiences, we recommend that the following provisions be included in all requirements, new and existing, for fenceline monitoring.
To ensure data quality
● Raw spectral data from open-path sensing and gas chromatography should be made publicly available. This allows for the auditing of monitoring results and the identification of monitors that are not operating properly.
● Time and date values should be expressed in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), using ISO-8601 standard formatting.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
● Metadata should accompany pollution measurements to allow data users to assess the contexts and quality of data collection. Relevant metadata include but are not limited to locations of monitors (latitude and longitude), detection limits, signal strength (for open path monitors), documentation of calibration and other quality control checks, and QA/QC plans.
● Data quality audits should be conducted routinely by trusted third parties. Funds for this work should be provided as part of the monitoring plan.
To ensure public access to data
● REST APIs (application programming interfaces) should be provided for all data endpoints.
● APIs should be documented using a widely recognized standard such as OpenAPI.
● APIs should be public and open. Any measures instituted to prevent inauthentic requests should be designed in such a way that users need not ask permission of monitor operators or other entities to be able to access the data.
● APIs should be versioned, with ample notification provided to users when new versions are available or old versions phased out.
● Databases and their APIs should be optimized to minimize API latency when executing requests for data. Under most circumstances, users should not have to wait more than a few seconds for requested data to be delivered.
● Intuitive, ADA-compliant user interfaces should be created to enable individuals with no programming background to select and download data in .csv format.
To ensure long-term resilience of monitoring systems
● Monitoring plans should specify measures for routine maintenance and periodic upgrades to monitoring systems.
● Monitoring plans should specify measures for maintenance and periodic upgrades to APIs and user interfaces.
● Monitoring data should be stored on a hosted cloud service (rather than local servers) to provide redundancy and protection against loss.
● Adequate resources should be allocated for maintenance and upgrades. These include not only funding but also appropriate expertise (e.g., experts in database and user interface design as well as experts in monitoring techniques).

Great idea. We also need to inform local medical personel about the impacts of current research on their patients. They may be the best ones to advise people at risk about not going out on smoky days, or wearing N95 masks.

It is very important that researchers can have access to this data.

What is the time frame for corrective action to prevent another incident and what are the penalites if nothing happens (haven't read the whole thing so maybe this will be clear later).

Shouldn't this say result in the prevention of a major incident

Cant this be simplified and put in actual time frames?

We need some definite times here otherwise this kind of thing can drag on and on.

Add pregnant women

Add BAAQMD to this list since they set local limits.

Maybe add educate. Mitigation can come from the timely identification of the source of the pollution so the polluter can determine the source of the pollution from it's facility and correct it as soon as possible. ( sorry this is repeated below)

Maybe add educate. Mitigation can come from the timely identification of the source of the pollution so the polluter can determine the source of the pollution from it's facility and correct it as soon as possible.

First of all, I'd like to applaud the incredible job done by City Council Members Kari Birdseye and Terry Scott who brought up the topic of revisiting the ISO, which led to a unanimous vote by the City Council to do so. Then Fire Chief Chadwick, as the City Staff Representative, joined them in the effort of creating this exceptional Draft Document in a relatively shorg amount of time. A huge task, with important input from the community, particularly the BISHO working group, as they addressed the purpose and goals for an ISO.

We know the results of NOT having an ISO and sincerely believe having one would improve our situation re: health, safety with upfront set regulations, fines and boundaries for industrial bisinesses in our city suitable to the whatever health and/ or safery infractions occur.

We need this ISO, not just for our community's better health and safety, but for surrounding areas who are at the affect of how our industries are monitored re: pollution via air, water and land in addition to any industrial accidents that may occur.

This document thankfully replied to most of the questions and concerns we, community members, addressed during a public participatory forum re: our perspectives of the purpose, fuction and viability of an ISO

I felt the major the issues concerning me and those shared by others, were mostly addressed in this document with few exceptions.

I do believe more fine tuning is needed concerning how the oversight committee is structured, as has been mentioned by others already. Also, firmer deadlines on fines due after they have been assessed I believe needs to be addressed. These are some boundary issues which I feel sure will get resolved as this document moves forward to it's next stage.

The concept of setting up the ISO to be unique for Benicia's needs while using concepts that have proved successful to other local counties feels like a wise approach. We can learn from what appears to be most effective along with recognizing where loopholes may still exist which we can opt to figure out how to close.

I agree with the statements made by Larnie Fox, Pat Toth-Smith and Cathy Bennett, so won't go into any more detail about those comments.

I sense we all realize there is more specific work to be done, as is true with any draft. Just want all of you to know how very much your determination to get this done plus the knowledgeable wisdom you offered in doing it, means to me and our community.

WELL DONE!

With deep respect to each of you,

Judith S. Sullivan
45 year Benicia resident

Kudos to Terry Scott, Kari Birdseye, Chief Chadwick and his staff for putting together such a comprehensive IHSO, and such an intuitive easy-to-use website to review it!

I'm not sure where to post this. I am VERY CONCERNED about the Montezuma LLC Carbon Capture Project currently proposed in the Suisun marsh wetlands. This project intends to drill, capture, transport and inject CO2 into these wetlands (the largest estuary on the Western Coast!). CO2 = Asphyxiant, and causes suffocation to animals and humans upon contact (for miles) if/when pipeline leaks occur. How can the BIHSO be written in such a manner that Benicians can leverage additional protection from the inherent dangers this project poses to the entire community? Valero plans to be an active participant in this project. Some pipeline is already in place within the Valero refinery. Additional pipeline will be needed for transportation. How can the BIHSO access pipeline safety regulation agencies/specialists if Valero proceeds with this project? There is documented history of massive destruction and lives lost due to pipeline leaks in Satartia, Mississippi in 2022.

reference: link