Price of Being a News Desert: Local Officials Struggle to Get Word Out About Refinery Release, Health Concerns

In other news, City Council to consider bumping up police pay to address staffing crisis; annexation workshop planned; school district sees good, bad news in budget ahead of board meeting

As a longtime journalist in Contra Costa County, I was struck by one thing above all else watching Thursday’s Martinez Refining Co. (MRC) Oversight Committee meeting on the refinery’s “spent catalyst” accident on Thanksgiving night that showered the community with toxic dust. Local and county officials have struggled to keep the public informed about developments and health concerns in the absence of any significant media coverage in the months since the event.

During a public comment period that consumed a large chunk of the hour-and-a-half meeting, frustrated residents asked why they were only now learning about the county’s health advisory against eating fruits and vegetables from gardens that may have been impacted by the release, which the county has deemed a major chemical accident. The independent oversight committee has been established by the county to investigate the root causes of the refinery accident and evaluate ongoing health and environmental risks from the dust containing heavy metals.

And for those who have been deeply concerned about the health and environmental consequences of the accident since November, frustration has grown about the amount of time it is taking to get answers to questions such as soil contamination and long-term health risks.

The reality is that many of the questions that were posed Thursday have been addressed repeatedly by officials in public forums and through social media and internet platforms in the months since the accident, yet many in the public remain in the dark.

For example, some speakers expressed concern Thursday about the impact of the dust on the city’s drinking water supply. But as Assistant City Manager Lauren Saguyan explained, the city tested the water supply within days of the release and announced publicly that it met state safety standards and was safe for consumption.

“We did communicate promptly, at least as far-reaching as the city can, to let people know that the water testing was done and the results were safe,” she said.

Indeed, the issue of water quality was discussed at a City Council meeting soon after the accident, and the city reported the results on the dedicated webpage it created to keep the community informed about refinery incidents (I also reported it in this Dec. 23 newsletter post.)

Similarly, a news release sent out by Contra Costa Health Services last week advising residents not to eat produce grown in gardens near the refinery “out of an abundance of caution” created renewed alarm, particularly after it generated regional media interest that had been largely lacking since the incident. But, again, this was nothing new to those of us who have been following developments since Thanksgiving. The question of soil contamination came up at a December City Council meeting attended by Contra Costa Health Officials, as well as at several other community meetings, and officials made clear that they could not vouch for the safety of produce until a proper investigation and testing took place. I reported in my Jan. 14 newsletter post:

“Concerns have also focused on the impact the metals in the dust may have had on soil in household gardens where residents grow and consume their own produce.”

Contra Costa Health had also issued the same warning about eating fruits and vegetables several weeks ago via social media before sending out last week’s news release, which was timed to the beginning of the spring gardening season.

As Deputy Contra Costa Health Officer Dr. Sefanit Mekuria said Thursday, “This wasn’t a change in our messaging, but just was to reiterate what we had seen discussed earlier out of an abundance of caution.”

For many residents, however, this was all news to them, and it serves to underscore what many of us have been saying about the demise of local news in recent years, not just in Martinez but across the country: Residents (due to no fault of their own) are increasingly left in the dark about events that directly impact their quality of life and well-being, and there’s only so much well-meaning government officials can do to get the word out amid this information vacuum (that vacuum is also the primary reason I started this newsletter as a public service to my community). Information about important events affecting the health and welfare of residents simply does not travel as far or as quickly as it once did when community news outlets could be counted on to light the informational spark.

If the spent catalyst release had occurred a decade or so ago, the situation would have been vastly different. The now-defunct Martinez Gazette and Contra Costa (now East Bay) Times would have immediately and thoroughly covered the event and its fallout, including issues such as water quality, soil contamination and short- and long-term health impacts. Even for those residents who didn’t read the coverage in those newspapers, the information from such coverage would have gotten out to many through word of mouth or when it was picked up by Bay Area television and radio stations. There would have been a clear domino effect, and a significant portion of the community would have been aware of the release, its possible impacts, and would have been able to make personal decisions accordingly.

Here is what happened instead. There was no local media presence at the City Council meeting in December when the incident was discussed at length with health officials and several members of the public expressed their own alarm about the dust and the refinery’s failure to immediately notify the community (the Gazette no longer exists, and the Times does not cover Martinez, or most other Contra Costa cities, in any meaningful way). To its credit, the city has tried to respond to this information vacuum by creating its own information platforms, including an emailed newsletter, to get the word out on important matters such as this, but its reach is limited. Many residents rely on local social media platforms such as the Martinez Rants & Raves Facebook group and NextDoor to try to stay abreast of events, but important news often gets lost on those platforms amid a deluge of personal gripes/rants and general toxicity that has caused more people to limit their exposure to social media, or abandon it altogether. Contra Costa Health Services also put out several updates and news releases in the wake of the accident and also created a dedicated webpage to track developments related to the spent catalyst release, but how many everyday residents with busy lives were aware?

Bay Area media finally jumped on this issue in the wake of last week’s county news release about the possible soil contamination, but the reality is that for mainstream media outlets these days, interest in local news pretty much begins and ends with the number of fatal shootings (or other tragedies) that occur in a city (or in Martinez’s case, how many salacious murder or sex-trafficking trials can be found at the county courthouse).

Unfortunately, this “news desert” dilemma underscored by the issues surrounding MRC has no easy answer. There is no real business model to support for-profit local, community-oriented journalism (at least one that pays its workers a living wage). Regional newspapers like the Times and Chronicle are never again going to cover important issues in cities like Martinez in a meaningful, consistent way, because their focus, above all else, is in generating the greatest number of page views and web traffic to keep their corporate overlords happy, and that usually means tripping over themselves to write the same stories about the same murders, wildfires, floods and football games, while leaving a giant black hole of news on topics that impact the daily lives of residents in communities such as ours . There have been some successful nonprofit ventures in local journalism in cities such as San Jose and Piedmont, but they are generally few and far between (I and others are looking for opportunities to help launch such a venture in Martinez and surrounding Contra Costa County cities). Even if government agencies such as the city and county are able to build out robust information platforms, the scope and impact will be limited, because they will never be in a position to scrutinize their own operations the way independent journalists are tasked with doing.

In the meantime, I will continue to do the best I can to keep you informed through this newsletter. And if there is a glimmer of good news to come from this episode, it’s that even amid the information vacuum we’ve largely seen over the past three months, residents and government officials who are engaged and active can make a difference. Under the leadership of new Mayor Brianne Zorn (who has made transparency and public communication top priorities), the city is grappling with the shortcomings of the county’s Community Warning System and has tasked the new police chief with working to enhance the city’s emergency communications around refinery and other incidents, which is badly needed since we can no longer rely on local media to inform us of critical events. The activism of residents from the first days after the release has clearly played a key role in the response of local officials, from the numerous town halls and community/council meetings that have been held on the topic to the creation of the independent oversight committee to investigate the root causes of the incident itself and ongoing risks to the community. We saw another example at Thursday’s meeting, when Nicole Heath, the county’s acting director of hazardous materials programs, announced that Supervisor Federal Glover had agreed to add a sixth community member to the oversight committee in response to complaints that there was not enough representation on the committee from residents who lived very close to the refinery and were directly impacted by the release (an issue I raised in a previous post).

Kent Hull, the new community member, is a 10-year resident of Martinez and an engineer by trade. He lives a few blocks from the refinery. “I want to make certain that this is a community everybody will want to stay in and move to that’s safe,” he said at Thursday’s meeting.

In another sign that community voices are registering over the incident, the Martinez Refining Company, which has generally said little publicly outside of a few community/government meetings in the months since the release, posted this on its Facebook page on Saturday:

When the oversight committee got down to business Thursday, members discussed and fine-tuned the process and scoring system they will use to select a consultant to handle the community risk assessment portion of the investigation. The committee plans to review the submitted proposals and select two finalists that will be invited for interviews. Proposals were due by March 10.

Heath also said that Contra Costa Health is continuing to work with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District on a “plume model” designed to map the fallout from the spent catalyst and determine which areas of the city and county were impacted. That is expected to be completed by the end of the month, setting the stage for soil testing to take place to try to determine if there was any long-term contamination.

Addressing frustrations about the pace of the investigation into the potential impact of the dust on residential gardens, Heath reiterated that “we’ve been working as quickly as we can” to investigate the accident, establish the oversight committee and recruit a consultant with the expertise to guide the process of determining not just soil impacts but a wide range of possible health and environmental effects from the release. As she has done in previous meetings since the event, Heath also pointed out that the county itself got a late start investigating the incident because it was not notified by the refinery of the release and only found out about it two days after it occurred through social media (a failure that has been forwarded to the District Attorney’s Office for potential legal action against the refinery). “We were not given an opportunity to even act in a way that would have allowed us to utilize the tools we have, including the Community Warning System, to get information out.”

All in all, community activists and engaged city and county officials have done a stellar job working to dig into the nitty gritty of what happened with this release and why, and keeping the community informed to the best of their ability, even as local media (what of it still exists) have up until this week largely been MIA.

A look at the week ahead

Now, a few topics of note for the coming week:

• The City Council will hold a special study session at 6 p.m. Wednesday (before the regular council meeting) to discuss the potential for annexing the unincorporated areas of Alhambra Valley, Mountain View, North Pacheco and Vine Hill within the city’s sphere of influence. Consultant RSG, Inc. will present a fiscal analysis it conducted detailing the financial ramifications for the city of annexing each of these areas. The meeting will be held both in person at the council chamber and on Zoom. More information is available here.

• At the regular council meeting, the council will consider amending the city’s contract with the Martinez Police Officers Association in an effort to recruit more officers amid a staffing crisis that the city says “is significantly impacting the ability to provide critical services to the community.” The city proposes making a one-time, market equity adjustment of 6.25% to the base salary for police officer and sergeant positions. According to the staff report: “This adjustment will bring Martinez above the median pay for officers in the county, and up to the fifth-highest paying agency (from the current position of 12th) among law enforcement agencies within Contra Costa County.” Other proposals include increasing the shift differential pay for night shifts from 3% to 5% of base salary; and removing the waiting period for officers to receive incentive pay for possessing a college degree or Intermediate and/or Advanced POST certificate. The city currently has seven vacant officer positions out of 27 authorized positions (one of its 20 current officers is on long-term medical leave, and two other positions are underfilled as trainees).

• The Martinez Unified School District Board of Trustees meets at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the district offices board room. Among the reports will be achievement data for the elementary, junior high and high schools, and a second interim report on district revenues and expenses through Jan. 31. The staff report shows both good news and bad news for the district budget. Revenues of 63,835,220 are outpacing expenditures of 59,506,516 for the current budget year, and MUSD is on pace to meet its financial obligations for this fiscal year and the subsequent two fiscal years. “At the same time, declining enrollment and salary costs are reducing available reserves for the district,” the staff report reads, noting that “dwindling student enrollment may require spending reductions.” As a result, the district is projecting that it will tip into deficit spending (expenses exceeding revenues) by the end of the 2025 fiscal year. This could impact future labor negotiations after 9% raises were awarded to district employees retroactive to July 1, 2022, especially as some government funding sources from the pandemic expire. From the staff report: “The expiration of one-time funding will need to be matched with reductions in expenditures. Discussions with labor partners related to salary increases should be weighed carefully against projected revenues and COLAs (cost of living adjustments).” The school board agenda is available here.