Petaluma residents fighting a proposed Safeway gas station on the west side of town have had a rollercoaster of a ride since they banded together in the summer of 2018.
The group, all of whom live in the residential neighborhood near the corner of S. McDowell Boulevard and Maria Drive, says the gas station is too close to multiple schools and playing fields and will put children at risk. Gas stations emit a cocktail of toxic fumes, including known carcinogens such as benzene, as well as noise pollution. They also are known to leak toxic chemicals into the ground.
"We would think common sense dictates that putting a large 16 pump gas station filled with cancer causing Benzene next to a school would be contrary to the public and community’s interests,” Sierra Club Sonoma Group wrote in a Sept. 4 letter to the Petaluma City Council, urging the body to reject Safeway’s proposal.
The supermarket chain first proposed the gas station in 2013, and the opposing group, called No Gas Here, got involved during the final stages demanding the city require Safeway to conduct an Environmental Impact Report, as stated by California law.
The Petaluma Planning Commission approved the project July 9, 2018 in a 4-3 vote, and that’s when the opposition group “No Gas Here” got involved. The group filed an appeal on that decision, which forced the city council to weigh in.
By September, the group had held public protests on the proposed site and had a large group donning red “No Gas Here” t-shirts attend and speak out at the Sept. 17, 2018 city council meeting.
Both No Gas Here and Safeway have “dumped” a massive amount of paperwork and information on city officials, causing delays and postponements of meetings and decisions until Dec. 3 when the city council directed Safeway to conduct the EIR.
No Gas Here and Sonoma Group celebrated the EIR request as a victory, but just a few weeks later, Safeway came back to the city demanding another hearing to “cure and correct” potential violations of the Brown Act, a 1953 statute that seeks transparency from elected officials, because the council’s endorsement of the EIR was not published on the Dec. 3 meeting agenda.
The city agreed, saving itself from any legal entanglements, and will come back to the table on Jan. 28.
No Gas Here, meanwhile, is not backing down. The group continues to raise awareness and organize around the issue. Co-founder JoAnn McEachin told the Petaluma Argus-Courier they are up for the ongoing fight.
“If Safeway thinks they can drag this on forever and use their money and power, they better think again,” she said. “We’re in this to win this. This is peoples’ lives at risk, not some bottom line for their corporate directors. We’re not backing down.”
Richard Sachen, a member of Sonoma Group’s executive committee and Petaluma resident, serves as liaison to No Gas Here and sees the gas station as misguided, old technology that will be obsolete in a short time:
"With electric vehicle sales growing by double digits year after year since 2012, the need for additional gasoline infrastructure has passed. Just as it wouldn’t make sense to build a gas lamp factory after the invention of the light bulb, today’s long range, reasonably priced, electric vehicles that get three to four times the mileage of gasoline cars will replace the dirty, noxious, inefficient gasoline burning cars that created the smog we all hate."
