SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the city of Oakland's ban on coal shipments from a new marine terminal being built at the foot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, finding inadequate evidence that coal operations would increase pollution.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria found that the Oakland City Council's 2016 ban was invalid because it violated a development agreement between the city and the terminal's developers, which stated that Oakland could only regulate terminal operations if there was "substantial evidence" of a "substantial danger" to health or safety.
Citing its environmental consultant’s failure to study proposed pollution-mitigation measures, Chhabria remained unconvinced that the city relied on substantial evidence to pass a ban on coal or petroleum coke at the terminal, known as the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT), or demonstrated substantial danger from coal operations there.
"Given the record before it, the City Council was not even equipped to meaningfully guess how well these controls would mitigate emissions," Chhabria wrote in his 37-page ruling. "This created a sizable gap in the record, and a major flaw in the City Council's ultimate conclusion that OBOT's emissions would pose a substantial health or safety danger."
OBOT's developers – including Phil Tagami, a friend of Governor Jerry Brown – want to haul coal and petroleum coke by train from nearly 1,000 miles away in Utah and ship it to Asia through the $250 million facility. The terminal is being built on an old army base along the shore in West Oakland and would be capable of exporting up to 10 million tons of coal annually, making it the largest coal export terminal on the West Coast.
But the Oakland City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting coal operations at bulk-material facilities in the city – and a resolution applying the ban to OBOT – after multiple studies found that coal dust blowing off trains can cause asthma or cancer, and that emissions from the terminal would worsen West Oakland’s already-poor air quality.
The new regulations brought the project to a halt. Tagami sued in December 2016 to reverse the ban, claiming it violated a development agreement the city signed in 2013.
Tagami did not return an email Tuesday seeking comment.
At a bench trial this past January, Tagami’s lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan argued that Oakland pressured consulting firm Environmental Science Associates (ESA) to produce a report that would “support a coal ban.” They said the report – on which the City Council relied to pass the ban – was based on faulty math and used the wrong input for estimating the amount of emissions the terminal would produce.
This led to the conclusion that the terminal would produce 67 pounds of particulate matter 2.5 – a type of air pollution that penetrates deep into the body – each day, 17 times more than it actually would, Robert Feldman, one of Tagami's lawyers told Chhabria at the trial.
Chhabria sided with Feldman, writing Tuesday that ESA's estimates "were almost completely unreliable," and that "the record is riddled with inaccuracies, major evidentiary gaps, erroneous assumptions, and faulty analyses, to the point that no reliable conclusion about health or safety dangers could be drawn from it."