State Senator Sheila Kuehl Interview
The EnviroReporter.com interview
October 26, 2007
California State Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Los Angeles) has long been in the spotlight, first as a child actress best known for her irrepressible Zelda Gilroy character in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The popular show’s four year run began in 1959 and starred Bob Denver, Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld. That same year a partial nuclear meltdown occurred about 35 miles northwest of where the 20th Century Fox show was produced in Los Angeles and now Kuehl represents constituents who live around the meltdown site, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
From child actress to first openly gay legislator elected to the California Assembly in 1994 to a twice-elected state senator to be termed out in 2008, Kuehl took on the largest private employer in the state, Boeing, and, along with Gov. Schwarzenegger, convinced the company that it was time to cut a deal that would clean up the 2,850-acre lab and leave it undeveloped as open space. EnviroReporter.com covered this historic event last month in Pay Dirt – Gov. Schwarzenegger signs Kuehl bill to clean up Rocketdyne to Superfund standards; Boeing agrees to pay for remediation and donate lab to State for parkland and interviewed Kuehl October 26, 2007.
The October 12, 2007 signing into law of Senate Bill 990 came only after years proposing legislation to deal with the former Rocketdyne facility’s massive chemical and radiological contamination only to have it fail repeatedly. For Rocketdyne activists, the promise of the land being cleaned up to the strictest EPA levels and left untouched by developers building homes, seems like a dream come true. Rocketdyne watchdog Dan Hirsch, however, is skeptical that the deal Kuehl cut will really force a Superfund-level cleanup of the property. The state senator, who has repeatedly been voted the smartest in the California Legislature, is determined to not let the possibility of cleaning up Rocketdyne slip away.
EnviroReporter: You’ve attempted to pass legislation about the field lab for a long time. Why?
Sen. Sheila Kuehl: I’ve been in the legislature for thirteen years and in the past twelve years, I’ve tried to get legislation through to set a cleanup standard for the former Rocketdyne site that would be protective of anybody who might live on that site eventually and the surrounding neighborhood because there was evidence, all the way back twelve years ago, and it has just gotten worse, that the activities of the former Rocketdyne site, now owned by Boeing, were incredibly polluting, polluting the groundwater with TCE, millions and millions of gallons of TCE. Polluted the dirt with radioactive matter because there was a nuclear meltdown. They had nine different nuclear reactors, experimental reactors, up there. So I’ve just been trying since the State can’t force them to clean up while they own it, trying to set a standard so that they at least (complete) a cleanup before they sold it.
What’s different this time?
Well, I think that there are three things that are different. One is when you bring a bill every year, you find that you’ve started to educate people how are still in the legislature because the bill sounds familiar and because we heard more and more every year about what Boeing was going to say or the scientists that they would bring to testify. For instance, that you get more radiation off of a banana peel than you get off of, you know, Rocketdyne. It began to sound more and more and more ridiculous. The second thing that happened was that we were much better prepared because there is a much larger movement behind getting a cleanup standard for the site. People who were neighbors around the site organized in greater numbers and they bring information as well. The third thing I have to say is Julia Brownley’s election to the Assembly because she represents the district where I live, the west end of LA County, and she was critical in getting this bill through the Assembly because one of the problems with a bicameral legislature is that you know the people in your house. For instance, I know the people in the Senate very well – I have access to them – but when your bill goes over to the other house, often you have trouble convincing, especially new people who have never heard of this before, that this is a problem and the proposed solution is the right one. Julia was key to getting the bill through on her side.
How do you feel about the efforts of the citizens and the media over the years in this battle in terms of leading to the signing 990?
There were only a few newspapers locally that were really interested in the issue. And, really, just a few reporters. I think we talked all the way back in ’99 about this. It didn’t really catch on as a problem. It seemed like a local thing, it seemed like a federal thing. It seemed like every time a claim was made, you know, Boeing would very ‘reasonably’ refute whatever the claim was. Over the years, I think, the organization of the citizens who were most affected by the site, along with a more sympathetic press ear, especially in the Valley; as they became convinced that what the people around the site were saying was irrefutable; that there was contamination and a great deal of it, that it did affect the neighborhoods around. We also got the water board interested because of the contamination of the groundwater that was offsite and we also got the Department of Toxic Substances Control interested because I had to bring a bill to switch the agency that was overseeing the cleanup from the Department of Health Services, who had been too lax, to the Department of Toxic Substances Control which has been better.
