City of extremes
For a place steeped in oil, Richmond has a remarkably progressivist bent. In 2006, it became the largest U.S. city to elect a mayor from the Green Party. In 2014, the city made nationwide headlines again when the uniformed police chief held a “Black Lives Matter” sign at a protest. Currently, Richmond is locked in a battle over a rent control measure, which voters approved in November but a landlords group is suing to block.
In “Refinery Town,” longtime labor activist and writer Steve Early explores this striking blend of oil and progressivism. To him, it is logical and laudable that Richmond politics have marched left. The refinery, opened in 1902 and owned for most of its life span by Standard Oil and one of its successor companies, Chevron, has in his telling been a polluting and objectionable neighbor — the worst recent offense being the 2012 fire at the refinery, which caused 15,000 people from the area to seek medical treatment for respiratory issues and nearly killed 19 workers. The refinery has fully earned, he argues, the backlash against “corporate power and its many toxic externalities” that has ensued.
Early had just moved to Richmond from New England when the 2012 disaster occurred. His wife was out gardening; a neighbor spotted her and told her to go indoors to shelter in place. “What’s that?” his wife, Suzanne, asked. Quickly comprehending the danger, the couple took refuge in Berkeley. The year after the fire, Chevron paid $2 million fines and restitution and pleaded no contest to six criminal charges.
The 2012 disaster seems to have piqued Early’s interest in his new hometown. “As a fortyyear veteran of labor and political organizing, I should have expected that a company with robber baron roots might have tangled with its own workers or downwind neighbors a few times before,” he writes.
Off he goes to dig, and he unearths a troubled history. The majority-minority, working-class city used to be run, he writes, “by public officials installed by ... Chevron, local developers or their building trades and public safety union allies.” Besides pollution from the refinery, municipal problems included drugs, poor schools, unemployment and gun violence. Around 2006, Richmond was deemed one of the most dangerous cities in California and the nation.
From these dismal circumstances the progressive movement took root. After the Green Party mayor came the new police chief. Improbably, he arrived from Fargo, N.D., a town very unlike Richmond. The homicide rate plunged on his watch: 11 people were killed in Richmond in 2014, compared with 47 homicides in 2007 and 2009. (The chief, Chris Magnus, has since departed; he joined the Tucson police department last year.)
The section on policing, and Magnus’ role, is the most compelling part of “Refinery Town,” which is otherwise rather tedious. Local politics simply is not well-suited to a blow-by-blow account. Is anyone truly interested in exactly how many door-knockers canvassers in a given election reach?
The tale is also one-sided. Chevron has much to answer for, not least its safety record and its efforts to influence politics through various means, including the press. But Early talks to few Chevron workers — an omission that’s all the more notable given that factory jobs were a defining topic in the last election. Nor does he spend much time on the need for oil (and hence a refinery), and the difficulty in weaning Californians — not to mention other states — off of it.
With a foreword by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, “Refinery Town” will be read proudly by activists. National progressives will value the blueprint laid out by Early — one that details setbacks as well as triumphs. But the book will struggle to get broader reach.
As for Chevron, one of the enduring mysteries — not answered by this book — is why it remains a California company. A refinery cannot move, but its headquarters, which are in San Ramon, have more flexibility. Chevron is scheduled to finish transferring hundreds of employees to Houston by 2018; why has it not consolidated front-office operations there, out of the way of some of California’s regulations?
Chevron has said it plans to stay put in San Ramon. In any case, we’ll always have Richmond.
Kate Galbraith is the assistant business editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: kgalbraith@sfchronicle.com.