The San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors joined its peers in San Diego and Marin counties, among other coastal California regions, to fight the Trump administration’s offshore oil and gas drilling expansion efforts.
The board authorized a three-pronged strategy on Dec. 17.
It adopted a resolution rejecting new offshore oil drilling and seabed mining, approved a letter to the Trump administration expressing opposition to new leases, and voted to join the Local Government Outer Continental Shelf Coalition opposed to offshore oil.
“We support all efforts to decrease petroleum exploration and extraction activity on our coast,” Cal Poly Initiative for Climate Leadership and Resilience Director Erin Pearse told supervisors. “We request the resolution retain its careful wording to avoid impacting any potential future development of offshore wind, which is a vital component of clean energy mix in our state.”
The supervisors’ move comes almost a month after the U.S. Department of the Interior announced a replacement to the Biden-era oil and gas leasing program.
Called Unleashing American Offshore Energy, the order detailed an expansive oil and gas leasing program that includes up to six new lease sales off the Northern, Central, and Southern California coasts between 2027 and 2030. It’s the first federal proposal to open Central Coast waters to new offshore drilling in decades.
Fourth District Supervisor Jimmy Paulding announced in his periodic newsletter that he requested consideration of the resolution.
“The current federal administration has made clear its intent to roll back environmental protections, expand offshore drilling, and open our coast and ocean floor to industrial extraction,” Paulding’s newsletter said. “These policies put corporate profits ahead of public health, local economies, and the long-term protection of our coastline.”
The local chapters of the Sierra Club and Mothers for Peace also urged the SLO County supervisors to reaffirm opposition to newly proposed offshore oil and gas drilling efforts.
“This threat is not hypothetical but something Central Coast residents experienced firsthand as recently as the 2015 Refugio Oil Spill,” Sierra Club Chapter Chair Mila Vujovich-LaBarre wrote in a letter prior to the meeting. “Across the United States, around 3.3 million jobs and $250 billion in GDP are dependent on healthy oceans.”
While neighboring Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors hasn’t adopted a similar resolution yet, it directed staff in May—exactly a decade after the Refugio oil spill—to draft a plan to enact a countywide ban on new oil and gas developments and a gradual phaseout of existing facilities.
The Sierra Club along with Ecologistics, the League of Women Voters, the SLO Climate Coalition, and the SLO Surfrider Foundation chapter will host a SLO County teach-in about offshore drilling expansion on Jan. 12 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The registration link for the Zoom webinar will be posted at sierraclub.org/santa-lucia/calendar.
SLO County supervisors cast a 3-2 vote as a consent agenda item that was pulled for separate discussion. Second District Supervisor John Peschong and 5th District Supervisor Heather Moreno dissented.
“I represent San Luis Obispo County, and the resolution is a one-size-fits-all resolution,” Peschong told New Times. “We don’t need it because don’t have any offshore oil.” ∆
This article appears in Dec 18-25, 2025.