Eureka council backs offshore drilling opposition, finds local ban harder to craft

Eureka’s City Council moved Tuesday to take a public stand against the Trump administration’s push for new offshore drilling, but city staff also warned that writing a local ban on oil support facilities would be much harder than it first appeared.

The council directed staff to draft a resolution opposing the federal leasing plan, which would reopen the California coast to new offshore oil and gas leasing for the first time in decades. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said the Draft Proposed Program for the 11th National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program was published Nov. 20, 2025, and its California leasing materials say the first two proposed Pacific lease sales are tentatively scheduled for 2027.

What Eureka can do locally is constrained by state coastal law. City attorneys said a simple ordinance aimed at blocking the federal government or oil developers from using onshore support facilities would not work because Eureka’s coastal-dependent industrial land and its Local Coastal Program already set the rules for those sites. California law allows local governments to amend certified Local Coastal Programs and implementing ordinances, but those changes do not take effect until the California Coastal Commission certifies them, and the commission requires a formal review and hearing process before approval.

City Manager Miles Slattery said an ordinance would not override the existing Local Coastal Program. He said any real change would likely require a more careful zoning amendment that avoids collateral damage to other industrial uses. Slattery also said staff have been working for about a year on a broader update to Eureka’s Local Coastal Program, which was first certified in 1984. A comprehensive update to the city’s Land Use Plan was adopted in 1997 and certified in 1999, and the city’s update page says the current document is outdated, inflexible and difficult to navigate.

That larger planning effort could shape the real battleground over offshore drilling opposition: not the miles of open water beyond the horizon, but the places where drilling would need onshore support, storage and staging. Slattery cautioned that using tourism and aesthetics as the basis for opposition could create problems, since the same logic might spill into questions about wind energy or other legitimate industrial uses. Councilmember Renee Contreras-DeLoach echoed that concern.

The issue is already spreading beyond Eureka. In early 2026, commissioners at the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District considered an ordinance to prohibit storing, handling or staging offshore-produced oil on district-owned property, a sign that the debate is moving toward local land-use and harbor policy. Humboldt County’s Humboldt Bay Area Plan, which covers about 21,500 acres and more than 20 miles of Pacific coastline, has not been comprehensively updated in 44 years. That makes Eureka’s resolution more than a symbolic rebuke. It is the opening move in a broader fight over how far local governments can go when federal drilling policy collides with old coastal rules and limited industrial land.