Chevron is moving forward with plans to clean up a piece of prime real estate that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Avila Beach.
The ultimate goal is to make it suitable for development of a future resort.
It's called Avila Point, but most locals know it as the Avila Tank Farm property. That's because the remnants of large oil containers still dot the hillside. The tanks themselves were removed in the 1990s, but infrastructure including pipelines, oil tank rings and some old buildings still remain.
It sits above the town with chain link fences surrounding it to prevent trespassing. In it's current state, the land is not suitable for public use.
"Avila was one of the largest oil ports in the world in the early 1900s, so it got years of industrial uses on the property," said San Luis Obispo County Senior Planner Ryan Hostetter. "Chevron is working very closely—as well as the county with the [Central Coast] Regional Water Quality Control Board—on putting a plan together on how the property is going to be cleaned up for future use."
Hostetter says there are not any developers currently lining up with plans to build a large resort on the property because the process to rezone the land is in its very early stages.
The county is holding a public meeting soon to discuss the possibilities for the Tank Farm land prior to developing an Environmental Impact Report (EIR).
"This is the first public meeting for our EIR process, it's called a scoping meeting, and what this does is it allows us to go to the community and get initial comments before we actually dive into doing the analysis of the EIR," said Hostetter.
Once the land is cleaned up and a final EIR approved, then Chevron could sell it. Plans for any sort of future development would have to go through a whole additional set of steps.
MEETING DETAILS:
- Tuesday, October 27, 2015
- Starts at 7:00 p.m.
- Avila Beach Community Center, 191 San Miguel St., Avila Beach, CA