The Richmond refinery provides significant local employment and tax revenue, but residents also deal with air quality concerns and the memory of past incidents. Is the economic tradeoff still acceptable in 2024?
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Add your commentMy aunt lived two blocks from the refinery fence line her whole life. Non-smoker, never drank, very healthy woman. Died of lung cancer at 61. Doctors said environmental exposure was a likely factor. You cannot put a dollar amount on that. You just cannot. I don't care how big the check Chevron writes to City Hall is.
Born and raised in the Iron Triangle. My dad worked at that refinery for 31 years, put three kids through school on that salary. You want to tell me his career wasn't worth it? Easy to moralize from your Oakland hills house. Come live on Cutting Boulevard for a decade and THEN give me your opinion on acceptable tradeoffs.
I actually looked this up because I kept seeing the jobs number thrown around — Chevron employs roughly 1,200 people directly at the Richmond refinery. In a city of 115,000. So we're talking about 1% of residents holding those jobs. The other 99% just get the air quality. I'm not saying those 1,200 families don't matter, I'm saying the math is worth acknowledging honestly.
To the person above saying the refinery is "cleaner than almost any comparable facility" — that is not what the BAAQMD data shows. Richmond still records some of the highest particulate matter days in the entire Bay Area and pediatric asthma rates in the North Richmond corridor are nearly double the state average. Please don't spread that around as fact.
Chevron pays something like $60 million a year in property taxes to Richmond. That funds schools, the police department, city services. People act like we can just swap that out for a farmers market and some tech startups overnight. The green economy transition is real but it is NOT here yet, and Richmond cannot afford to wait on a promise.
the 2012 fire literally sent 15,000 people to the hospital. fifteen thousand. and we're still out here debating whether the "tradeoff is acceptable"?? what kind of question is that lmao. if a neighbor's house fire sent 15k people to the ER we'd have torn it down already
honestly idk why this is framed as either/or. negotiate harder. make chevron fund a genuine community health trust, require real-time emissions monitoring accessible to the public, tie their operating permits to air quality benchmarks. other cities have done this. richmond keeps accepting the crumbs and calling it a feast
Unpopular opinion maybe but Chevron has actually cleaned up their act significantly since 2012. The refinery now runs cleaner than almost any comparable facility on the West Coast — I read that in the Bay Area Air Quality Management report. The health scare narrative is outdated at this point. Richmond deserves the jobs AND the tax base without the guilt trip.
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