As the City of Signal Hill says good bye to a long time city leader, Micheal Noll, new city councilmembers are sworn in. Additionally, Mayor Lori Woods was acknowledged and thanked for the completion of her first term as Mayor. Edward Wilson was appointed as the new Mayor and Tina Hansen will remain Vice Mayor for the second consecutive year.
Below is the Signal Tribune’s article explaining the changing dynamics of the Signal Hill City Council. The article has statements from David Slater, Executive VP and COO for SHP, about Mayor Woods’ term as Mayor. (See section in bold)
Signal Hill City Council appoints Wilson mayor, Hansen vice mayor
Copeland and Woods also sworn into office; Noll completes last term
By: Anita W. Harris
Staff Writer
City council reorganization
At its March 21 meeting, the Signal Hill City Council voted unanimously for Councilmember Edward Wilson to serve as mayor, replacing Lori Woods, whose one-year term as mayor has ended. There were no other nominations.
Tina Hansen will continue as vice mayor for another one-year term after a unanimous council vote and no other nominations.
Hansen expressed her wish to defer becoming mayor until next year, though she was up for that position having served as vice mayor for a year.
“Everyone knows that my passion is the [new Signal Hill public] library, and I want to be assured that I will be mayor when the library opens,” she explained. She further expressed appreciation that Wilson agreed to bypass a year of being vice mayor before accepting the nomination for mayor.
Woods will remain on the council as a member, having won a new four-year term in the March 7 municipal election, as did Wilson and former City Clerk Robert Copeland. Larry Forester is continuing in his term as a fifth council member.
The three newly elected members of the council were sworn in by Deputy City Clerk Kimberly Boles amid public applause. Copeland made a few remarks as the newest member, indicating his excitement about serving on the city council.
“I’m looking forward to helping to influence the direction of the city and to talk to the residents about what they’re looking for in the city and figure out how we can satisfy those wants,” Copeland said.
The overall mood during the formalities was light-hearted among the members and the public audience alike, with council chamber at nearly full capacity. During the mayor’s initial roll call, outgoing Councilmember Michael Noll embellished his response. “Still here for a little while,” he said, eliciting chuckles all around.
Noll acknowledgements
In one of her final acts as mayor, Woods presented a proclamation to Noll, who has served on the council for 25 years, including five terms as mayor.
“Michael’s vision and leadership helped transform Signal Hill from a rustic oil town to a vibrant community,” she said. Woods further listed his accomplishments for the city, citing his fiscal responsibility and commending his efforts to foster an inclusive community.
Noll’s subsequent remarks included affirming the commitment of the entire council.
“We don’t always agree. Sometimes we disagree,” he said. “But after the vote, we all get on board and make it happen.”
After taking his seat as mayor, Wilson further acknowledged Noll’s service instead of making a formal speech.
“It is really important that we recognize him for all he’s done for this city,” Wilson said. “It look a lot of time, a lot of dedication […] and you have to be committed to the betterment of your community to […] serve that long, and so I want to personally commend Mike for all he’s done.”
Woods presentations
Wilson presented Woods with a City proclamation, emphasizing her dedication.
“Because [Signal Hill has] been very successful, it really looks easy, but there is a lot of work that goes on, and you have to dedicate yourself to learning not only about the city but everything that’s going on around you,” he said, referring to LA County and the state as a whole.
Wilson then read from the proclamation.
“Lori Woods has served this office with distinction and has earned respect and admiration for her integrity and for her personal and professional dedication as mayor,” he read.
The proclamation especially focused on Woods’s prioritizing of emergency preparedness for the city, among her other accomplishments. Wilson led the audience in chanting “Go, Signal Hill” three times, referring to the mobile app that Woods spearheaded to connect the City with its residents and visitors.
Not insignificantly, Wilson read from the proclamation that under Woods’s mayorship, the City adopted a balanced budget with sound reserve measures.
Woods was also given formal presentations for her work and service by: representatives from Signal Hill Petroleum; the Signal Hill Chamber of Commerce; and the offices of U.S. Rep. Alan Lowenthal, State Sen. Ricardo Lara and Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn.
Representing Signal Hill Petroleum and the Signal Hill Police Foundation, David Slater thanked Woods for her accomplishments.
“Your leadership has been characterized by your compassion, dedication to learning, strategic thinking and […] tireless efforts to improve the quality of life for […] residents and businesses alike,” he said. “The time and energy you’ve given to this city is remarkable.”
He further chronicled a list of Woods’s specific successes. “Lori, you’re a class act,” he said.
For her part, Woods acknowledged the dedication of City staff members and asked them to stand. “We have a highly professional staff here at Signal Hill,” she said. “The staff makes us look really good.”
Election certification
Before its reorganization, the council had voted 5-0 to adopt a resolution prepared by City Manager Charlie Honeycutt certifying the results of the March 7 municipal election, including the failure of Measure F, the medical-marijuana tax measure.
Later, as part of new business, Forester and Wilson both thanked the residents and businesses of Signal Hill for their participation in the election, reaffirming the importance of voting, noting the relatively high voter turnout compared to recent years.
“One of the […] most important things in government is for people to vote,” Wilson said. “When people are participating, we (the council) can do things a lot better. As people fall out of the fold, then we don’t get as much feedback from all the different sectors of our community.”
Mayor’s reception
After the meeting was adjourned, council members, staff and meeting attendees reconvened for the annual mayor’s reception, this year held at the Alpert Jewish Community Center in Long Beach.
During the reception, Hansen announced that because election results are sometimes delayed until soon before they are finalized, as was the case this year, the function of the mayoral reception would be expanded beginning that night to not only welcome the new mayor, vice mayor and any newly elected council members, but also to mark the accomplishments of the outgoing mayor and retiring council members.
“So, tonight we gather to celebrate the accomplishments of outgoing Mayor Lori Woods,” she said.
Woods then made closing remarks about her accomplishments as mayor, especially regarding city-wide emergency preparedness. She also looked to the future, listing several projects that are in development, including the new library, the former Fresh & Easy site being developed into a Mother’s Market and resident gathering center, a dog park, new housing at Gundry Avenue and Hill Street opening in June or July, plus 24 new three-story homes near the Food 4 Less on Willow Street.
She concluded by encouraging the public to attend the annual City budgeting council meeting held in late May or early June.
“If you could only attend one council meeting a year, the budget workshop would be the one I’d choose,” she said. “It is the ‘State of the City’ update of the year. You should plan to attend.”
NPR talk radio interviewed David Slater, Executive Vice President and COO for Signal Hill Petroleum, discussing how the Oil Industry turned Los Angeles into the thriving city that it is today. See below for the written article associated with the interview, along with the audio clip.
Ever watch The Beverly Hillbillies and wonder why Jed Clampett moved to Beverly Hills and not Texas or some town that we more closely associate with oil?
Even Angelenos forget sometimes that the Clampetts came first, then the swimming pools and movie stars. Think J. Paul Getty or Edward Doheny, men who made their fortunes on oil and then made LA.
Los Angeles is a world center for transportation, fashion, manufacturing and — above all — entertainment. In the heart of this metropolis, oil is hidden in plain sight. If you go on a walk to clear your head at NPR’s Culver City studios, cross the street and you’re in one of the largest producing urban oil fields in America.
“When you think about Los Angeles, you tend to think of big skyscrapers and beaches. You don’t generally tend to think of oil wells,” says Lars Perner, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
“This is fairly valuable real estate, with some rather expensive homes close by,” he says of the Inglewood oil field. Perner points to the Baldwin Hills and View Park neighborhoods that are considered the “Black Beverly Hills” for former residents such as Tina Turner, Ray Charles and Nancy Wilson. “This oil is clearly very valuable to justify using that space for those oil pumps,” Perner says.
He says that as iconic as the Hollywood sign or the movie studios are, it’s the oil wells that made modern life in LA possible. The LA Basin is very isolated and vast. That makes getting goods into the area difficult, and it made transporting goods around the region very tough. That is until the invention of the automobile and the discovery of oil.
“Back in those days there weren’t really a lot of regulations as to how you could drill, so a lot of people got very entrepreneurial. And they were trying to get pumps onto their property before their neighbors could,” Perner says.
You can find oil wells hidden all over Los Angeles. Beverly Hills High School has multiple oil wells on its campus. (The school’s wells were the subject of a class action suit brought by Erin Brockovich). Edward Doheny, for whom the major thoroughfare in Beverly Hills is named, discovered oil under a private residence in 1892. His find set off an oil-drilling spree. The battle over the rights to that oil could fill several history books and many films. As J. Paul Getty once said, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.”
Part of what made Los Angeles oil so attractive, Perner says, was that the oil was close to the surface and easy to extract. Add to that the newly invented automobile, incredible weather and a port, and that’s a recipe for exponential expansion.
But Perner suggests that without oil there would be no modern LA. “Well, the petroleum industry of course made it possible to have Hollywood.” And he says it made it made it possible to build an infrastructure to transport agricultural produce from other areas to help support the growth of a relatively large city very quickly.
“Los Angeles was a sleepy pueblo that became LA, and Hollywood and the studios all popped up and people got wealthy because of oil,” says David Slater, chief operating officer of Signal Hill Petroleum. In 1921, oil was discovered on Signal Hill, a city near the Port of Long Beach. These two discoveries are what made Los Angeles one of the world’s major petroleum fields.
It’s difficult to overstate just how much oil was being produced in LA back in the 1920s.
“The production from here made Los Angeles the equivalent of Saudi Arabia today,” Slater says.
Today, the city of Signal Hill is one of the largest urban producers of oil in the U.S. But the steep drop in oil prices has had a big impact on smaller oil companies like Signal Hill Petroleum.
“The painful part, though, is when prices go down, contracting our business and eliminating jobs is never ever a fun thing to go through,” says Slater. His company has shrunk from 150 employees to 85.
As he looked out over the bay of Long Beach, where supertankers line the horizon, Slater said he wished he could drill more. He joked that cheap gas wasn’t completely bad, as he drove us down Signal Hill in his white Escalade.
The Long Beach Business Journal wrote an article about the benefits CSULB gains from private partnerships; continue to read below to see why SHP agrees the benefit is mutual.
Cal State Long Beach student researchers gain from private partnerships
David Slater, right, chief operating officer and executive vice president of Signal Hill Petroleum, join professor Rick Behl, left, of CSULB in Long Beach. A partnership with private industry has led to employment for student researchers at Cal State Long Beach. One of the biggest partners, Signal Hill Petroleum, has donated $250,000 for an environment geosciences lab in the Hall of Science to support the MARS project — Monterey and Related Sedimentary Rocks — as part of a consortium’s efforts to explore oil and gas supplies in the Monterey Shale formation. (Thomas R. Cordova / Press-Telegram)
By Josh Dulaney, Long Beach Press Telegram Posted: 11/06/15, 7:49 PM PST
A partnership with private industry has led to employment for student researchers at Cal State Long Beach. One of the biggest partners, Signal Hill Petroleum, has donated $250,000 for an environment geosciences lab in the Hall of Science to support the MARS project — Monterey and Related Sedimentary Rocks — as part of a consortium’s effort to explore oil and gas supplies in the Monterey Shale formation. “Quite frankly, Cal State Long Beach is an amazing institution,” said David Slater, chief operating officer and executive vice president of Signal Hill Petroleum. “Three-fourths of our geologists and geophysicists are from Cal State Long Beach. They’ve been a great resource for us. Highly trained, technical personnel.” The consortium supports several graduate and undergraduate student research projects, and helps provide equipment for students and faculty. In return, Signal Hill Petroleum benefits from the research. “They’re great people,” Slater said. “They do a fabulous job. It’s a great regional resource for California, with the quality of students they turn out.” Chief among projects is the MARS research, led by professor Rick Behl. Now more than four years old, the project is concerned with the Monterey Shale formation, a 1,750-square-mile area which cuts through much of the Central Valley and coast and runs south of San Francisco into the northern tip of Los Angeles County. The Monterey Shale is home to California’s primary petroleum source rock, which some say holds a large amount of oil reserves. CSULB researchers are focused on the geology of the area. According to the MARS project’s website, the Monterey Shale formation has served as a laboratory for “countless studies of silica, clay, carbonate, phosphate, organic matter, and petroleum.” Study of the formation can be “applied to shale gas and shale oil reservoirs in other basins,” according to the website. The project is a training ground for graduate students while also providing them opportunities to interact with leaders in the energy industry. “The MARS project is really the first industry-affiliated program at Cal State Long Beach, where we have a number of companies’ interest in what we’re doing,” Behl said. “And they’re interested in our students, and they support us with a yearly membership fee and that money goes to the program. Because of their generous support, I’ve been able to support a program that has eight to 11 graduate students working at one time.” Behl said before Signal Hill Petroleum and other companies provided funding, graduate students were engaging in a labor of love — conducting research while holding down part-time jobs. Juggling research while trying to pay the bills meant taking quite a long time to complete their research. “This allows my students to concentrate so they hit the ground running,” Behl said. “They come up with a research project early, and most of our students are finishing in just over two years. It’s particularly important at a school like ours. Although we have students that go on to Ph.D. programs, the greatest focus of our students is building their qualifications for career and working.”
The Long Beach Press Telegram and Signal Tribune covered the Grand Opening of the newest Starbucks in the Signal Hill Gateway Center.
City officials celebrate new Starbucks in Signal Hill
The new Signal Hill Starbucks is located at 899 E. Spring St. Photo courtesy of the Signal Tribune.
A new drive-through Starbucks has officially opened at 899 E. Spring St. in Signal Hill at the Signal Hill Gateway Center as the shopping center’s newest addition. Signal Hill city officials and staff from Signal Hill Petroleum, which owns the shopping center, celebrated the store’s opening with a ceremonial ribbon-cutting and reception on Wednesday, Nov. 12.
Courtesy of Neena Strichart/Signal Tribune Signal Hill Mayor Ed Wilson and Starbucks District Manager Fauzia Adams cut a ceremonial ribbon marking the grand opening of the company’s new location in the Gateway Center of Signal Hill. Also pictured are various city officials, Chamber of Commerce members, Starbucks employees and Signal Hill Petroleum representatives.
The new coffee shop features an outdoor dining and seating area. In addition, a new full-service Sprint retail store, a Chipotle restaurant and ATMs are expected to open at the center once construction is completed.
SHP was featured on the cover of the Long Beach Business Journal for the recent 2014 Oil and Gas E&P Company of the Year award. Read the following excerpt from the Long Beach Business Journal’s November 11-24, 2014 issue to see why they dubbed Signal Hill Petroleum “#1 On West Coast”.
#1 On West Coast – Signal Hill Petroleum Names Top Exploration/Production Company
Pictured near one of their drilling sites with Signal Hill Petroleum President and CEO Craig Barto, center, are David Slater, left, the firm’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, and Kevin Laney, vice president of rig operations for the company. (Photograph by the Business Journal’s Thomas McConville)
Long Beach Business Journal – November 11-24, 2014
By Michael Gougis, Contributing Writer
Beautiful, high-end condominiums with a view of blue-green Pacific Ocean waters and crude oil drilling and pumping rigs would seem to go together like – well, water and oil.
But not only has Signal Hill Petroleum managed to look for, ding and extract thousands of barrels of crude oil a day in such a challenging environment, it has performed the task so well that it was named the TEEMCO E&P Company of the Year for 2014 at the recent West Coast Oil And Gas awards ceremony.
“A lot of people in the industry thought this field was dead,” says David Slater, executive vice president and CEO of Signal Hill Petroleum. “But it’s a huge remaining resource. It took technology to economically unlock it.”
A combination of cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned public relations outreach has allowed the company to flourish in a potentially difficult environment, said the judges who awarded the firm the Exploration & Production Company of the Year award.
“Through use of sustainability programs, innovative exploration and extraction techniques, environmental/emission controls and community enhancement programs, the company appears to be able to work very successfully in an urban environment where other companies may struggle,” the judges said.
Founded in 1984, the company started with the acquisition of Shell’s assets on Signal Hill. Shell was repositioning in oil extraction operations elsewhere, and had put the Signal Hill assets up for sale. The field actually was owned by three large companies – Shell, ARCO and Texaco – and Signal Hill Petroleum spent the next two decades consolidating those properties into a single company.
“It was a very, very major accomplishment to aggregate ownership,” Slater says. “What that did was open the economic possibility of applying technology and doing a lot of things that had not been done before because of the fragmented ownership.
As a more mature asset, the field relies on salt water injection to make the field productive, Slater says. Salt water injection is done “to re-pressurize it (the underground reserves) and mobilize the remaining oil,” he says.
But drilling injection wells and extraction wells accurately relies on a thorough, detailed understanding of the subsurface soil formations. The high-end technology used by the company involves the three-dimensional mapping of the sub-strata in a way that Signal Hill Petroleum helped develop, a method of subsurface imaging that met the needs of an oil producing company trying to work in an urban environment.
Traditional three-dimensional imaging “is not very urban-friendly.” Slater says. “Lots of equipment, lots of cable.” Basically, the process relies on thousands of sensors that detect minute vibrations – but those sensors had to be connected together via cables. Signal Hill Petroleum began working with a company that was developing a system that collected the data wirelessly. When the wireless data gathering was perfected, Signal Hill Petroleum became the first oil company in the world to put such a system into field operation.
What the data shows the company “is how the earth is cracked and bent. It’s similar to what people who study earthquakes are interested in,” Slater says. The data has, in fact, been shared with institutions and universities across the nation. And it has given the company a clearer view of the cracks, bends and folds of the earth’s crust – data that the company uses to drill for crude. It has worked so well that the company actually is drilling new wells in the field – the first new wells in decades.
Currently, the company operates about 450 wells and produces about 3,500 barrels per day. And it does so largely in harmony with its neighbors. Debra Montalvo Russell, director of community relations, says Signal Hill Petroleum is a visible, accessible member of the community, and that helps maintain positive relations with the people who live and work near the company’s operations.
“We are out there so much, and we are giving information, and we are so accessible,” she says. “The difference about our company is that we put a face to the name,” she says. “Most of our employees are local residents. They are faces that people will recognize in the store, in the community. So people know and trust us. We’re here as members of the community.”
“We work really hard to be transparent, to be face-t-face, to provide real information, to open the gates,” Slater says. “Come on in and take a look – we’ll show you what we do and how we do it.”
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