South Los Angeles residents urged city officials at a July 23 hearing to revoke the permit allowing the Murphy Oil Drill site to operate, arguing that years of alleged permit violations and health concerns have made the facility incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood.
The request came during a nuisance-abatement hearing that lasted more than four hours and could determine whether the site remains open.
Four months after Dímelo reported on the Murphy site and the city’s effort to tighten its operating conditions, officials are now weighing in on a more significant question: whether the facility should be allowed to operate at all. The pending decision could influence how Los Angeles responds to other communities seeking stronger protections from urban oil drilling.
The Murphy site, owned by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and operated by E&B Natural Resources, sits in a residentially zoned neighborhood near homes, schools, senior housing, a medical center, a preschool and a convent. In 2023, the Los Angeles Department of City Planning imposed additional operating conditions on the sites, including requirements intended to address emissions, noise and equipment use. E&B appealed, and some of the requirements were later modified.
Community organizers now argue that adding more conditions is not enough.
The July 23 nuisance-abatement hearing allowed the city’s zoning administrator to consider whether operations at the site have created a public nuisance or repeatedly violated the conditions of its permit. Revocation could lead to the site’s closure, but because the decision could be appealed, it would not necessarily result in an immediate shutdown.
The hearing ended without a decision on whether to revoke E&B’s permit, leaving residents and organizers who want the site closed still waiting.
After a hearing that lasted more than four hours, Jonathan Hershey, Associate Zoning Administrator with the Department of City Planning, kept the case’s public record open through Oct. 9. E&B Natural Resources has until Aug. 23 to answer questions raised by the Department of City Planning. The public then has until Sept. 25 to respond, and E&B may submit a final reply by Oct 9.
Hershey will issue a written determination after the record closes, though he did not announce exactly when the decision will be released. Once issued, the decision may be appealed within 15 days. The process means residents must wait at least until late October to early November to learn whether the city will revoke the site’s conditional-use permit.
“The question on the table is now, whether or not this land is even compatible with such a dense neighborhood,” Nancy Lam, director of organizing and policy at Redeemer Community Partnership said. “That’s the question we should have been asking in the ‘60s.”
Five days before the July 23 hearing, residents, organizers and environmental advocates gathered at a community town hall to outline why they believe the Murphy site should be shut down.
Redeemer President Richard Parks presented examples from regulatory records the organization says it has compiled. According to information published on the Redeemer’s website, regulatory agencies have issued at least 109 notices of violation and notices to comply throughout the site’s decades of operation under multiple operators. Redeemer’s public account identified equipment degassing near K-12 schools, workplace-safety violations and instances in which operators allegedly left the site unattended. During his presentation at the town hall, Parks discussed an idle well that remained unplugged and citations issued after community members photographed workers allegedly violating safety requirements.
Parks also stated that community members documented more than 50 instances in 2025 when activity allegedly occurred outside the site’s permitted operation hours of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
“They know the rules, but they choose not to follow them,” Parks said.
Lam believes those records support concerns residents have raised for years.
“We can present all these violations, all these statistics, all of this research; and we have for years,” Lam said. “We’ve been sounding the alarms.”
Health concerns were also a central part of the July 18 town hall. Jill Johnston, an associate professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at UC Irvine, presented findings from studies examining communities near urban oil operations.
E&B disputes the characterization of the site as a danger to the community. In a statement provided to the LAist, a company spokesperson emphasized E&B’s compliance with regulations and said the facility “plays an important role in supplying locally produced petroleum to the Los Angeles Basin.”
The company also cited a report it commissioned from environmental consulting firm Roux Associates. That report argues that the administrative record does not contain scientific evidence establishing that the Murphy site threatens the health or safety of nearby residents and workers. E&B has also said delays in enclosing the site resulted from the city’s permitting process and that it is awaiting necessary approvals.
“This burden is often placed on the community to prove they’re being harmed,” Johnston said. “People’s experiences are rarely sufficient for agencies to decide to do the right thing.”
Research led by Johnston found that residents living within 200 meters of oil operations on average had lower lung function than residents living farther away, with greater reductions among those living nearby and downwind.
“It weighs on people’s mental health to constantly keep thinking, ‘Is the air I’m breathing poisoning me, my family, my kids or my husband?” Lam remarked. “That is a mental toll that people have to live with every day.”
For community activists, the case also reflects a larger history of environmental inequality.
At the town hall, attorney Angela Johnaton Meszaros for environmental law organization Earthjustice compared the Murphy site with enclosed drilling sites in wealthier parts of West Los Angeles. Facilities such as the Packard and West Pico sites were surrounded by structures designed to reduce noise, odor and visibility.
Meanwhile, the Murphy site has continued operating as an open-air facility behind a wall and vegetation.
“The law allows drilling sites to be in our neighborhoods,” Johnson Meszaros said. “Those drill sites benefit the few at the expense of the rest of us.”
She argued that requiring South L.A. residents to spend years demanding protections already granted elsewhere represents a form of environmental racism. “We shouldn’t have to fight harder than others have,” Johnson Meszaros said. “They shouldn’t have had a fight for their protections, and we shouldn’t have to fight harder for ours.”
The Murphy hearing is one of two policy paths that could determine the site’s future. The other begins with a state law and depends on Los Angeles adopting its own citywide phaseout.
California Assembly Bill 3233 took effect Jan. 1, 2025, giving cities and counties explicit authority to restrict or prohibit oil and gas operations within their jurisdictions.
The law does not close drilling sites itself; it allows local governments to enact policies that do. It also states that operators remain responsible for plugging wells and decommissioning production facilities when a local government restricts or prohibits their operations.
Los Angeles is using that authority to pursue a new version of its Oil and Gas Drilling Ordinance. Under the current proposal, existing drill sites would become nonconforming land uses. Operators would be prohibited from drilling new wells, redrilling or deepening existing wells and expanding or intensifying their facilities.
The proposal would require all oil operations to end within 20 years of the ordinance’s effective date. However, the draft preserved the city’s authority to shorten that period or end operations sooner at an individual site. Wells or operations left unused for one continuous year would also lose the right to resume.
The ordinance is not yet in effect. On June 23, the City of Los Angeles advanced the proposal 14-0 and directed the city attorney to prepare and present the final ordinance. No date has been announced for that vote, according to the ordinance’s official council file.
The Murphy site now sits at the intersection of site-specific enforcement and citywide policy. Revoking its permit could end drilling sooner. If that does not happen, the proposed ordinance could still set a deadline for the site’s closure. AB 3233 answered one legal question by affirming the city’s authority to restrict oil operations. What remains unanswered is how quickly L.A. will use that power.
Parks pointed to the former Jefferson Drill Site, located about a mile from Murphy, as a model for what organizers hope to accomplish.
After years of community advocacy and litigation, the operator chose to close rather than comply with newly imposed requirements, Parks said.
According to Redeemer’s account of the Jefferson project, residents prioritize a park, affordable housing and a community center. The organization partnered with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust and secured $10 million in state funding to purchase the property. The land trust later received approximately $6 million for park development, while the site entered an environmental assessment and remediation process.
“Bit by bit, an amazing transformation is taking place,” Parks said. “This is our strategy with the Murphy Drill Site.”
No redevelopment plans for Murphy have been approved, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles continues to own the property. For Lam, any conversation about the land’s future should begin with the people who live closest to it.
“When they bought their house or when they moved into their apartment, they had dreams of what their life would look like,” Lam said. “I don’t think it included living next to an oil drilling site.”
“We want to listen to folks as they’re telling their stories,” she added. “We want to listen to the dreams as well of the folks who live directly in that neighborhood.”
Whether Murphy reaches that stage depends on decisions that have not yet been made. Hershey must rule on the site’s permit, the city must decide whether to enact its broader phaseout, and any plan for the property would require a separate process.
Edited by Jose Guzman-Wug and Omar Mejia.