Taft article in L.A. Times

Tyler found this article on Taft in the L.A. Times. Pretty interesting.

Small town hopes oil drilling will revive economy
Bruce Holmes walked on land his grandfather acquired in Maricopa, Calif. There are few signs of prosperity in nearby Taft. (AL SEIB/LOS ANGELES TIMES)
EmailPrintSingle Page Text size – + By Steve Chawkins
Los Angeles Times / July 7, 2008
TAFT, Calif. - This town of 6,700 sits amid the richest oil fields in California, but nobody would mistake it for Dubai.
There are no gleaming towers. Empty storefronts line its downtown streets. One of its two car dealerships recently folded, and a church recently went into foreclosure. While the oil wells are lucrative for their owners and the county, the town sees little of the profits.
The decades have not been kind to Taft. Hemmed in by oil fields, the town has little room to grow. Residents do their shopping a half hour away in bustling Bakersfield. Oil workers surge into town from Bakersfield each morning and surge right out again at night.
To bring in more cash, town officials have crafted an audacious annexation proposal. They want to move Taft's eastern line 17 miles, adding vast tracts of land suitable for building as well as an auto raceway under construction along Interstate 5.
If the plan is approved, a greatly expanded Taft would receive tax dollars not only from the NASCAR track but also from future developments along the highway. Absorbing several poor, unincorporated communities, it would more than triple Taft's population, to about 20,000, which officials hope will make it a magnet for new businesses.
"We have to go out there to collect some revenue," said Bud Rice, a Taft official who works on economic development. "Without that, we're basically stuck."
Thousands of pumps dot the desert around Taft, and many more are coming. With rocketing oil prices, companies have reopened old wells that were once deemed too costly to operate. Chevron alone has tripled its investment in the area since 2004, budgeting more than $900 million this year to find and pump the oil left behind by previous booms.
"Folks are making big money around the oil patch," said Les Clark, a spokesman for the Independent Oil Producers Agency, an association of smaller oil businesses in Kern County.
In recent years, the oil business has been very good to people like Bruce Holmes. On a century-old oil field in nearby Maricopa, he is moved to grand oratory when contemplating the bad rap that oil gets, particularly in communities along the coast.
"Environmentalists live their lives in helium-filled balloons balanced on the backs of the taxpayers," he said. "The oilman, the bootlegger, the pornographer: People utilize the services we provide, then curse us for providing them."
Standing beside a well he sank on what was once his grandfather's homestead, he said he'd had his share of financial ups and downs. At 67, he's up: He scraped together $250,000 to drill five years ago, when oil went for $25 a barrel or less. Now it fetches roughly five times that, bringing Holmes $3,000 a day - enough, he said, "to put beer on the table and keep my Roxy in dog biscuits."
The heritage of oil runs deep in Kern County, especially in the towns that dot the sage-studded desert west of Bakersfield. The county yields more than 75 percent of all the oil produced in California. It pours out more oil than all but three states. America's biggest gusher erupted here in 1910 and for a year spewed as much as 100,000 barrels a day into an oozing black lake.
Although Kern County receives nearly 30 percent of its property taxes from the oil industry, Taft gets little of that directly.
"There's no decent, affordable places to live in Taft," said Charlie Beard, owner of an oil field service company and a developer who feels hamstrung by state and federal regulations.
Beard said he and several partners have proposed a 3,500-home development that is being stalled by restrictions aimed at saving rare species.
Taft officials say growth is crucial in a town surrounded by oil fields and federal land. They say the higher population resulting from the annexation plan will mean more business.
"For Starbucks, the magic number is 20,000," Rice said. "Right now, there's not a lot to spend money on in Taft."