On Monday, Aug. 10, U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Carmel Valley, was joined by local officials, advocates and business leaders at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to reaffirm their opposition to the Trump Administration’s proposals to expand offshore oil and gas leasing.
The 11th National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program is being developed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The agency completed its first analysis and proposal, with a public comment period that ended on Jan. 23, 2026. BOEM is now working on the second analysis and proposal.
The current draft proposal to expand offshore gas and oil leasing includes 34 potential lease sales nationwide, including two in the Central California Planning Area in 2027 and 2029. The process includes three rounds of analysis and proposals with opportunities for public comment at each stage. The second proposal, once released, will have a 90-day public comment period. A third and final analysis and proposal will follow before the program can be approved.
Panetta detailed the Trump Administration’s attempts during his first term to open up U.S. coastlines to potential oil and gas lease sales, including executive orders aimed at opening up marine sanctuaries on the West Coast and directing federal ocean policy to prioritize oil extraction.
According to BOEM's combined leasing report published Jan. 1, 2026, oil companies owned nearly 8.5 million acres of unused leases, which is more than 80 percent of the total leased acreage of federal public waters.
“With the help of the state of California, with the help of the counties in California, we put up legal, logistical and political barriers, installed those proposals, and protected our treasure,” Panetta said at the press conference. “But we must continue to work together because, as we are witnessing, Trump 2.0 is different, and they can be a lot more destructive when it comes to our way of life if we let it.”
Panetta noted that more than 200,000 comments were submitted in the first round of public comment, with the intention to mobilize more when the next draft is released. “When they're doing it, who knows?” Panetta says to the Weekly. “Just like anything with this administration, it could be today, it could be next year.”
“California's opposition to offshore drilling is grounded in hard-learned experience,” Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo said in a letter submitted to BOEM. He emphasized the impacts of the 1969 offshore oil spill that released three million gallons of crude oil near Santa Barbara, followed by the Refugio oil spill in 2015 and the Huntington Beach oil spill in 2021, which released more than 25,000 gallons of crude oil.
“We have a responsibility to act as careful stewards of this resource, not to place it in jeopardy for short-term industrial gain,” he wrote.
In 2017, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution opposing new oil and gas leasing in federal waters offshore California. In addition, many counties have joined together to build a “local wall” blocking the onshore infrastructure offshore drilling requires. Coastal communities began passing local ordinances back in the 1980s; today, 27 coastal jurisdictions still have such protections, according to Katie Thompson, executive director of Save Our Shores, who spoke at the press conference.
Assembly Bill 1448 was highlighted as a state-level effort to restrict new oil and gas infrastructure in state waters, while also strengthening safety and environmental oversight of existing operations. The bill, introduced by Santa Barbara Assemblymember Gregg Hart, is currently in the State Senate for review, and seeks to close loopholes in current regulations governing offshore oil and gas drilling.
“We’re going to do what we’ve always done and do so well,” Supervisor Kate Daniels said at the conference. “We organize, we file lawsuits and we uphold entities like the California Coastal Commission, and we uphold our laws and our environmental regulations and we fight until this administration is gone. Then we plan for the future and institute whatever additional protections are needed to preserve something so special and sacred and can be destroyed by one oil spill.”