The refinery worker protections written after the 2012 Chevron fire choked Richmond for days are now the subject of a tug-of-war between two arms of California government — and a union bill on the Assembly floor is trying to lock them into law before regulators can quietly loosen them.

Senate Bill 966, sponsored by the Bay Area's United Steelworkers, would enshrine in statute the process-safety rights refinery workers won after Richmond and Torrance: the right to refuse deadly work, to sit in on safety reviews, to pick their own safety representatives and to report hazards anonymously. Those same rights are being softened right now by state regulators, who agreed to revisit them in a 2024 settlement with the oil industry — a deal negotiated behind closed doors that the Steelworkers, though a party to the underlying lawsuits, refused to sign. SB 966 is, in effect, the Legislature moving to overrule a settlement struck by the executive branch, and it is opposed not only by the oil lobby but by Gov. Gavin Newsom's own Department of Finance.

The rules at the center of the fight were born in the Bay Area. Public Health Watch, in its investigation of the current rollback, recounted the August 2012 fire at Chevron's Richmond refinery that drove roughly 15,000 people to seek medical care for the toxic smoke. Federal investigators found the disaster could have been avoided had Chevron replaced a pipe its own inspectors had flagged, the outlet reported. A near-miss three years later at ExxonMobil's Torrance refinery — which came close to releasing modified hydrofluoric acid — hardened the state's resolve. The regulations that followed, built around a doctrine called process safety management, rank among the strongest in the country and hand workers a formal say in when a unit is too dangerous to run.

Then the industry pushed back. As CalMatters reported, the Western States Petroleum Association sued in 2019 to block the rules as vague and invalid, and California quietly settled in 2024, agreeing to revisit the requirements in exchange for the industry dropping its litigation. Public Health Watch, which broke the terms of the deal, reported that lawyers for the Steelworkers — an intervenor in the suits — were asked to sign off in September 2024 and refused, saying they had been shut out of a process they had a right to join. "We can't let industry write the rules," Marie Choi of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network told that outlet. The California Environmental Protection Agency has since finalized amendments to its accidental-release program, and a companion revision at the state's workplace-safety board is still underway.

That regulatory retreat is what turned a rulemaking dispute into legislation. Union officials say the speed of CalEPA's concession is what convinced them the protections could not be left to regulators to redraw. A Bay Area Steelworkers representative told CalMatters, in the account KQED republished, that the fight is ultimately about lives and the fenceline communities the state has already had ample warning about — and that it should not take an act of the Legislature to affirm that a refinery worker can walk away from a job that could be fatal.

The measure, authored by Sen. Lena Gonzalez, D-Long Beach, would require refiners to build worker participation into every element of their safety plans and, by April 1, 2027, to adopt formal stop-work and hazard-reporting procedures, according to the Legislature's bill record↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). It cleared the Assembly's fiscal committee this week and was ordered to a third reading on Aug. 13 — the last step before a floor vote.

The opposition is a coalition that rarely lines up so plainly. WSPA — routinely the biggest-spending lobbying force in the Capitol — is joined by Chevron, Marathon Petroleum and PBF Energy, whose refineries account for nearly 90% of the state's refining capacity, according to lobbying reports CalMatters reviewed. A WSPA lobbyist, Zach Leary, warned a legislative hearing in June that the measure would inflict "regulatory and legislative whiplash" on an industry already hard to operate in. And Newsom's Department of Finance opposes it too, warning it carries unbudgeted costs, could invite fresh litigation and may conflict with the very rule-rewrite the 2024 settlement set in motion.

For Bay Area readers, the abstraction has an address. The refineries governed by these rules — Chevron in Richmond, Marathon in Martinez, Phillips 66 in Rodeo — sit inside dense residential neighborhoods, and the Steelworkers local pushing the bill represents the workers inside their fencelines. The question SB 966 forces is procedural but consequential: when regulators and an industry quietly agree to loosen safety rules, can the Legislature reach in and freeze them in place first.