Tecklenburg Calls For Passage of Resolution Against Offshore Drilling
March 4, 2015
CHARLESTON, SC – At today’s meeting of the City of Charleston’s Sustainability Advisory Committee, Charleston mayoral candidate John Tecklenburg called on committee members to pass a proposed resolution in opposition to oil drilling off the South Carolina coast.
Tecklenburg, a Charleston businessman who has served on the boards of numerous local organizations including the Palmetto Project and the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, stressed the danger that offshore drilling would pose to our quality of life here in the Lowcountry.
“When I was with Southern Oil, we were Coast Guard approved and made shore to ship oil transfers,” Tecklenburg, who was president of Southern Oil Company from 1982 until he sold the company in 1995, said during the public comment period. “We were safe and never had a spill. But as I saw with my own two eyes at the time, it’s a risky business. Even a small mistake could lead to a large problem. And that was just with my small, local oil distribution company. Imagine the dangers our coast would face from the kind of large-scale industrial oil exploration and drilling that are now being proposed.”
Later, the committee voted to defer the resolution for two weeks, while certain details of the language are reworked.
“I come to this issue from a bit of a unique perspective,” Tecklenburg said in a statement released after the meeting. “I’ve been the founder and president of a local oil company. I’ve been the Director of Economic Development for the City of Charleston. And, perhaps most important of all, I’m a native and longtime resident of the South Carolina Lowcountry. And all these experiences tell me the same thing — that offshore oil drilling here in South Carolina would be wrong for our coastal waters, wrong for our local economy, and wrong for our shared quality of life.”
Tecklenburg closed by stating that the people of Charleston deserve to be heard in the decision-making process.
“For more than three hundred years now, the people of Charleston have lived, worked and played along these shores, and in the clean, abundant waters off our coast. They’re an essential part of who we are, and why we’ve chosen to live in this place. And I don’t believe it makes sense to put all that at risk just because a few political leaders in Washington and Columbia seem to have forgotten the age-old lesson that oil and water don’t mix,” Tecklenburg said.
