Legal Legacies: No Coal in Oakland
How 10+ Years of Coal Terminal Litigation Revealed the Limits of City Government Legal Power — and the Durability of Community Resistance
The Original Sin of the Oakland Coal Terminal
In December 2013, Phil Tagami publicly dismissed rumors that his proposed redevelopment of the Oakland Army Base into a shipping terminal would process coal. Tagami’s California Capital & Investment Group (CCIG) was a familiar face in Oakland development: when the City endorsed CCIG to redevelop the Army Base into the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT) in 2009, Tagami had just completed the restoration of the Fox Theater in the same year. That day in 2013, Tagami reinforced CCIG’s reputation for local investment when he said what the community wanted to hear: no new coal would move through the port or the City. OBOT, Tagami promised, would move bulk commodities—not fossil fuels—and support local, reliable jobs on a working waterfront.
Today, OBOT is anything but what Tagami promised nearly thirteen years ago. This project spurred one of the longest, most expensive, and revelatory environmental justice litigations in California’s history. At the core of this conflict is a broken promise—no coal in the OBOT—and immensely powerful financiers and lawyers that defend that double-cross of the Oakland community. Although Tagami said publicly in 2013 that OBOT operations would never move coal, in April 2015, CCIG signed an exclusive deal with a Utah coal company subsidiary. This did not become public until three years later.
For as long as this web of coal corruption has been known, a volunteer-powered grassroots coalition called No Coal in Oakland (NCIO) has mobilized around legal challenges to OBOT in city council chambers, federal district court, California appellate courts, and even Kentucky bankruptcy court. The common thread of this campaign is to prevent millions of tons of coal from moving through West Oakland neighborhoods that already carry some of the highest pollution burdens in the state. This movement won a unanimous Oakland City Council vote against handling coal in the city, sustained a coalition without staff or salaries, and drove out the lead financier behind OBOT using interpersonal advocacy beyond the courtroom. Yet for each of these protections secured, courts overturned these wins, continually treating the dispute as a contract issue, rather than the public health emergency the situation is.
This is a story about what happens when law entrenches environmental injustice and rewards deception, stripping a city of its authority to protect its own residents. It illustrates how private law firms benefit from choosing the side of capital over honesty and public health. But this story is equally about what happens when people refuse to accept that a backroom deal is the final word for what will happen to their community.
The Place and the Project
The disproportionate industrial burden of OBOT’s planned coal operations echo the history of development in West Oakland. Known in the mid-1900’s as “the Harlem of the West,” West Oakland is a historically Black community that continues to bear the impacts from decades of infrastructure siting decisions made by people who did not live there. Industrial commerce zig-zags throughout West Oakland, creating geographical barriers for the community: the 880 freeway, the Port of Oakland that sits at its edge, and the West Oakland Yards rail yards threading in and around the port all impose heavy local land footprints and emissions.
The cumulative result is measurable: West Oakland is designated as one of California's most pollution-burdened communities by CalEnviroScreen, a tool that uses environmental, health, and socioeconomic information to help communities understand their disproportionate pollution burdens. Residents experience elevated rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and reduced life expectancy compared to neighboring communities. These asymmetric burdens are the result of policy choices made to develop West Oakland, and although many different industries contribute to the cumulative damage, the additional coal that OBOT would move into the community would unambiguously exacerbate the harms. Coal pollutes sites of storage and handling with fine particulate matter, heavy metals, and carcinogenic dust. OBOT’s planned shipments would not only call into question the broader issues of climate change and decarbonization, but whether children in West Oakland could breathe.
The terminal that Tagami proposed would handle up to 10 million tons of coal each year, traveling from Bowie Resources' Utah mines to Asian markets. This would entail moving colossal shipments by rail throughout Oakland neighborhoods and storing the inventory within the community. As many as one dozen hundred-car coal trains would have crossed through the city every week, with each open-top rail car losing up to one ton of dust between the mine and the port, releasing roughly 60,000 pounds of toxic fine particulate matter over the journey. The project would have made Oakland the largest coal export facility on the West Coast, increasing national coal exports by approximately 19 percent.
Understanding How the Law Enabled and Protected the Terminal
Before a single chunk of coal was loaded onto a railcar, the legal groundwork for the dispute was laid not by environmentalists or city regulators, but by the structure of the development agreement itself. Development agreements are contracts between local governments and private developers that freeze existing zoning and land-use regulations, providing developers with certainty that future government action will not disrupt their investment. Oakland's 2000 agreement with OBOT's predecessor established a vested right that any agreement to build the terminal would be contractually regulated under the rules in effect at the time of signing and thus the development would be insulated from subsequent regulatory changes. Trapping regulations in amber at the time of signing left the scope and safety of the project vulnerable to manipulation: while the City of Oakland’s environmental review covered prior development scenarios, it never assessed the impacts of a coal export operation because, as far as the public record showed, coal was never part of the plan. That gap, invisible at signing, became the legal chasm at the heart of years of litigation.
By April of 2014, it became public that Tagami had negotiated with Utah counties to export their coal through OBOT. The Sierra Club, through a Utah Public Records Act request, obtained documents related to those negotiations, but did not immediately act on their contents. The NCIO coalition read the terms carefully and found the thread that revealed the full truth: Terminal Logistics Solutions, the entity through which Tagami had structured the deal, was a wholly owned subsidiary of a coal company.
Ted Franklin, a retired attorney and member of NCIO, discussed the campaign with LSCA Fellow Sophia Burbank in early 2026. According to Franklin, in December 2013, Tagami publicly denied any interest in coal and dismissed the rumors. Four months later, in April 2014, he signed an exclusive negotiation agreement (ENA) with a wholly owned subsidiary of a coal company. The public did not learn about the ENA with Terminal Logistics Solutions involving coal as a commodity in April 2015. Still, Franklin said, they did not learn until early 2016 that the coal company owned TLS, and that fact was deduced from public records they obtained. This fact was not confirmed by Tagami or TLS at the time, as Tagami was still cutely claiming in public statements that no commodity had been ruled in or out, which is deceptive phrasing that concealed TLS’s identity as a front for the coal company.
While painstakingly reviewing these documents, NCIO organizers found one possible escape clause. Paragraph 3.4.2 allowed the City of Oakland to use its police power to change the contract if there was “substantial evidence of substantial danger.” Every council vote in the lead-up to the ordinance, every public health report submitted into the record, and every legal brief filed in defence of the ban cited Paragraph 3.4.2 as the source of the city’s authority to take action.
This deception is the origin of the series of lawsuits that followed, because coal had never been disclosed and the city's environmental review had never addressed it, meaning the evidentiary foundation for any subsequent regulatory action rested on a record that predated knowledge of the project's true nature. Tagami’s promise in 2013 was in line with the scope of the initial environmental review of the project. Backroom deals with the Utah coal industry, however, changed everything. After acquiring coal export rights from Bowie Resources, the nature of OBOT fundamentally changed.
The Coalition Behind the Work
The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, WOEIP, co-founded by Ms. Margaret Gordon, a longtime resident and environmental health leader, spent decades documenting the local impacts of cumulative industrial burdens, and bringing these findings into the scientific and political record. As the community realized Tagami’s deception, Ms. Margaret and the WOEIP emerged as a community anchor and catalyst to organize against this city-wide threat.
By summer 2015, NCIO had formed as a volunteer collective. Meetings were held in backyards, garages, and eventually WOEIP’s office, which provided space, knowledge, and credibility. Its modus operandi: open meetings, shared minutes, and a single mission—no coal.
The campaign's goal was to persuade the Oakland City Council to invoke the police power authority identified in Paragraph 3.4.2 of the Development Agreement. To do so, organizers built a power map charting who influenced each council member, what issues they cared about, and what it would take to move them. Advocates met individually with each member, bringing constituents from diverse districts, and selecting messengers based on what they knew each member cared about most. The council's initial posture was one of resignation: in their view, the contract was signed and there was nothing to be done. This outlook changed, however, when the city scheduled a public hearing on the coal ordinance right before a major demonstration at Oakland City Hall. The movement shifted the council, and in June 2016, the City voted unanimously to ban coal handling at OBOT.
The labor narrative was equally hard-won. The developer's framing, "coal means jobs," found traction in a high-unemployment neighborhood. Into that dynamic stepped Derek Muhammad of ILWU Local 10, who testified before the council that the Longshore union would not want coal jobs. Ted Franklin recounted to LSCA that Muhammad, who has been appointed to the Oakland Port Commission, offered a memorable rebuttal. “There are jobs, and there are jobs. Some aren't worth having.” Moreover, the Alameda Labor Council (ALC) voted in support of the ban. According to the Campaign Report published in August 2016 by NCIO member Mararet Rossoff, this was the first time the ALC had ever engaged in a debate directly concerning climate change impacts. Nineteen unions signed the No Coal letter, and shortly thereafter, the ALC formed a Climate and Environmental Justice Caucus.
In the same report from Rossoff, the campaign also acknowledged, with unusual candor, “A key weakness of the campaign was racial diversity. Although people of color were involved, some very critically, the overall composition of NCIO reflected the current state of the environmental justice movement in the Bay Area. This was particularly challenging because the visible pro-coal forces were almost all African-American.”While people of color were critically involved in the unions, the faith community, and the coordinating committee, the overall composition of NCIO reflected a disproportionately white Bay Area environmental movement. Meanwhile, the most publicly engaged members in favor of OBOT came from communities of color. This self-accounting deserves to be read alongside the campaign's genuine achievements, not as a disqualification of them, but as an honest reckoning with what coalition-building in environmental justice contexts actually requires for representative action. It highlights how overwhelmingly white environmental movements are both unjust and a liability—particularly when engaging with the much more racially diverse communities in which fossil fuel infrastructure is typically located—that can only be remedied by centering coalition members of color in decision-making processes.
When the Courts Took Over
Following the intense public campaign led by NCIO, the Oakland City Council unanimously passed Ordinance No. 13385 to ban coal handling in its port. OBOT, however, filed a federal lawsuit against the City, alleging that this ban breached the contract terms of the project’s Development Agreement. Represented by the international firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, this claim reached the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2018. There, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in favor of OBOT, concluding that the City lacked the "substantial evidence of a substantially dangerous threat" required to override the contract via the City’s police power. This ruling, affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 2020, established a precedent where contract law superseded the City’s own prerogative and findings to exercise police power for protecting its residents’ health.
Parallel to the challenge against Ordinance No. 13385, the City sought to terminate OBOT’s ground lease for failing to meet construction milestones. Represented by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the developers challenged the termination in court, arguing that the City’s own political and legal resistance to the project constituted a force majeure: a “superior force” that explained the delays and excused OBOT from failing to meet its own contract terms. In 2023, Judge Noël Wise ruled against the City, awarding OBOT specific performance to reinstate the lease with a 2.5-year extension. The City was ultimately ordered to pay over $6.8 million in attorney fees and costs to the developers, a decision upheld by the California Court of Appeals in June 2025.
Legal action surrounding the project also expanded into a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where coal company Insight Terminal Solutions (ITS) filed a tortious interference claim against the City seeking hundreds of millions in damages for never-earned profits. While a federal judge later vacated the bankruptcy court's ruling on jurisdictional grounds, the proceedings highlighted how sophisticated corporations can exploit legal architecture to move disputes far from the affected communities. Even in the case of a win, the time, money, and energy required to raise legal challenges create a burden that is neither accidental nor trivial. The law need not deliver a verdict to impose costs; the process alone can be punitive.
Among these legal roadblocks, however, NCIO employed non-legal strategies to affect the project. In successfully pressuring the Bank of Montreal to withdraw as a financier in light of the equitable interests at stake from the project, the coalition demonstrated that community organizing remains a critical tool for environmental justice that delivers results from outside the courthouse.
The justice system’s role in this conflict highlights a profound tension between contract law and public health advocacy. Courts consistently prioritized the stability of development agreements over the City’s efforts to protect its citizens, and perhaps most shockingly, its inherent governmental police power. Furthermore, the legal battle imposed a severe financial burden on the public, with the City ordered to pay nearly $7 million in attorney fees to the developers, depriving the community of resources. Ultimately, the OBOT saga reveals that the legal system can function as a trap, and environmental justice is often secured through the durable infrastructure of community organizing. While litigation can stall projects and provide social and political utility as part of a public-facing campaign, the law is one part of a many-pronged strategy to prevent environmental harm and win a livable future.To fully understand the extent to which courts impeded community benefits and legal action against the grand deception behind OBOT’s coal operations, each case is explored in depth in the three sections that follow.
1. Quinn Emanuel and the “Substantial Evidence” Test
Within months of the June 2016 vote, Phil Tagami's California Capital and Investment Group, OBOT’s developer, filed a federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California, represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. The complaint alleged that Oakland's coal ban violated the Development Agreement, was preempted by federal law, and improperly restricted interstate commerce. Quinn Emanuel is one of the most aggressive commercial litigation firms in the country. The city's outside counsel was experienced in municipal matters, but deeply outflanked in corporate law.
The Sierra Club and SF Baykeeper moved to join the lawsuit as defendant-intervenors, represented by Earthjustice. Their argument went further than the city's, contending that the development agreement was legally unenforceable to the extent it restricted the city's police power, the constitutional authority of municipalities to regulate for public health and safety. A contract that bargains away that authority, the argument ran, is not a contract courts should enforce.
Judge Vince Chhabria denied the intervenors' motion to raise that argument. In the bench trial that followed in January 2018, he treated the case as a straightforward contract dispute, limited the city to the evidence it had assembled at the time of the ordinance, and allowed OBOT to introduce a broader range of material. In May 2018, he ruled for the developer: Oakland's coal ban violated the Development Agreement because the city lacked sufficient evidence of a substantially dangerous threat (Chhabria May 2018 opinion, Case No. 3:16-cv-07014-VC).
Franklin characterized Chhabria’s ruling as the foundational legal error underlying everything that followed.The ruling had two interlocking problems. First, Chhabria confined the City to evidence gathered only during the nine months between the first public hearing on coal, on September 21, 2015, and the council’s first vote to ban it in June 2016—while allowing OBOT to introduce expert testimony that had never been presented to the City Council at all. Anyone trained in administrative law will recognize the departure: in proceedings governed by frameworks like CEQA, both sides are bound by the record before the decision-making body at the time it acted. Chhabria abandoned that principle, producing what Franklin described as trial by ambush. Second, and more fundamentally, by declining to reach the question of whether the development agreement was void as an unlawful surrender of the city’s police power, Chhabria left in place a legal structure that allows a municipality to contractually sign away its authority to protect its residents—and then be held to that waiver even when their health is at stake. The evidentiary constraint compounded the constitutional one: the strong public health record assembled by the City’s Public Health Advisory Panel and by Councilmember Dan Kalb’s expert consultant Zoé Chafe, both of which were before the council in June 2016, was sidelined in favor of a litigation record the City had assembled around the incompetent report of Environmental Science Associates—a contractor that, by the campaign’s assessment, lacked any public health expertise and produced work that did not reflect the quality of the record the community had actually built. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in May 2020, and the petition for rehearing en banc was denied.
2. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and the State Court War
A second front opened in state court when, in November 2018, the City terminated OBOT's ground lease for failing to meet the contractual deadline to begin construction. The developer had missed other milestones as early as 2015. OBOT and Oakland Global Rail Enterprise, now represented by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court for breach of the ground lease. The city countersued. After years of discovery, the case reached an eight-week trial before Judge Noël Wise during the summer and fall of 2023.
The central legal question was whether there was a force majeure, which refers to an unforeseen or unavoidable catastrophe that prevents parties from fulfilling a legal or contractual obligation, and is primarily used as a legal defence. OBOT argued that the city's own conduct, the ordinance, the political resistance, and the termination constituted the unforeseeable circumstances that excused its missed milestones. The city argued that force majeure does not apply to government regulatory actions that a sophisticated developer should have anticipated and that the lease termination was valid.
Judge Wise ruled for OBOT. Her statement of decision held that the city had breached the ground lease, that OBOT was not in default, and that the lease termination was invalid. She quoted Chhabria's 2018 federal decision at length. “What the city could not do was undermine or improperly terminate the contracts it had with OBOT; that was not a legal option,” she wrote. “That, however, was the path the city selected.” She awarded specific performance–reinstatement of the lease with a 2.5-year milestone extension–rather than the $159.6 million in damages OBOT had demanded. In May 2024, she awarded OBOT attorneys' fees of $6,572,880.44 and costs of $276,805.90. The California Court of Appeals affirmed in June 2025. The California Supreme Court declined review in September 2025. By that point, the City had spent approximately $5.55 million of its own funds resisting the project — and had been ordered to pay nearly $7 million more in fees. But the litigation was not over.
3. The Kentucky Gambit: Forum Shopping and Its Bankruptcy
The most novel chapter of the OBOT lawsuits played out not in California but in a federal bankruptcy court in Louisville, Kentucky. It illustrates with unusual clarity how sophisticated corporations can exploit the architecture of the legal system to move disputes far from the communities they affect.
In 2018, a company called Insight Terminal Solutions, incorporated in Kentucky, had subleased nineteen acres of the OBOT development from Tagami for $6 million. When the City terminated Tagami's master lease, ITS's sublease collapsed with it. Control eventually passed to its primary creditor, Autumn Wind Lending LLC, an entity controlled by Los Angeles-based hedge fund principals. From the bankruptcy proceeding, the new controllers filed a tortious interference complaint against the City of Oakland, claiming between $230 million and $673.6 million in never-earned profits, the revenue ITS allegedly would have made had the terminal been built.
The city contested the proprietary of jurisdiction vigorously. ITS was incorporated in Kentucky, which provided the hook for bankruptcy jurisdiction, but the underlying dispute was entirely in California: involving California land, California governments, California residents, and California public health. In October 2025, Bankruptcy Judge Joan Lloyd ruled that Oakland tortiously interfered with ITS's sublease and caused its bankruptcy, setting a minimum damages floor of $230 million and naming former Mayor Libby Schaaf and former Councilmember Dan Kalb as having personally directed the interference.
Less than one month later, however, Federal District Judge Benjamin Beaton vacated Judge Lloyd's due to a lack of subject-matter jurisdiction: a bankruptcy court lacked authority to issue a final judgment on tort claims against a non-consenting municipal government. The underlying damages question remains open as of 2026.
Attorney Megan Wachspress, writing in the Oakland Review of Books in February 2026, asked a question the New York Times had not formally expressed in its coverage on the case: how can a California city be ordered in Kentucky to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in never-made profits from a terminal that was never built, to a company that only ever existed on paper, controlled by an L.A. hedge fund? The answer, she suggests, is that it may not be able to do so. Yet even with a final judgment vacating the damages, the proceedings themselves inflicted real harm. The time, money, and energy required to contest ITS’s lawsuit imposed their own punishment.
Following the Money
No Coal in Oakland understood from the start that litigation was one part of a larger strategy. If the project still needed financing to be built, and if that financing could be made politically and economically untenable, the project could be stopped regardless of what happened in court. The Bank of Montreal had been identified as the investment banker, brokering a $53 million loan from Utah state pension funds. The campaign sent formal letters invoking the Equator Principles, an international framework that requires lenders to engage with communities affected by their projects. Affected by the community’s interest and OBOT’s dishonest dealings to bring in coal, the Bank of Montreal withdrew entirely from the project.
Knowing that the same investment banker tied to the Bank of Montreal was soliciting pension fund capital through an opaque investment vehicle, a coalition member attended a pension fund consultant convention and met directly with the Bank of Montreal contact. Other coalition members demonstrated outside and contacted further fund representatives. The campaign also built international networks in Japan, the intended export market, as well as in Utah, to track and disrupt the financing pipeline wherever it extended.
As of early 2026, NCIO believed that construction financing had not been secured. The collapsing economics of the global coal market, which the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has described as in structural decline, compound the project's financial uncertainty, even with legal clearance in hand (IFEEFA, para 6).
This deficit, however, attracted federal attention. On June 4, 2026, The Trump administration’s Department of Energy approved over $500 million for funding coal-based infrastructure under the Defense Production Act, including $75 million for OBOT—explicitly on the premise that it would be a coal terminal. Even this substantial sum, however, appears unlikely to provide a sufficient boost for construction to actually begin.
AB 40: The Next Step to Justice
NCIO’s work has long exemplified that effective community resistance can utilize, but does not wholly rely on, legal action. Political advocacy and legislative change provide an additional path for change. In the 2025-2026 California Legislative Session, Assemblymember Mia Bonta introduced AB 40, the Community First Coal Review Act. Co-sponsored by WOEIP and Earthjustice, this legislation promulgated greater accountability for any construction on any coal terminal infrastructure. AB 40 would require developers to fully disclose a project’s environmental impacts and adopt effective mitigation procedures before any approval.
NCIO and community partners championed the bill, working throughout the legislative session to emphasize the importance of AB 40 for not only the future of California’s coal policy, but to correct the environmental injustice and lies of OBOT. And on August 28, 2026, the California legislature passed AB 40 to protect communities across the state from coal pollution.
For these protections to take effect, Governor Gavin Newsom must sign AB 40 into law by September 30, 2026. Earthjustice maintains a platform for constituents to contact the Governor’s Office directly and urge support of the bill.
The AB 40 victory represents the latest accomplishment of public resistance to OBOT and demonstrates the versatility of this environmental justice movement: whether in courts, in the legislature, or in the community, NCIO and the people who lead it refused to take deception and contract terms as the final word for the future of their home.
The Long Road
After eleven years, the No Coal in Oakland campaign has produced something beyond the specific legal fight: durable infrastructure. Youth vs. Apocalypse, which began as Youth Against Coal within the No Coal campaign, is now nationally recognized for developing leadership among young people, particularly youth of color. The Interfaith Council of Alameda County, founded by Reverend Chambers, meets monthly and addresses a range of county-wide issues. The Keep Coal Out East Bay Coalition, a 15-member organization including faith, labor, health, youth, and education leaders, grew from NCIO and works in furtherance of a clean and healthful future for the region. And NCIO itself maintains a mailing list of approximately 3,000 subscribers who receive updates without fundraising appeals. As Margaret Rossoff stated,
“The Alameda Labor Council’s eventual vote in support of the ban was the first time the ALC had ever engaged in a debate on climate change. Nineteen unions signed the No Coal Letter. The ALC subsequently formed a Climate and Environmental Justice Caucus.”
The OBOT litigation has produced a legal legacy that cuts two distinct ways for the parties involved. For the coal industry, it demonstrates the power of the development agreement as a mechanism to lock municipalities into permitting infrastructure, even if the true nature of that project fundamentally changes. The courts reinforced this from Judge Chhabria to the Ninth Circuit and from Judge Wise to the California appellate courts, with the case law clearly stating that a carefully structured contract may supersede a city's police power. The Kentucky proceedings add a further lesson: how the corporate form exemplified in ITS may exploit jurisdictional gaps and manufacture liability in forums far from the affected community.
For the environmental justice movement, the lessons point in a different direction. NCIO did not win in court. Yet it drove out OBOT’s lead financier, sustained a large political coalition for over a decade, and continues to stymie OBOT’s efforts to garner financial backing and permitting for the project. The campaign also demonstrated something about movement lawyering that Franklin articulated from his union background: law is a tool, not a vehicle for justice by itself. Societal change does not come from filing lawsuits — it requires building movements. Justice is ultimately a collective project, a shared reckoning with how people want to live with one another on the planet, and the extent of that reckoning will determine whether the species will survive to see another century.
That framing, with law as a middle chapter and organizing as the beginning and end, is one way to understand a career that took Franklin from activism to law school at forty; through twenty-two years of union litigation; and then back to organizing as a full-time volunteer after retirement. It is also, perhaps, the most honest account available of what it actually takes to fight a fossil fuel developer for years on end in a legal system structured to protect capital investment expectations above community health.
Phil Tagami said that, after the California Supreme Court declined Oakland's final appeal in September 2025, “the truth and the law and the process worked.” He was right, in a specific and limited sense: the contract held. The development agreement that froze the city's regulatory authority in place before coal was ever disclosed as the terminal's purpose survived eleven years of challenge and emerged with legal clearance.
It took an army to achieve that result. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan filed the federal complaint that set the litigation in motion and tried the case before Judge Chhabria. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips carried the state court case through eight weeks of trial and two levels of appellate review, ultimately collecting nearly $7 million in attorneys' fees from the City of Oakland. The hedge fund principals now controlling Insight Terminal Solutions are pursuing a damages claim worth hundreds of millions of dollars in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, for profits from a terminal that was never built.
Meanwhile, West Oakland is still West Oakland. Its residents still live at the intersection of the 880 freeway, the Port, the rail yards, and the industrial corridor. CalEnviroScreen still places the neighborhood among the most pollution-burdened in the state. The children who testified before the city council in 2015 and 2016 are adults now.
And NCIO is still meeting.
Every attorney who has worked on a development agreement that stripped a city of its regulatory authority, every firm that has argued a contract term trumps a community's right to breathe, every lawyer who has used jurisdictional arbitrage to move a dispute from the people it affects to a more favorable forum — they have made a choice. Those choices are the keystones of their legal legacy. It poses a question for law students and attorneys who may one day stand on one side or the other of a dispute like this one, and a question the people of West Oakland have been implicitly asking litigators on the other side of the dispute for eleven years: What will your legal legacy be?
Citations
CASES
Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal, LLC v. City of Oakland, No. 3:16-cv-07014-VC (N.D. Cal. May 23, 2018).
Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal, LLC v. City of Oakland, 960 F.3d 570 (9th Cir. 2020).
Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal, LLC v. City of Oakland, No. A169585 (Cal. Ct. App. June 27, 2025), available at https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/2025/a169585.html.
In re Insight Terminal Solutions, LLC, No. [docket no. needed], Bankr. W.D. Ky., Statement of Decision, Oct. 2025.
District Court Order Vacating Bankruptcy Judgment, City of Oakland v. Insight Terminal Solutions, LLC, No. [docket no. needed], W.D. Ky., Nov. 2025.
STATUTES AND LOCAL ORDINANCES
Oakland, Cal., Ordinance No. 13385 C.M.S. (June 28, 2016) (prohibiting coal storage and handling at the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal).
CONTRACTS AND GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS
City of Oakland, Army Base Gateway Redevelopment Project Lease Disposition and Development Agreement (2000).
City of Oakland, Ground Lease for West Gateway: Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal Project (Feb. 16, 2016).
City of Oakland and Sierra Club et al., Joint Objections to Evidence Introduced at Trial, Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal, LLC v. City of Oakland, No. 3:16-cv-07014-VC (N.D. Cal. Feb. 9, 2018).
BOOKS AND REPORTS
Environmental Science Associates, Health and Safety Impacts Associated with the Transport, Storage, and Handling of Coal in Oakland (2016).
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), Accelerating the Coal-to-Clean Transition: Five Global Case Studies (June 2024).
Margaret Rossoff, No Coal in Oakland: A Report on the Campaign (rev. ed. Aug. 2016), available athttps://nocoalinoakland.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/NCIO-coal-campaign-report_v2016-08-30.pdf.
PERIODICALS AND ONLINE SOURCES
Megan Wachspress, Unpaid Debts, Oakland Rev. of Books (Feb. 5, 2026), https://www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/unpaid-debts.
Hana Bhatt, Oakland Loses Appeal in Coal Legal Battle, Oaklandside (June 30, 2025), https://oaklandside.org/2025/06/30/oakland-loses-appeal-in-coal-legal-battle/.
Darwin BondGraham, Oakland’s Coal Terminal Legal Battle Draws to a Close, Oaklandside (Sept. 22, 2025), https://oaklandside.org/2025/09/22/oakland-coal-terminal-legal-battle-phil-tagami/.
Matthias Gafni, Judge: Oakland to Pay at Least $230M After Losing Latest Coal Terminal Dispute, KTVU Fox 2 (Oct. 29, 2025), https://www.ktvu.com/news/judge-oakland-pay-least-230m-after-losing-latest-coal-terminal-dispute.
The Maritime Executive, City of Oakland Loses Legal Battle over Export Terminal for Wyoming Coal (Oct. 28, 2025), https://maritime-executive.com/article/city-of-oakland-loses-legal-battle-over-export-terminal-for-wyoming-coal.
Cowboy State Daily, California Supreme Court Clears Path for Wyoming Coal Exports Through Oakland Port (Sept. 18, 2025), https://cowboystatedaily.com/2025/09/18/california-supreme-court-clears-path-for-wyoming-coal-exports-through-oakland-port/.
No Coal in Oakland, Open Letter: Oakland Coalition Urges Hedge Fund Mogul to Stop Coal Threats (Mar. 5, 2025), https://nocoalinoakland.info/open-letter-oakland-urges-brooks-stop-coal-threats/.
No Coal in Oakland, Developer Files Federal Suit Seeking to Overturn Coal Ban; Community Vows to Fight Back (Dec. 8, 2016), https://nocoalinoakland.info/developer-files-federal-suit-seeking-to-overturn-coal-ban/.
Earthjustice, Keeping Coal out of Oakland (Oct. 13, 2015), https://earthjustice.org/article/keeping-coal-out-of-oakland.
Center for Biological Diversity, Community Groups Urge Court to Uphold Oakland’s Ban on Coal Storage, Handling (Dec. 17, 2018), https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2018/oakland-coal-terminal-12-17-2018.php.
Sierra Club, San Francisco Bay Chapter, Fight for a Coal-Free Oakland, https://www.sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/coalfreeoakland (last visited Mar. 29, 2026).
U.S. Energy Information Administration, Coal and the Environment, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/coal-and-the-environment.php (last updated Apr. 17, 2024).
Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal Joint Venture, About OBOT, http://obotjv.com/ (last visited Mar. 29, 2026).
West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, Campaigns, https://woeip.org/campaigns/ (last visited Mar. 29, 2026).
Naveena Sadasivam, Even $75M from Trump may not save Oakland’s embattled coal terminal (June 15, 2026), https://grist.org/energy/trump-oakland-coal-terminal-funding/.
INTERVIEWS
Interview with Ted Franklin, Co-Organizer, No Coal in Oakland (2026).
Interview with Margaret Rossoff, Co-Organizer, No Coal in Oakland (2026).
