In a newsletter earlier this year, the Burland Homeowners Association tells about plans for setting up new swings for the park in the Ranchettes. Up north of Pine Junction, members of the Woodside Park Homeowners Association are planning for their 2011 summer kids fishing derby and community barbeque and residents in the Town of Alma prepare for the 12th annual Soup Cook-off and Bingo on April 3. These local activities all contribute to the sense of community that is all of Park County. Each place is the home of one of our county commissioners.
Seemingly far, far away, in a distant Park County neighborhood, a drive down Elkhorn Road between US 285 and Hartsel tells a different story. Midway between the two, a crooked hand-painted sign points west to another dirt road saying simply, “El Paso,” and it’s not directing drivers to the city on the Texas-Mexico border. Instead, it is pointing to ground zero in the battle between the need for energy and the fears of environmentalists as well as many every-day residents over natural gas drilling in the county.
The below ground land rush began in earnest last year when the same Commissioners gave the OK to El Paso Corp. to begin exploratory drilling at three sites in search of rich natural gas reserves. They accelerated last week when the Colorado Division of Wildlife gave the approval to allow access four more wells in the James Mark Jones Wildlife Area – approval a likely precursor to more drilling. If they strike it rich, expect industry efforts to drill hundreds of additional wells to follow.
First, a political geography lesson: the closest county commissioner to the El Paso site, Mark Dowaliby, lives 15-20 miles away, (as the crow flies) on Alma’s Main Street and at a higher elevation. Would he be as quick to support drilling and the 7x24 tanker traffic on the vacant land just north of the South Park Saloon? A 50 mile drive to the site from Commissioner John Tighes’ home makes one wonder if the same support would come if the waste disposal pond or tanks were to be set up next to the Burland swing sets in his subdivision. Farther away yet, how about a rig at the end of Meadow Drive just past Commissioner Dick Hodges home in the extreme northeast corner of Park County? Just what would the neighbors say?
Natural gas drilling companies have major exemptions for numerous federal environmental laws written to protect air and drinking water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals.
This week, Colorado Democratic Congressional members Diana DeGette and Jared Polis have introduced a new bill seeking transparency in the process of hydraulic fracking, a process in which undisclosed chemicals are forced into the ground in a process to release the natural gas trapped there. The bill also wants oil and gas companies to comply with the Safe Water Drinking Act, something they were exempted from during the Bush Administration.
Telling the Denver Post this week the industry doesn’t oppose fracking fluid disclosure on its merit, Oil and Gas Lobbyist and GOP strategist Michael McKenna said, “Let’s not have the federal government involved. It slows the process down to a crawl and it increases costs and leads to a lot of unhappiness.”
Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn, who “represents” Park County’s 5th Congressional District, told the Post, “I don’t think we need a federal bureaucracy piled atop of state regulations at this time; states are doing a very good job. If we make it more difficult and costly and time consuming to bring energy to the market, it doesn’t help our economy.”
When combined, the $48,000 Lamborn received in campaign contributions from oil, gas and mining industries rank as his largest donor group according to the web site opensecrets.org.
When Republicans took over control of the US House of Representatives after the 2010 elections, the fight to regulate fracking fell to former Colorado Senator and now Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar who hinted the department might order gas drillers to disclose the content of their fracking fluids.
Following that announcement, Park County’s other Congressional Representative, Republican Mike Coffman, from the 6th Congressional District, joined in a GOP letter to Salazar urging the Secretary to put any plans to regulate fracking fluids on hold.
A recent 3-part expose of the political and environmental collision in Washington appeared earlier this month in the New York Times. Among highlights, an EPA Administrator tells how in 1987, under the Reagan Administration, the EPA was pressured to not seek tight control of the industry. “It was like science didn’t matter,” the author an EPA report to Congress told the Times, as concerns were eliminated from the final report version.
Similarly, a former assistant administrator for water at the EPA under the George W Bush Administration told the blog ProPublica this month that in 2004 EPA officials never intended to grant the industry a perpetual exemption, but wording of an original EPA report was watered down. A 30-year EPA agency veteran in Denver who challenged the report’s findings was rebuffed and a senior EPA spokesperson told the Los Angeles times in 2005 that the potential threat was “low and doesn’t justify additional study.”
In Colorado just last year, 18 Republican members of the State Legislature sent a letter to the EPA demanding the federal agency refrain from regulating fracking, no matter what a new two-year study of the process reveals. State Senator Scott Renfroe, R-Greeley, said in a release to the Colorado Independent newspaper that “the EPA shouldn’t stick its nose into the regulation of fracking or other oil and gas industry processes in states.”
The GOP won control of the Colorado House last November and a bill presented this year by Rep. Roger Wilson, D-Glenwood Springs, seeking to review a pending federal study on fracking and drinking water died in the Republican controlled Agriculture Committee in February. The bill also sought a report to the legislature outlining complaints related to fracking be presented to the Legislature. It drew this response from Rep. J Paul Brown, R-Ignacio. Brown said, “I have a little problem with complaints from the public. You can complain about just about anything. This should not be able to happen.”
But we must remember that representatives are elected to represent the public, and at all levels, those members deserve to be heard and their concerns addressed, not smoothed over by nice politically-motivated and edited dialogue.
Let’s put a moratorium on any further activity here in Park County until the questions and concerns receive real answers – answers based in science – not based on politics.
This column was originally published in the March 25,, 2011 edition of The Flume, the paper of record for Park County, Colorado. The monthly column is titled "Democratically Speaking"
