Colorado Oil And Gas Industry Prepares For Battle At The Polls

COLORADO – By John Herrick for The Colorado Independent. Oil and gas companies in Colorado are on track to reach record production levels this year. But when industry representatives gathered on the top floor of the Hyatt in Denver on Thursday, the mood was sober.

That’s because the political winds could shift in November. A proposed anti-fracking ballot initiative would outlaw drilling in over half the state. Republicans, who are generally friendly to the industry, could lose their one-seat majority in the state Senate, giving Democrats full control of the state legislature. And the governor’s mansion could be occupied by a man who has fought the industry in the past.

A top concern for the $31 billion industry in Colorado is Initiative 97, a proposed ballot initiative that would require new drilling rigs to be placed no closer than 2,500 feet from homes, schools and other “vulnerable areas” such as playgrounds and open space. The current setback is 500 feet for homes and 1,000 feet for school buildings. Under the proposed regulations, about 85 percent of all non-federal land in Colorado would be off-limits to oil and gas development, according to a July 2 report by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, an agency that both promotes and regulates oil and gas.

The Colorado Democratic Party is endorsing the ballot initiative. But Democratic leaders, including Gov. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, who is running for governor, oppose the measure. Opponents of the initiative say it would deprive a potential source of income from landowners with mineral rights.

Former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, an Alamosa native who was a guest speaker at the annual roundtable, said the initiative would be “unconstitutional.”

Salazar, who expanded national parks and wildlife refuges and championed utility-scale renewable energy projects while serving in the Obama Administration, is now a partner at a Denver law firm, WilmerHale, where he has represented Anadarko Petroleum Corp. The company owned the leaking pipeline that caused fatal Firestone explosion in April 2017.

Across the state, oil and gas rigs and residential neighborhoods are coming closer together, prompting calls for greater public health and safety protections. In the Front Range, Salazar said, new residential developments are encroaching on existing oil and gas areas.

“The consequence of that is that you have a greater degree of awareness and a greater degree of conflict that we’ve seen now for the last 10 years,” Salazar told The Colorado Independent.

This year is not the first attempt at a setback measure.

In 2014, Polis, who Salazar is supporting for governor, backed an initiative that would have required drilling rigs to be placed at least 2,000 feet from homes. At the request of Gov. Hickenlooper, a former oil and gas geologist who opposed the proposed setbacks, Polis agreed to drop the ballot initiative in exchange for a task force on oil and gas issues. Later in 2016, a 2,500 setback initiative failed to get enough signatures to make it on the ballot.

As the event was underway, Colorado Rising for Health and Safety, a coalition of environmental and community groups backing the setback initiative, was holding a press conference about five blocks away at the State Capitol to announce that a political consultant hired to gather the signatures, Mike Selvaggio, left the state, taking an estimated 20,000 signatures with him.

State Rep. Joe Salazar (no relation to Ken), is an acting attorney for Colorado Rising. He told The Colorado Independent that seven boxes of signatures were returned around 5 p.m. on Thursday. He’s yet to confirm if the boxes include all the expected signatures.

Salazar filed a lawsuit in Denver District Court. He said he will use the discovery process to investigate whether the oil and gas industry was involved.

The group has until Aug. 6 to obtain 98,492 signatures needed to get the question on the ballot.

Read more in the Colorado Independent

Title photo: Oil and gas development in new housing subdivision on Collier’s Hill. Photo by Ted Wood/The Story Group.

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