Officials approve six-month halt on new drilling applications

From the Boulder Daily Camera

The Town of Erie approved a sudden halt on any new drilling plans for the remainder of the year Tuesday night, suggesting the town’s nascent leadership will likely plot a course to overhaul its oil and gas regulations in the coming months.

Erie’s Board of Trustees approved the six-month moratorium on Tuesday by a vote of 5-2. Trustees Scott Charles and Dan Woog offered the two “no” votes.

The bid was presented as an emergency ordinance, but it lacked the six votes necessary to pass and enact it immediately. Instead, Trustees suspended a second reading and passed the stay as a regular measure.

Wattenberg pad, SRC Energy

It could effectively stymie sections of Weld County’s fracking capital, area that includes Extraction Oil & Gas, Inc.’s subsidiary 8 North LLC’s recently announced plans for two new well sites.

Prior to the meeting, Mayor Jennifer Carroll said the stay would give the board a moment to examine its current operator agreements with specific drilling firms, as well as its current drilling codes, which were last updated in 2015.

It may be less ambitious than neighboring efforts, like Lafayette’s dabbling in attempts to legalize civil disobedience, though it has the possibility for farther-reaching impacts. It’s also not the first regulatory effort by Erie leaders, who sanctioned a landmark ordinance last fall requiring drillers with local operations to hand over maps of their flow lines and other subsurface facilities to the town.

According to the ordinance language, the moratorium would expire on Jan. 11, “unless sooner repealed.”

As Charles pointed on Tuesday, the moratorium actually may have minimal impact: the halt would not impact the four pending applications currently making their way through town bodies, nor anything under the current Crestone operator agreement.

“You need to do what is right for this community,” resident David Lotton told trustees b, “give yourselves the time to understand how to best do that and to understand what you can and cannot do. The folks that are afraid of being sued should applaud this — should applaud you trying to understand the situation.

The ordinance stipulates that town staff, and some unnamed consultants, will examine current land use codes to discern whether or not they need to be revised “to protect and preserve the public health, safety, welfare and the environment.”

Like most of Erie’s recent regulatory efforts aimed at oil and gas, however, it won’t come without controversy. Several residents and industry officials took the board to task Tuesday for springing the vote on them. Plans to vote on the ordinance were announced with a subtle placement on the agenda only the night before.

“I have to stress how blindsided we felt by these moratoria appearing on the agenda,” Jason Grubb, a community outreach coordinator for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, told Trustees. “Many of our members have been actively engaged with the board for months, if not years, — a little more heads up would have been more appropriate, and more in line with the transparency of effective governance.”

Such a sentiment was echoed by Erie resident DeAndrea Arndt, who leaned heavily on calls for a transparent process, rather than over ideological lines, when she implored leaders to vote down the moratorium Tuesday.

“For now, I want to put aside peoples’ feelings about the energy industry,” she said. “I’ll be the first to admit we all have strong feelings. But the secretive process and lack of transparency surrounding this board’s vote sends a terrible signal.”

The current board, a portion of which was elected in April on a wave of anti-fracking sentiments, has since stressed that it would re-examine how it asserts local control over drilling firms operating in Erie, one that was cemented by Carroll’s wide-margin victory.

The board may be trying to stack staff more friendly to that mission; former Town Administrator A.J. Krieger was fired earlier this year without explanation, though speculation abounded that his philosophies — particularly over oil and gas regulation — did not align with the new leadership.

Trustees also are considering hiring new special oil and gas legal counsel as it wades through its current litigation and potential drilling moratorium, officials announced earlier this summer.

“It feels like more of the same,” Woog said prior to the vote, “we’re doing something that’s more about style than substance.

“We’re doing something to make it look like we’re doing something,” he added. We’re enabling the fantasy that we can regulate oil and gas from Erie town hall.”

 


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