From the Daily Camera
Lafayette is poised to sanction a sweeping update to its oil and gas regulations, potentially putting the city’s protocols at odds with a growing faction of homegrown activists and in the crosshairs of an industry prone to wielding litigation typically backed by state lawmakers.
Some of the proposal’s more significant changes include stipulations surrounding pipeline mapping, setbacks requirements, expanded public outreach and heightened environmental mitigation, according to draft language unveiled Friday.
Lafayette’s City Council — along with Boulder County Chief Planner Kim Sanchez and Jeffrey Robbins, the city’s $300-per-hour oil and gas attorney — convened on the particulars of the nearly 40-page mandate Tuesday night. An official vote on the revamping could return to council members as early as next month.
The new regulations would require mapping of existing well sites, mineral interests, producing, closed, abandoned and shut-in wells and any other oil and gas operations within 1 mile of the site, hazards, floodplains and potential traffic impacts. Industry officials have resisted legislation compelling companies to hand over drilling maps to the public, decrying a similar ordinance approved by Erie trustees last year as an illegal overreach.
Colorado oil and gas industry representatives said they were still in the process of analyzing the new language and were unable to comment.
Additionally, the revamped stipulations would require a bevy of mitigation efforts for oil and gas development on air and nearby water quality, according to the draft language.
Those rules could limit a certain number of wells on a specific site, require visual buffers and curb traffic to and from the area. The proposal would also coordinate monthly payments to surrounding homeowners from local drilling companies known as “disruption payments.”
A moratorium on new oil and gas development approved last year to allow the city to sort out these drilling rules is slated to expire in May.
The updated language would also bar pipelines from being closer than “150 feet from a residential, commercial or industrial building, a place of public assembly” — a more conservative approach than figures floated by officials in recent months.
Each section would be facilitated through the city’s land use powers, a tool that local municipalities across the Front Range have begun to flex more frequently as they review their fracking rules.
The language is by design almost identical to those enforced at the county level, officials say. Boulder County last year approved an update to its own regulations — touted by commissioners as the state’s most stringent — ahead of the expiration of a five-year drilling embargo.
“In this process, we discovered that we really like what Boulder County was doing,” Lafayette City Administrator Gary Klaphake said Tuesday. “Even if you don’t like regulations, they did a good job with their regulations.”
The city is also proposing an intergovernmental agreement with the county to act as an administrative body for handling drilling permits, as well as to band together financially for a defense in case of an eventual lawsuit.
The efforts have come under fire from a number of citizens who have appeared en masse at council meetings and public demonstrations in recent months.
They have called for the full activation of the ” Climate Bill of Rights and Protections,” an effective ban on all oil and gas development approved last year and see any attempts at regulation as a direct confliction.
“We understand how corrupt the same system is, but then we talk about regulating a corrupt system,” Councilwoman Merrily Mazza, often a dissenting voice against the city’s approach to oil and gas, said Tuesday. “There’s a massive disconnect between what the people want in Boulder County, and what we’re told we can get in this corrupt system.”
If approved, the revision would be the city’s first change to its fracking policies in more than two decades, say officials who suggest the update is a last-ditch effort to stave off what may be the waning days of a Boulder County relatively free of drilling.
The last permit for new drilling in Lafayette was pulled in 1994, according to city records.
The city’s current mandates are woefully out of step with the modern mineral extraction technology, according to Robbins — “it’s a completely different beast.” Chief among them is the pervasiveness of horizontal drilling techniques that have become the norm for drillers across Colorado.
“Seems to me that our regulations today aren’t any good,” Klaphake said. “They have to be replaced at a minimum with something better, whether you like regulation or not.”
Almost a year since the county’s moratorium was lifted, a deluge of large-scale oil and gas plans aimed at hundreds of acres of open space across eastern Boulder County have made their way to the hands of state regulators.
“We’re not accepting oil and gas in this city because we have regulations,” Mayor Christine Berg said, “but it’s one of our ways of saying that we’re making this as hard as possible (for drillers).
“Our approaches may be different,” she told residents equipped with signs and slogans opposing the proposed regulations on Tuesday, “but we would ban it tomorrow if we could.”
