Dear Tugboat,

Reading through your response, we thought maybe you missed some of what we wrote. The paragraph you are referring to explicitly discusses the interaction.

“For me, the event took an even more bizarre turn when outside waiting to be let back in. A man came up to me and asked why I had taken a picture of his son. I told him I had taken pictures of all the speakers and proceeded to show him my phone. Angrily, he told me he believed the shot I took of the crowd purposefully included his son. I had no idea what he was talking about, as when I took the group shot, I was looking at the room. Apparently his son was directly behind me, but I did not see him as I was focused on the room. I attempted to explain this, but he refused to believe me. I asked him if he was threatening me since he was extremely hostile and, frankly, a little scary in his tone and approach with me. At that point four more Oil & Gas employees encircled me and begin yelling at me. Even though I had never met any of these people, some called me out by name.”

We wish you had used a valid email when you signed up. A quick search shows this is an email that has not been used previously, presumably made to comment on our page.

You will be happy to know, we did record the entire meeting.

While we understand the desire to portray our representation of the event outside differently, this is an accurate portrayal of what took place. Again, had you used your real name and email, we would take you more seriously, but since you chose not to, we can presume you are one of the many trolls that we run into online for which we have folders of screenshots.

A Male approached her and VERY QUIETLY AND CALMLY asked why you took a picture of his Son. After a few seconds YOU WALKED 5 steps to where a group of people were standing and started screaming you were being harassed and bullied. You walked into that group…presumably by accident but no one knew your name or said anything other than the guy who asked you about the picture did so in a calm manner.

You were acting extremely erratic and hysterical, much like the activists who shut the meeting down, infringing on the first amendment rights of everyone else because they could not assemble peacefully.

SB181 was meant to be a sea-change in the permitting of new oil and gas wells in Colorado. It hasn’t even been an eye-dropper of change. NOT ONE PERMIT DENIED. EVER. How is this considered oversight? When impacted citizens are denied the right to ban fracking, when we are denied the right to know what we are breathing and drinking, when we have NO RECOURSE to protect ourselves against an industry that is running rogue in this state, just what are we supposed to do? Sit quietly in sham “hearings”?

Thank you to the protesters who showed up . I regret I was not among you. Unless and until there is a single permit denied by the COGCC, I hope every sham hearing is shut down. Well done!