With the June 16 vote on a proposed agreement selling the town’s mineral rights approaching, debate in Erie is shifting from fracking itself to the process behind the deal. In particular, residents and some council members are asking whether the negotiations followed the expectations laid out in the town’s contract and purchasing policies.

The proposed agreement is tied to the Draco oil and gas project, a state-approved development operated by SM Energy, formerly Civitas. The project would drill 26 horizontal wells extending roughly five miles underground beneath portions of Erie. In exchange for selling town-owned mineral rights that lie in the path of the project, officials say Erie would receive a package of cash, royalties, land and environmental concessions from SM Energy, while critics continue to press for details on both the value of the deal and the process used to negotiate it. 

Residents crowded into a June 2 public study session seeking answers about well locations, groundwater impacts, wastewater disposal and what a mineral-rights sale could mean for the town’s future development. 

Beyond the drilling itself, the agreement could shape how Erie grows in the coming years. In exchange for its mineral interests, the town would receive a package of cash, royalties, land and other concessions that officials say could support future development. Some residents, however, remain concerned about potential environmental and public health impacts, as well as whether selling town-owned mineral rights outright is preferable to retaining or leasing those assets for future revenue. 

Mayor Andrew Moore has consistently framed the mineral-rights agreement as an economic-development opportunity rather than solely an oil and gas debate. In his April State of the Town meeting, Moore argued that Erie’s infrastructure and growth needs were going to outpace available capital funding and portrayed the deal as an important source of future revenue. However, previous Yellow Scene reporting found that Erie’s capital reserves and projected revenues appeared stronger than suggested during those discussions, raising questions about how essential the agreement is to the town’s long-term financial plans. 

Moore reiterated that argument during the June 2 study session.

“Yeah, I guess the way I look at this is the first offer was $2.85 million, which is that land. And now we’re up to roughly $35 million plus the value of the land going forward, which goes to over $200 million,” Moore said. “And so, yeah, maybe this isn’t the best deal we can get, but maybe it is by far the best deal we can get.”

Town officials repeatedly emphasized that rejecting the agreement would not necessarily stop the Draco project. During the June 2 study session, Environmental Services Director David Frank said the town’s unsold mineral rights would have to be “avoided,” but what that means in practice remains uncertain. “It could be that the overall direction of those laterals changes to avoid physically contacting those areas,” Frank said. “It’s also possible that they may drill right through our mineral rights and simply not perforate and frack those sections of the casing.” Later in the discussion, Frank acknowledged that the state has not provided a definitive answer on how such a scenario would be handled. “It’s highly unlikely that Draco, which is a $1.5 billion operation, is going to go away,” he said. “Their attorneys told me that they will go forward without the town’s minerals.” 

Toward the end of nearly two hours of discussion, however, council members began asking whether the consultant hired by the town to assist with the negotiations had fulfilled a contractual requirement to solicit bids and whether the town’s purchasing guidelines had been followed when he was hired. Discussion focused heavily on uncertainties about the process itself alongside the specifics of the proposed agreement. 

Currently, council is considering an agreement with SM Energy that town officials have described as one of the largest mineral-rights transactions in Erie’s history. According to information presented during the negotiations, the wellbores would be the longest ever proposed in Colorado and would be drilled beneath an established suburban community rather than a remote oil and gas field, which has been a cause for concern for many residents.

The proposed deal would involve the town selling mineral interests associated with the approved Draco Pad development in exchange for a package of cash payments, production revenue, land transfers, additional monitoring provisions and commitments to plug aging wells. While officials have argued that the agreement would provide significant benefits to the community, residents and council members alike have continued to ask how the town determined that this proposal represented the best available option.

The town’s selection of Alameda Mineral Advisors has itself become a subject of scrutiny, as public explanations of how the firm was identified and brought into the process have shifted over time.

During a March 10 council meeting, Mayor Andrew Moore said Alameda had been recommended by town staff and that council had not played a role in identifying the firm.

“With Alameda Minerals … they were recommended to us by staff and that’s how that contract came about,” Moore said. “There is nobody that personally advocated for them … nobody on council … that was brought to us by staff.”

A different account emerged during an April 21 discussion. Responding to a question from Councilmember Emily Baer about how Owens became involved, Director of Environmental Services David Frank said Moore had provided Owens’ contact information to town staff.

“Mayor Moore sent me an email and said, ‘here’s some contact information from a gentleman. I think it would be a good idea to reach out to him and hear him out,'” Frank said. “I gave him a call. He gave me his pitch…”

Moore offered another explanation during the June 2 study session, describing Owens as someone uniquely positioned to help the town negotiate with Civitas because of his previous experience inside the company.

“Matt was brought in for his unique knowledge of knowing the inside workings of a Civitas,” Moore said. “If you’re negotiating, you always want to have information from those you’re negotiating against.”

Those explanations are not necessarily contradictory, but they describe different accounts of how Alameda entered the process, ranging from a staff recommendation to a referral that originated with the mayor. 

When asked about the hiring process for Alameda Mineral Advisors, Town Attorney Breena N. Meng focused on the town’s procurement policy.

“There is a requirement that was adopted in a purchasing policy that was approved by council to conduct RFPs or solicitations for services like this,” Meng said. “That did not happen.”

In other words, Erie’s purchasing policy requires a public Request for Proposal, where the town publicizes the need for services and companies can submit proposals explaining how they would perform the work in hopes of being selected for the contract. The town is then supposed to choose the best proposal for the services needed.

The admission means Alameda was hired outside the process the town’s purchasing policy requires.

Scrutiny of how Alameda entered the process was compounded by a second issue raised during the June 2 study session: whether the firm completed a key responsibility outlined in its contract with the town. 

Matthew Owens of Alameda Mineral Advisors

At the center of the discussion is the scope of work agreed upon when Erie hired Matthew Owens of Alameda Mineral Advisors in December 2025. The contract’s scope of work states that the consultant shall solicit bids for the sale of town-owned mineral rights and property with comparative analyses of upfront proceeds versus projected cash flows.

The contract language requires more than finding a buyer. It requires that Alameda Mineral Advisors reaches out to a variety of companies that might be interested in buying the mineral rights. Then, all of the offers have to be presented to the town with comparisons of up-front profits, future royalties, and other non-monetary terms. 

That requirement became the focus of a tense exchange between Councilmember Hoback and Owens.

“How did you actually solicit bids?” Hoback asked. (1:19:23)

Owens responded by describing work he had performed before being hired by the town. 

“Before you guys hired me, I worked for a client in this unit, who had a whole bunch of minerals at the end of last year,” Owens said. “So I solicited a whole bunch of bids for him to lease or to monetize them. I followed up in early January and got back to the same folks to ask them about their bids and if they were still in the same range… it was substantially lower than what this deal would be. And so at that point, I was determined to just focus on this deal, since the value discrepancy was so great.”

Hoback immediately questioned whether that satisfied the contract’s requirements.

“That does not sound like a competitive bid to me,” he said.

He continued pressing the issue.

“It’s one thing to have, you know, prior discussions, going back to them. That still is not a competitive bidding process. And your scope of work says you’ll complete a competitive bidding process.”

Owens began to respond. (1:19:30)

“It does, that is why in that Executive Session, we had been specifically asked…”

Before he could finish, Town Attorney Breena N. Meng interrupted him, saying the answer would pertain to matters discussed in executive session.

The topic resurfaced later in the meeting when Councilmember Emily Baer attempted to revisit it. Mayor Pro Tem Brandon Bell objected.

“I want to make a point of order… we cannot talk about what was talked about in an executive session. I feel this line of questioning is completely disingenuous because you all know what you heard.”

Baer disputed that characterization.

“I have never heard another offer from any other entity… That’s good that we can’t talk about executive session things because that is not something we’ve ever talked about.”

After the study session adjourned, Owens was again asked whether he had completed the solicitation of competitive bids described in his contract.

“I was instructed not to… by the people who hired me,” Owens said. Owens did not identify who gave the instruction.

The statement prompted council members to discuss whether the town’s procurement practices had been followed and whether the contract’s scope of work had been fulfilled.

Councilmember Baer said she wasn’t sure whether the consultant had met the contract’s expectations.

“I do have concerns that the contract, scope of work for the contract hasn’t been met with a competitive bid,” she said. “I would like to understand more about that. Was that a violation of our expected scope of work of the contract that we signed? That’s what people in the community are asking me.”

The issue raised during the study session was not whether the town ultimately received a favorable offer, but whether the process outlined in the contract was completed in the manner council expected when it approved the agreement. 

The discussion continued when Mayor Andrew Moore suggested that auditors review the issue. Interim Town Manager Meredyth Muth responded that auditors had already identified it.

“[Auditors] have noted it as a finding or possible finding,” Muth said. Neither Muth nor other officials elaborated during the study session on the nature of the finding or whether it related specifically to procurement procedures, contract administration or another aspect of the process. 

None of the officials suggested rejecting the proposed agreement because of these discrepancies. 

Town officials continued to argue that the agreement would provide substantial value to the community. According to information presented by the town, Erie owns approximately 183 acres of mineral rights associated with the Draco area. Of that total, roughly 103 acres remain unleased while about 80 acres are already subject to existing leases. Officials repeatedly emphasized that the town’s unleased mineral interests represent only a small percentage of the overall drilling unit and argued that recent changes in Colorado law increased the town’s negotiating leverage by limiting the circumstances under which municipal mineral interests can be pooled into development without the town’s consent.

Officials also argued that the proposed agreement would convert that leverage into tangible benefits for residents. According to town presentations, the package includes a multimillion-dollar upfront payment, future royalty revenue, approximately 158 acres of land along County Line Road, commitments to plug additional wells and inspection access at the Draco facility. 

Representatives of the negotiating team argued that the town would forgo significant benefits if it rejected the agreement. They also noted that the Draco project has already been approved by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission, meaning the debate before council is no longer whether the project will be drilled, but whether Erie should seek compensation and concessions tied to that development.

Not everyone on council accepted the negotiating team’s assessment of the town’s leverage. Throughout the study session, questions surfaced about whether Erie had adequately tested the market, whether other operators may have been interested and whether the town’s mineral position provided more bargaining power than officials suggested. 

For many residents, however, the conversation extended beyond the financial terms of the deal. Residents repeatedly focused on where water used for hydraulic fracturing would come from, how wastewater would be handled, whether groundwater resources could be affected and what authority Erie would have if environmental problems occurred in the future.

Officials acknowledged that while the town negotiated monitoring and inspection provisions, much of the regulatory authority over drilling operations remains with state agencies. Residents also asked whether the proposed land parcels are worth as much as stated and how much of the transferred acreage could realistically be developed.

Several residents noted that council is expected to vote on the agreement only weeks after the first major public discussion of its details, which they noted as a major issue they wanted addressed.

Those continuing worries come after months of criticism regarding how much of the process occurred in executive session and how little information was publicly available before the proposed agreement reached council. During the June 2 discussion, questions surrounding executive session matters were redirected, renewing the public’s concern about the confidentiality of the negotiations.

Council is scheduled to vote on the proposed agreement June 16. 

By the conclusion of the meeting, many of the concerns raised by residents remained unresolved. Alongside issues of water, drilling and future development, council members found themselves conflicted over procurement, transparency and accountability.

The post Town Council to Vote on Mineral Rights Sale June 16; Bidding Process Draws Scrutiny appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

The Town of Erie Colorado is weighing whether to sell or lease a portion of its mineral rights tied to the state-approved Draco oil and gas project, a decision that has exposed divisions on council, raised questions about the town’s negotiating process, and highlighted uncertainty about how much authority Erie actually has.

At a special meeting on April 21, town staff emphasized that no final agreement has been reached and no vote has been scheduled. Council questioning made clear that key aspects of the proposal, including how it originated, how consultants were selected, and what the town actually owns,remain unresolved.

Erie Environmental Services Director David Frank

The Draco project, approved in March 2025 by the Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC), allows for up to 26 wells to be drilled from a site in unincorporated Weld County, extending horizontally beneath portions of Erie. Town officials reiterated that the project is expected to move forward regardless of local action. “I would fully expect, no matter what action the town takes, that 26 wells will be drilled,” Erie Environmental Services Director David Frank said.

Town of Erie Councilmember, Dan Hoback

Early in the meeting, Early in the meeting, Councilmember Dan Hoback began pressing staff on the fundamentals of the deal: when the town was first approached, how negotiations began, and why Alameda Minerals was selected without a competitive process. When asked about this piece of the process, Frank said, “I’m not aware of any other companies that do this exact work.”

 By the end of the meeting, those questions had evolved into a broader challenge to both the process and the assumptions underlying it.

“I have serious concerns about conflict of interest,” Hoback said. The consultant, Alameda Minerals, is led by a former oil and gas executive with ties to the industry involved in the project, a connection that drew scrutiny during the meeting. He also warned that the absence of a formal request-for-proposals process could expose the town to legal and audit risks.

More significantly, Hoback disagreed with the idea that Erie lacks leverage. While town staff and some council members emphasized the town’s relatively small percentage of mineral ownership, Hoback emphasized that without permission to drill through town-owned minerals, operators may not be able to reach large portions of the approved drilling area. “The inability to drill through Erie land without owning its mineral rights can be a major, major impediment to the ability of Draco to drill much of its planned area, currently approved or not,” Hoback said.

Town officials declined to provide additional documentation or answer detailed questions about the procurement process, citing the ongoing nature of negotiations.

Those competing interpretations of the town’s authority sit at the center of the debate. Erie’s leverage stems from Colorado SB24-185, which prevents operators from forcing municipalities into pooling agreements. But how that law will function in practice, and particularly whether operators can drill through or around municipal minerals, remains untested.

Public comment reflected both that uncertainty and a sharp divide over how the town should respond. Sixteen residents and stakeholders spoke at the meeting, with the majority opposing a sale or urging alternatives such as delaying action or retaining the town’s mineral rights. Five supported moving forward with a sale or lease, including three who identified themselves as representing business or industry interests, such as mineral rights owners and energy companies.

Former state senator and attorney, Mike Foote

Former state senator Mike Foote, who worked on oil and gas legislation for years, described the current moment as the result of a long effort to give local governments control over their mineral rights. He recalled earlier policies that allowed a single mineral owner to force others into leasing, calling it something he “couldn’t believe” when he first encountered it. 

The 2024 law, he said, was designed to change that dynamic. “This was a hard-fought provision,” Foote told council, urging them to “take advantage of it” and follow the will of the community. “There’s nothing in the law anymore that says that you have to say yes.” He warned that approving a deal would entangle the town with the oil and gas industry for decades. “This puts Erie in business with oil and gas for a long, long time,” he said. “I would urge you [… ] to say no.”

Other residents raised concerns about long-term environmental and infrastructure risks. Steve Hochgesang pointed to the lifespan of plugged wells and containment systems, warning that decisions made now could create long-term liabilities, particularly for groundwater and waste disposal.

In contrast, speakers aligned with mineral interests emphasized financial realities and potential legal consequences. Kole Kelley, an oil and gas attorney at Fennemore Law, argued that development is already approved and that refusing to participate would not stop drilling but would result in forgoing compensation. He warned that the town could face litigation if it interferes with mineral owners’ ability to realize value from their assets.

Those competing perspectives were reflected in the council’s closing statements.

Hoback remained the most openly critical, raising concerns about procurement, transparency, and conflicts of interest, while also emphasizing the town’s decision-making power in this moment. “Other companies cannot drill through our land to reach other people’s mineral rights. So I’ll be a bit of the voice of the wilderness and say, yeah, we can impact Draco, despite the narrative that’s been making its way through social media and tonight’s presentation. um The initial approval of the Draco pad was not a rollover and play dead moment.  In fact, we should be fighting harder than ever,” Hoback said.

Councilmember Anil Pesaramelli aligned more directly with residents opposing the deal. “I am for health and safety,” he said. “I urge everyone to stop this sale.”

Councilmember Brian O’Connor took a more cautious position, expressing frustration with the process and emphasizing the need for more information before any decision is made.

Town of Erie Councilmember, Emily Baer

Councilmember Emily Baer delivered one of the most detailed and forceful closing statements, drawing on years of work in oil and gas regulation. 

She pushed back on the idea that selling mineral rights would improve safety, noting that many of the cited protections are already required by the state regardless of any deal. “To imply there are safety regulations that will go unenforced unless Erie sells its minerals is misleading,” she said.

Baer also argued that the town retains meaningful authority under current law, including the ability to deny subsurface access. She framed the decision as a question of values and long-term governance. “My principles are not up for purchase,” she said, reiterating her opposition to selling the town’s mineral rights.

Councilmember John Mortellaro took a more logistical tone, emphasizing that the project has already been approved and suggesting the town should consider whether it can secure benefits from an outcome it cannot prevent.

Mayor Pro Tem Brandon Bell and Mayor Andrew J. Moore both framed the decision in similar terms, emphasizing inevitability and the potential to capture value. Moore rejected claims that the town could significantly alter the project, calling that idea “100% false,” and stressed the importance of protecting negotiations.

Bell drew a direct comparison to a past landfill decision, where the town chose to accept development in exchange for compensation rather than oppose it without leverage. “If you’re going to dump trash in my backyard, you’re going to pay me for it,” he said, describing the philosophy guiding his position. His remarks made clear that he views the mineral rights as a negotiating tool rather than a mechanism to stop drilling.

To some council members, the project is unavoidable and selling the mineral rights are a means of extracting value and oversight. Others view those same rights as one of the town’s only remaining tools to challenge or constrain development.

No vote has been scheduled, and officials said any agreement would be subject to a future public hearing. Until then, core questions remain unresolved, including the exact location and value of Erie’s mineral rights, whether the town followed standard procurement practices, and how much influence Erie ultimately has over a project already approved by the state.

For now, the debate in Erie is not just about oil and gas. It is about whether a town that fought for the authority to say no will use it.

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The post Erie mineral rights hearing divides council over control, transparency and who decides appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Erie officials are considering selling or leasing the town’s mineral rights to energy company Civitas Resources, a decision that could determine oil and gas development beneath large parts of the community, as talks continue largely behind closed doors. Municipal mineral rights refer to the town’s ownership of minerals beneath the surface that can be leased or sold to energy companies for drilling.

Over the past several months, the council has met in executive session at least 10 times to discuss matters related to negotiations and the potential sale of property, with little public disclosure about the scope, timeline or terms of a possible agreement with oil and gas operator Civitas Resources. Public agendas describe these sessions using broad statutory language — such as “negotiations” or the “purchase, acquisition, lease, transfer or sale” of property — without identifying specific projects or mineral rights. The lack of detailed public information has raised concerns among residents, who say they were unaware that discussions were taking place until recently.

The issue at hand is whether Erie should sell or lease its mineral rights,  which are tied to the approved Draco Pad and could involve drilling beneath large portions of the town, and how that decision might affect public health, development, and  property values.

That distinction could be significant. If Erie retains its mineral rights and declines to lease them, it may be able to influence the configuration of drilling operations. If it sells those rights, that leverage could be reduced or eliminated.

The response received from Mayor Moore was the same as his March 17 Facebook post.

The issue first surfaced publicly in December 2025, when the Town Council voted 4-3 to move forward with hiring Alameda Mineral Advisors to negotiate a potential agreement involving the town’s mineral assets. The firm is led by Matthew Owens, a former chief operating officer of Civitas Resources. Under the agreement, Alameda is tasked with representing the town in negotiations and helping structure a potential sale or lease of its mineral rights.

According to town documents, the agreement allows for up to $4.5 million in compensation tied to the negotiation process and any resulting transaction, including a commission based on a percentage of the deal’s value. 

While the council has not publicly confirmed the full structure of a potential deal, in a December 16th council meeting Mayor Moore mentioned that Civitas Resources expressed interest in acquiring the town’s mineral rights. Civitas is the parent company of Extraction Oil & Gas, which owns the approved Draco Pad project, a fracking development that has drawn sustained opposition from some community members.

Former Erie Mayor Justin Brooks wrote in a Facebook post that selling the town’s mineral rights would be “clearing the way for this massive and experimental drilling project to move forward.”

The involvement of Owens has become a focal point for criticism, particularly given his prior role with Civitas and the perceived lack of transparency.

Many residents,  like Jennifer Bertman, have raised concerns that a consultant who stands to benefit financially from a successful deal may not be positioned to provide impartial guidance.  “To hire a former Civitas employee as a consultant who stands to make millions if the sale goes through is a conflict of interest,” Bertman wrote in an email to the Town Council.

Civitas Resources declined to comment.

Town code requires public officials to disclose and recuse themselves from decisions where conflicts of interest exist, though it is unclear how that standard applies to contracted consultants.

Owens has declined to comment.

As Erie mineral discussions struggle to find footing in a public forum, some argue that the lack of transparency is due to the format of conversations.

Councilmember Dan Hoback said the structure of executive sessions can limit meaningful public input. “Contract negotiations always take place in executive session, so public engagement often comes only once a contract or other agreement is largely in place,” Hoback said.

Under Colorado law, public bodies may enter an executive session to discuss negotiations, legal matters, and personnel issues. While no formal votes can be taken in those sessions, discussions can shape decisions that are later approved in public.

Some residents feel this “closed-door” dynamic has effectively frozen them out of the conversation regarding mineral rights. With no public hearings scheduled and only a brief window for comment at the upcoming March 24 meeting and a town hall scheduled for April 2nd, many feel the town’s feedback loop is broken.

Councilmember Emily Baer has publicly urged community members to become involved. “Council serves to represent the people,” Baer said. “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

Still, many residents say participation is difficult due to the lack of public information on what is being considered. Without dedicated public meetings or detailed disclosures, some residents argue that by the time a vote reaches the floor, the real decisions have already been made in private.

The questions facing Erie are unfolding within a broader shift in Colorado oil and gas law.

A 2019 law, Senate Bill 19-181, shifted the state’s regulatory framework to prioritize public health, safety, and welfare while giving local governments more authority over siting and land use.

More recently, Senate Bill 24-185 introduced new limits on the forced pooling of municipal mineral interests. The law requires state regulators to deny certain pooling applications involving local government-owned minerals unless operators revise their plans.

However, the law remains largely untested in practice, and it does not offer a guaranteed path to stopping drilling entirely.

“It requires the operator to amend the application to avoid municipal unleased interests — not deny the whole thing outright,” said Heather Sabo, an Erie resident who has closely followed oil and gas permitting.

County Line Rd & Arapahoe Rd, Erie Colorado

That shift gives Erie greater authority over where and how drilling occurs within town limits, but it does not eliminate development altogether, making decisions about whether to retain or sell municipal mineral rights a key factor in how much leverage the town ultimately has.

Beyond legal and financial questions, many residents point to potential health impacts associated with oil and gas development near residential areas.

Baer cited research and personal experience in describing those concerns, including her son’s illness following nearby drilling activity. “There are more than 1,700 peer-reviewed health studies that point to the negative health impacts that can and have been recorded, living near oil and gas development,” she said.

Public health findings on oil and gas impacts vary, though multiple studies have identified associations between proximity to drilling and certain health risks. The role those findings play in shaping local policy decisions is often debated.

Erie does not currently have a dedicated public health department, and residents have called for more localized study of potential impacts.

A central question remains unanswered: why would Erie choose to sell its mineral rights at this moment?

Possible motivations could include financial considerations or efforts to influence how future oil and gas development in Erie takes place. However, the town has not publicly outlined its reasoning.

Without that explanation, some residents say the process feels driven more by private negotiation than public deliberation.

Residents have organized online and through community networks, calling for the release of nonconfidential documents, dedicated public meetings and greater transparency about the potential deal.

For now, the outcome of the mineral rights discussions — and their implications for Erie’s future — remain uncertain. What is clear, residents say, is that decisions of this scale carry consequences beyond any single contract.

When decisions of this scale are made largely out of public view, residents say, trust in the process itself becomes part of what is at stake.

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The post Erie Mineral Rights Deal Advances Largely Out of Public View, Raising Concerns Over Transparency and Conflicts appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

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The process of going through all of our stories from the past 25 years of Yellow Scene Magazine (YS) to find the 25 stories best suited for a sort of “Where are they now?” segment proved to be a little more overwhelming than I expected. That’s even when you consider the fact that our first several years aren’t well documented on our website, with the earliest being 2007, which is itself incomplete, and all the rest of YS’ early years only exist in physical form, collecting dust somewhere in the home of our publisher and founder, Shavonne Blades. Even if you take away those years, that’s still a mountain of articles to go through.

While some were absolutely fascinating, did all of them reflect the time that had passed and demonstrate something significant that changed over time? In the past 25 years, our coverage area of East Boulder County and the surrounding metro area has gone through significant changes. So has Colorado as a whole. So has the country, with Colorado often along for the ride while the country has bounced from one right-wing extremist presidency, to eight years of Obama, to another right-wing extremist presidency. In fact, what I found was that seemingly insignificant stories look very different through the lens of history.

Take, for example, “Bare Necessities” — which we’ll count as the first of our 25 stories — a strange 2012 story about North Boulder nudist couple Bob and Cathy Pierce who attempted to sue the city for harassing them but found it difficult when Cathy tried to enter the county courthouse topless. The unusual story raised some interesting issues at the time about personal freedom and the ability of police to enforce laws they don’t understand, considering that baring breasts is actually legal in Boulder. We didn’t follow up on the Pierces afterwards — it’s hard to imagine that story having an interesting follow-up, but boy would you be wrong. The following year, the couple was arrested in Marblehead, Ohio after a waitress overheard what she thought was Bob threatening then-President Barack Obama. Bob insisted he was talking about killing Obama in a debate and that he wanted to go to Washington to set the politician straight. The Pierces once again made headlines in the Daily Camera in 2016 after Cathy was convicted of felony theft and criminal exploitation of an at-risk elder for allegedly tricking a 73-year-old, half-blind man into signing away his trailer home for $1.

While the Pierces’ sordid exploits weren’t something we wanted to make front page news, it demonstrates that almost every story, no matter how inconsequential it may seem at the time, could have an interesting follow-up if you take the time to look into it. So how could I narrow it down to just 25 stories that demonstrate the inevitable passage of time? In some ways, the articles I chose were somewhat arbitrary, as almost any article could have fit this piece. But I think I found a series of articles that truly do reflect the important changes in local history.

Fighting Words (2008)

Riding the blue wave that the 2008 election brought, Colorado’s first all-Democratic leadership in the legislature looked to use their newfound majority status to get affordable healthcare passed in the state, with one phrase on everyone’s lips: “single payer.” As the article pointed out, “single payer” is the other term for one of the most terrifying concepts in American politics: universal healthcare. Why it remains such a divisive issue when most other countries in the First World have long since instituted a single-payer healthcare system is somewhat of a mystery, but for whatever reason, there’s always a completely unjustified pushback on the topic in American legislatures. But at this unique moment in 2008, Democrats finally thought they could get it pushed through. Spoiler alert: They didn’t.

Single-payer healthcare in Colorado is much like the proverbial football that Lucy always holds out for Charlie Brown, promising she won’t pull it away at the last moment, only for poor Chuck to land flat on his back when Lucy inevitably does so anyway. In 2017, Colorado attempted to pass a single-payer healthcare system by ballot initiative, but there was a problem: Colorado’s constitution bans public funding for abortion, so the ballot initiative, the way it was worded, would have meant that everyone who currently has abortions covered by private insurance would be forced to pay out of pocket, a situation that drew opposition from major abortion advocates. As recently as February of this year, a new bill was proposed to study the potential impact of single-payer healthcare, a bill that’s similar to one that failed in the last few years, but this version of the bill wouldn’t be funded by taxpayers, giving it a fighting chance of getting passed. Still, a lot has changed since 2008 when Democrats thought they could get single payer passed. Now they’re fighting just to explore the possibility.

An Education in Luring Top Minds (2008)

In 2008, Colorado State Sen. Brandon Shaffer was trying to get more people to go into teaching, particularly in districts and subject areas that are significantly understaffed, by instituting a $500,000 scholarship fund to get kids to go to Colorado public colleges and take teacher prep courses. Well, it seems he succeeded and created what became known as the Teach Colorado Grant, and in 2009 he introduced the “Troops to Teachers” bill which sought to bring more military veterans into the program.

Well, Schaffer went on to become President of the Colorado State Senate from 2009-2013, and, even though he’s no longer involved in politics, his dream of scholarships for teaching lives on. Today, the Educator Recruitment and Retention Program (ERR) offers up to $10,000 in one-time assistance to towards teacher prep courses, as long as the recipient signs on to work for three years in a “shortage area” for Colorado Public Schools. Still, education has a long way to go in Colorado, a state that was recently ranked 45th in the nation for education by USA Today, with teachers making less than the state median salary. It seems like we need more than just scholarships, we need to pay teachers more to incentivize better performance.

The Most Expensive Seat in the Country (2008)

In 2008, YS stopped in to a fundraiser for a “non-descript” man self-financing his campaign for the second U.S. Congressional District seat in what was being called the most expensive seat in the country (or at least one of the most expensive), predicting at the time that it would take $10 million or more to settle the seat. That non-descript man was none other than Jared Polis who, in 2019, was sworn in as Colorado’s first openly gay governor as well as our first Jewish governor.

Polis not only made CD2 one of the most expensive in the country, ten years later, he helped make that election the most expensive in Colorado history up to that point, with more than $200 million spent on Colorado campaigns and with Polis pumping more than $23 million into his own campaign. In 2022, he won re-election with a bit less of his own money financing campaign but still pumped $12.6 million into his own campaign that year. And, while we had a hard time picking Polis as our endorsement for the CD2 election in 2008, we had a little bit of an easier time in 2022 picking him for governor against the too-extreme Trump supporter Heidi Ganahl.

Far From the Party: A Republican Fights for Her Political Life (2008)

In 2008, we checked in on Betsy Markey, the Democratic challenger for Colorado’s 4th Congressional District against incumbent Marilyn Musgrave. The seat had traditionally been held by Republicans in this district, but Musgrave saw her lead in each election dwindling more and more, making it seem possible that, in 2008, Markey might overtake the Republican and win the seat.

Well, she did. In the 2008 election, Markey’s 11-point win was more than even her own staff had hoped for. The victory was short-lived, though, as Republican Cory Gardner won the seat back for his party in 2010, which he kept until 2015 when he moved from the House to the Senate. Markey’s political career didn’t end there, though, as she was then appointed to be secretary for intergovernmental affairs in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration, a post she held until 2013.

Who Killed The Rocky (2009)

The closure of Rocky Mountain News, one of Colorado’s major newspapers, in February 2009 was a seismic shift in the local news industry that we look at in more depth in this issue titled, “The History of Independent Media in Boulder County,” which discusses how the 300 reporters at Rocky Mountain News (nicknamed “The Rocky”) competed with the same number of reporters from The Denver Post, resulting in too much competition for the same leads. In our 2009 piece, former Rocky writer Dave Flomberg explained the flaws of The Rocky’s parent corporation, E.W. Scripps Company, and how they failed to let The Rocky find a niche by focusing on local news while also failing to grow their digital content to reduce print costs.

Nearly 10 years later, in 2018, The Rocky’s biggest competitor, The Denver Post, nearly met the same demise. Learning lessons from the past, the staff of The Post launched what became known as The Denver Post Rebellion where its writers printed a series of articles protesting against the leadership of its hedge fund owners, Alden Global Capital, with the headline “News Matters” and the subheading “Colo. should demand the newspaper it deserves.” While Alden Global kept to their gameplan rather than following The Post’s call for them sell to better owners, Coloradans demonstrated that local news mattered to them, and The Denver Post Rebellion is often cited as part of the reason the newspaper didn’t fall the way The Rocky did.

Graduation: Now What? (2015)

In 2015, we examined how difficult it was for college students to find jobs in the wake of the then-recent recession. At the time, 44% of college graduates were underemployed, meaning they took jobs that didn’t require their college degree. According to an article in Forbes last year, the situation hasn’t improved in the past decade. 52% of college graduates — more than half — are now working in jobs that don’t require higher education and 75% of them remain in this situation for a full decade after college.

Down the Road: Ten Transportation Issues Impacting You in the Next 10 Years (2011) and Derailed (2016)

In this 2011 article, writer James Burrus talked about the transportation issues that would define the next decade. Now that it’s 14 years later, how much of what Burrus talked about has been realized? The Boulder BCycle bike-sharing program that he mentioned continues to this day, but now it competes with e-scooters from Lime, Lyft, and other major companies. Still, other transportation options that Burrus talked about in 2011, like FasTracks, have not fared as well over the years. In our 2016 article “Derailed” talked about a modified FasTracks proposal that was being put to voters.

The 2004 FasTracks program ran into funding difficulties in the 2010s that pushed their projection to build a commuter rail between Denver and Boulder/Longmont to the 2040s. As recently as February 2025, RTD has been talking about a revised plan to have a train from Denver to Fort. Collins with stops in between, such as Boulder and Longmont, by January 1, 2029. At this point, we’ll believe it when we see it.

Frack Attack (2012)

The concept of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing is a familiar one in 2025, especially for those living in the oil-rich areas of Colorado such as Erie. But, in 2012, the concept was still somewhat of a new one to our readers, enough so that we had to explain what it was. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, fracking dates back to an idea from 1862, although the modern concept of hydraulic fracturing started in the 1940s. Still, the boom in fracking is largely a 21st century phenomenon and, of the approximately 1 million wells that have been fracked from 1940 to 2014, about one-third of them were fracked after the year 2000.

In 2025, fracking and horizontal drilling have become more commonplace, and the results are becoming more and more catastrophic. EnvironmentAmerica estimates that 57,000 acres of land in Colorado have already been damaged by fracking, a number it says is equivalent to one-third of the acres of land in the state’s park system. Our latest fracking controversy happened just last year when the Draco Oil and Gas Development Plan proposed by Extraction Oil & Gas Inc./Civitas Resources was set to start drilling underneath residential areas and schools in Erie but was halted by a unanimous vote of the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission. The Draco Pad has sparked significant controversy due to its plan to drill 26 horizontal wells extending five miles beneath residential areas and schools in Erie. This would mark the longest lateral drilling ever attempted in Colorado, surpassing the previous maximum of four miles. Initially, the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) unanimously halted the project. However, on March 26, 2025, the ECMC reversed its decision, approving the plan with a 4–1 vote.

Notables: The New Guy (2012)

In 2012, we sat down with Longmont’s “New Guy,” the new city manager Harold Dominguez who had just uprooted himself from San Angelo, Texas to manage the Boulder County city. “Considering we had over 100 days of over 100-degree weather in San Angelo, I think we will enjoy it,” he said at the time about making the move from the sweltering Texas heat to the more temperate climate in Colorado. Well, he seems to enjoy it pretty well, because Dominguez isn’t the new guy anymore. He continues to serve as Longmont’s city manager to this day. In 2023, his base salary was raised to $305,620 by a unanimous vote  from Longmont City Council due to his exceptional competency at the job and the council’s desire to hold onto him in that position.

Breaking out of the cubicle (2012) and The Rise of Flexible Jobs (2012)

In 2012’s “Breaking out of the cubicle,” we checked in with Avery Brewing Company and explained how they’re considered one of the most fun places to work in Colorado, largely because of the fact that they let employees grab a free beer from the taproom at any time, even during work hours. We also dipped into some other fun workplaces such as Louisville’s Natural Habitat Adventures, which was sending employees on annual trips and holding ping-pong tournaments, and Training Peaks in Lafayette which gave employees a $600 per year stipend to spend on fitness. In “The Rise of Flexible Jobs,” we talked to Sara Sutton, who started FlexJobs to help people in the then-difficult task of finding flexible jobs that allowed work from home.

Of course, we all know how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the standard workplace, forcing companies to allow more employees to work from home. At the height of the pandemic, 61.5% of all work in the U.S. was remote. Today, hybrid and remote work is still popular, with the average American worker spending 1.4 days of the week working from home. So getting a free beer during work hours doesn’t quite hold a candle to being able to work out of your own home.

Kiss the Ring (2012) and Lucky Stars (2012)

We did two articles on Brad Feld in 2012, the man who was one of the pioneers of Boulder becoming a hub for tech start up companies. As managing director of venture capital firm Foundry Group and founder of Techstars, Feld was quickly becoming one of the rockstars of the venture capital field.

13 years later, and Feld still lives in Boulder with his wife, Amy Batchelor, who he started the Anchor Point Foundation. Foundry Group and Techstars are still up and running. Meanwhile, Feld spends his time writing books about venture capital and startups, running marathons, and sponsoring documentaries about topics he’s passionate about. Meanwhile, Boulder is still listed amongst the top cities in the U.S. for tech startups, recently making the lists from Crowdspring and Yahoo! Finance.

Smoke Signals: Q&A with Mason Tvert (2012)

Anyone who enjoys cannabis legally in Colorado has Mason Tvert to thank for it. He led successful campaigns to decriminalize cannabis possession on CU and CSU campuses, passed an initiative to legalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis for adults in Denver and, in 2012, we interviewed him about his efforts to pass Amendment 64: The Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act, which, at the time, looked likely to pass.

It’s little secret what happened after that. About a month after our article ran, Colorado voters approved Amendment 64 and Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize recreational cannabis use. Other states caught on, and recreational cannabis use is now fully legal in 25 states as well as the District of Columbia. Taking it a step further, Colorado has just started issuing licenses for “healing centers” where people can ingest psychedelic mushrooms under supervision.

Small Space, Big Idea (2013) and Resurrecting a Village: Tiny Homes for the Homeless (2016)

In 2013, we profiled Jay Shafer, founder of Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. and the movement to live more simply in homes built to be under 150 square feet. In 2016, we looked into how tiny homes could be a better solution for solving homelessness than jail-like temporary shelters which are undignified for the people living in them as well as more expensive in a comparative analysis of costs compared to Dignity Village, (a Tiny Home community in Portland, OR). Flash forward to 2025, and the tiny home market is expanding very rapidly. Yahoo Finance! Predicts that the size of the tiny homes market is estimated to grow by $3.71 billion from 2025-2029.

The Privatization of Colorado’s Public Education (2014)

If we thought that education was overly privatized in 2014, we had no idea what we were in for in the years to come. In our 2014 article, we looked at the increasing use of private corporations to dictate standardized tests in an attempt to cut costs and, by adopting a consistent, objective measure of student knowledge and skills, qualify for No Child Left Behind funding. Over reliance on companies such as Pearson went hand in hand with the introduction of Common Core State Standards.

In the years since this story ran, public education has become even more privatized nationwide with the sudden boom in charter schools, independently managed schools that somehow still qualify as a public school option for kids. According to pro-charter school advocacy group National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the five years from 2019 to 2024 saw an increase in enrollment in charter schools of 400,000 students nationwide in the 46 states that allow charter schools. Colorado is, of course, one of those 46 states. So, while the use of private companies to handle day-to-day operations in a public school was problematic, the move to make public education more privatized has become a sort of horrifying mutation of the existing problem.

Net Neutrality (2015)

In 2015, we looked at the decision by the FCC to classify the Internet under Title II of the 1996 Telecommunications act to ensure that service providers would treat every website equally and not charge fees to certain sites, like Netflix, to ensure the fastest possible speeds. The issue has gone back and forth over the years, being repealed during the Trump administration, then reinstated last year under the Biden administration. But then, in January of this year, a federal appeals court struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, arguing that the FCC did not have the legal authority to enact such rules. Interestingly enough, our article predicted that the net neutrality rules would make the Time Warner/Comcast merger more likely, but that merger never happened.

Hard-partying brothers Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) plan to turn their sister’s wedding into a wild getaway. Photo Credit: Gemma LaMana.

Spotlight on Adam Devine (2016)

In 2016, we got a chance to sit down with actor Adam Devine to talk about his new comedy Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, a movie you might not have heard of before despite its all-star cast featuring Zac Efron, Anna Kendrick, and Aubrey Plaza. That might have something to do with the abysmal reviews of the movie, which currently holds a score of 38% on Rotten Tomatoes with the critic’s consensus reading “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates benefits from the screwball premise and the efforts of a game cast, even if the sporadically hilarious results don’t quite live up to either.”

Meanwhile, Devine’s family has had a new addition, as last year he and his wife Chloe Bridges welcomed their son Beau into the world. Devine said of the experience of being a new dad that “Every day is like a new adventure.” Fatherhood seems to suit him pretty well.

Graphic image by De La Vaca

The ORR v. Abortion | Duly Noted (2019)

In this 2019 piece, we looked at Scott Lloyd, the Trump appointee who was then running the Office of Refugee Resettlement and denied a refugee the right to an abortion, even going so far as to say that he has never granted permission for a detainee to receive an abortion for any reason. Thankfully, the refugee sued through the ACLU and won her right to an abortion, but the incident demonstrated the Trump administration’s real agenda on abortion: They wanted to end it at all costs.

Sadly, we all know where this story goes: In 2022, the Supreme Court, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson, overturned the landmark case of Roe v. Wade which declared a legal right to abortion. The decision reversing Roe v. Wade, spearheaded by all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — found that “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” setting the battle for reproductive freedom back decades. The result has been that the decision on abortion rights was thrown back to the states, with many now finding their access to abortion to be severely restricted. Make no mistake, the Trump administration always wanted its appointees to stand in the way of any and all rights to abortion.

Time After Time… (2019)

Sadly, our 2019 article entitled “Time After Time…” was not a tribute to longtime pop star and LGBTQ+ advocate Cyndi Lauper. Instead, it talked about how time after time Donald Trump chose the dishonorable, disreputable, and immoral path and asked if the Republican Party had the fortitude to break ranks and vote to impeach one of their own amidst the strict party-line votes that are so common for Congress in the 21st century.

As we now know, Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019 brought forth charges against him  for improperly seeking help from a foreign power to boost his chances of re-election. In fact, in 2021, Trump became the first president to be impeached twice, having faced another impeachment over his role in the January 6 insurrection. But he was acquitted of all charges in both cases by the Senate, keeping him from being removed from office and being barred from running again. Thus, he ran again in 2024 and became the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms as well as the first convicted felon to be elected to the Presidency.

“…Unmarried, straight white dudes who couldn’t get laid.” (2019)

In 2019, we discussed the Newsweek interview by Tareq Haddad with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie that explained that Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, targeted incels and other insecure white men with a message of xenophobia and racism because of how easy they are to manipulate. In essence, we learned that Bannon knew exactly what he was doing the entire time, using hatred and frustration as fuel for the fire that skyrocketed Trump into an unlikely presidency in 2016.

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, Bannon was no longer a member of the inner circle, and yet he still communicates with Trump and his team from time to time. However, Bannon recently told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation that he is part of an effort to win Trump a third term in 2028, despite the fact that presidents are term limited by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. Short of a violent overthrow of the government, a third Trump term seems unlikely.

Fatal police shooting in Boulder over the weekend (2023)

Despite being one of the most recent stories on our list, this might be the story with the most significant developments in the time since the original article was posted. In 2023, we reported on the erratic behavior of a then-unidentified woman, who was later identified as 51-year-old Jeannette Alatorre. After officers responded to reports of a woman at the North Boulder Recreation Center refusing to leave the bathroom, less than an hour later they received another call about the same woman pointing a gun at the people trying to exit the recreation center. The gun was later determined to be an airsoft gun with the orange tip removed, but officers say they were unaware of that at the time. The police claim to have taken the proper steps necessary to de-escalate the situation non-violently before ultimately using lethal force, resulting in Alatorre’s death.

It’s possible that the police used every means available to them to avoid the death of Alatorre, but in the wake of officer-related shootings that could have been easily prevented, it was important to make absolutely certain that the right actions were taken in Alatorre’s case. This is where YS entered the story. When YS requested the officer’s body-worn camera (BWC) footage, Boulder Police Department demanded an exorbitant fee of $2,857.50 for locating and redacting the footage. YS, attorney Dan Williams, and Alatorre’s daughter entered into a lawsuit alleging that the fee violated Colorado’s Law Enforcement Integrity and Transparency Act of 2020, which restricts such fees. The city of Boulder argued that the broader Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act allowed them to charge reasonable fees of requesters. A district court ruled in YS’ favor in April 2024, but the City of Boulder filed an appeal in January of this year that has yet to be heard by a court. So, while the tragic story of Jeannette Alatorre is heartbreaking, it may change the way police are held accountable for such incidents in the future.

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The post 25 Stories Then and Now appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

There’s something about the words “rules-making process” that almost instinctively causes the vast majority of people’s eyes to glaze over. However, within the glaze of boredom for many, comes real power with significant consequences for our daily lives. 

The Colorado environmental movement knows this and has the paper cuts to prove it. 

Last October, the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) adopted new rules that included “robust protections” for disproportionately impacted (DI) communities living with the cumulative impacts of oil and gas operations. It was clear that after the 18-month public process, the State of Colorado was calling the new rules a win.

The ECMC Chair, Jeff Robbins, claimed, “These rules represent the most protective standards for oil and gas development in our state’s history and require new measures to avoid, minimize, and mitigate adverse impacts on disproportionately impacted communities.” 

It was also clear that the Colorado environmental movement didn’t feel the same way, and their reaction to the new rules had a theme. 

Citizens for a Healthy Community: “Polis Administration Gives Oil And Gas Industry Roadmap For Expanding Neighborhood Drilling In Disproportionately Impacted Communities.”

Colorado Sierra Club Director Margaret Annexstein: “Gov. Polis ECMC has once again failed Coloradans and legislative mandates meant to protect us from severe pollution.” 

Conservation Colorado: “New Rules Help Address Oil And Gas Pollution, Fall Short Of Adequately Protecting Colorado Communities.”

The difference in tone wasn’t just noticeable, it was damning, and it raised some serious questions.

Thankfully, Yellow Scene had the opportunity to discuss these new rules with two people who were involved in the process. Ean Thomas Tafoya, who is the National Vice President of State Programs at GreenLatinos, and the Director of GreenLatinos Colorado. As well as Patricia Garica-Nelson, who is the Colorado Fossil Fuel Just Transition Advocate at GreenLatinos Colorado. 

Yellow Scene: In the letter regarding Cumulative Impact & Enhanced Systems & Practices signed by 23 state lawmakers on August 21st to the Department of Natural Resources and the Energy and Carbon Management Commission – these lawmakers claimed that the draft rules at that time significantly deviated from the intent of the laws passed (BH 24-1346, SB24-229, and HB24-1338). 

Do you agree with the statement that the rules in effect today deviated significantly from the intent of the laws?

Patricia Garica-Nelson: “Yeah, initially in the June draft, there would have been a hard 2000-foot setback, no exceptions. The agency did pull that back, and so there are more off-ramps for operators to get around that setback. So I feel like that one of the biggest issues that we left unresolved was that proximity approach that was something that we had really pushed for. We had tried to get, you know, a bigger setback, at least 2500 feet, but we were unsuccessful.

“I do want to mention, when it comes to notification, we were able to include notifications for community members within 4000 feet of a new site within Disproportionately Impacted Communities (DIC). I feel like it is positive that we are requiring more; we’re requiring more engagement with communities further and further away from sites. So that’s really positive. We also included operators also have to include more information about how their site will cumulatively impact or how that would add to the already existing cumulative impacts to communities. 

“But unfortunately, that wouldn’t be any criteria used for a denial of a permit. So at least now, I feel like we’re putting more safeguards for communities, not the ones that we wanted ultimately, but we’re slowly getting more protections into these roles.”

YS: Do you believe that these rules effectively protect communities of color low in communities and the residents who live in counties with significant oil and gas activities, such as Weld and Adams County? 

Ean Thomas Tafoya: “Are these rules more protective than the rules that existed before? Yes, are they the gold standard yet? No. And I will also say we have to wait for them to take effect for us to know how effective they are being. We’re only now doing interviews for the community liaisons. We do not know what the long-term effect will be with the commissioners’ decisions. And then, if you couple in the fact that we’re also headed to a new governor, and how and what the structure and tone of the commission will be, is probably the biggest hurdle.”

YS: ECMC chair Jeff Robbins, in a statement, claimed that these rules represent the most protective standards for oil and gas development in our state’s history and require new measures to avoid, minimize, and mitigate adverse impacts on disproportionately impacted communities. 

Do you believe that to be a true statement, considering the Chevron Corporation said it supported the ECMC “staff’s thoughtful revisions”?

Ean Thomas Tafoya: “100% these are the most protective rules that have ever existed at ECMC. But we, as environmental justice leaders, didn’t get everything we wanted. For example, the hard setback to protect communities.”

Patricia Garcia-Nelson:” Though these aren’t all the protections we were able to get in some protections, like the notification. A lot of the time, people don’t know what’s happening until it’s already been approved or it’s already getting built. So we feel that definitely there are more opportunities. More engagement for community members, and that was also part of the Environmental Justice Act 1266, that people in Colorado have a right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, but also have input in decision making or for the environment around them.”

YS: Citizens for a Healthy Community claimed that the Polis administration, through these rules, has given the oil and gas industry a quote: ‘road map’ for expanding neighborhood drilling in disproportionately impacted communities.

Is that how you see it? Do these rules allow for expanded drilling in neighborhoods?

Ean Thomas Tafoya: “I mean, they were operating under [previous] rules that allowed them to expand. These rules won’t preclude them from expanding, but the rules and the changes we got put more opportunity for the community to use their voice. And we at GreenLatinos feel like that is the strongest and first step because so many times we’ve been called into environmental justice situations, and leadership has said, ‘Well, nobody’s told us.’

“I can tell you time and time again that the process feels too much like the train’s already moving analogy, that it’s much more difficult. So, if communities are being informed about risk. And it’s not just this bill that is making a difference, right? 

“We’ve passed other legislation that actually can make a bad actor get their license taken away. You’re seeing that happen. We’ve passed; I’m trying to think we’ve had legislation that requires the disclosure of what’s in fracking fluid. I think this right-to-know concept is going to allow communities to make the decision for themselves about what is protective and not protective.”

Patricia Garica-Nelson: “Also, last year, we worked on a bill that would expand the powers that the air pollution control division has when it comes to holding people accountable. And so they expanded their powers to be able to take operators to court for their bad acting.”

YS: As you know, we have a new administration in the White House, and they have selected the CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy [Chris Wright] to be their pick for Energy Secretary. 

Do you have any thoughts or concerns about both Colorado Senators supporting Trump’s pick for energy secretary and the impact it could have on Colorado and the nation?

Ean Thomas Tafoya: “Yes, we are incredibly disappointed. We are disappointed to see our senators break not only for the Energy Secretary but also the Department of Interior Secretary. And I think, in particular, seeing the video of that CEO accosting the community youth, particularly with the sunrise movement, who are concerned about the actions that are being taken and the science that’s being ignored.”

The post The Dirty, Messy Work of Cleaning Up After Oil & Gas in Colorado appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Press releases are provided to Yellow Scene Magazine. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

COLORADO ENERGY & CARBON MANAGEMENT COMMISSION STAYS HIGHLY CONTESTED DRACO PAD INDEFINITELY

Ensuring protection of public health, safety, and the environment is prioritized

DENVER, CO — Today, the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) voted unanimously to stay the Draco Oil and Gas Development Plan (OGDP) proposed by Extraction Oil & Gas Inc./Civitas Resources. The plan, which would have allowed Civitas to horizontally drill and fracture 26 wellbores, some extending five miles underground, under the Town of Erie — including residential areas and schools — has been indefinitely paused. This decision ensures that public health, safety, welfare, environmental protection, and wildlife resources remain at the forefront of Colorado’s energy policies.

The stay comes after the Commission identified the need for additional analysis of alternative development locations, which would ensure that Erie residents are more appropriately represented in local decision-making. While risks remain with any proposed location, including the unprecedented length of the wellbores and the proximity to existing wells, the Commission acknowledged the importance of further investigation into potential safer alternatives before proceeding.

“We are deeply relieved and grateful that the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission listened to the voices of Erie residents and issued a stay on the Draco oil and gas development project,” said Sami Carroll, Founder of Flatiron Meadows Oil & Gas Monitoring Group. “This decision represents a victory for the community. It affirms that the Commission recognizes the unique complications surrounding the governance of the Town of Erie and the impact that such projects have on residents. Today, we celebrate this win and look forward to continued work with the Town of Erie on ensuring a safer, more sustainable future.”

The Commission’s decision was shaped by the newly adopted Cumulative Impacts rules stemming from Senate Bill 19-181, which require operators to demonstrate that adverse impacts from oil and gas operations are first avoided, and if unavoidable, minimized or mitigated. The Commission recognized that further exploration of alternative locations represents the best opportunity to avoid unnecessary harms to the community. Additionally, the stay allows time for further discussions between Civitas Resources and the Town of Erie to consider potential alternative sites.

The Commission also weighed the significant future risks posed by the proposed site, including the proximity to residential communities, schools, and ongoing developments, as well as the impact on air quality in the Denver Metropolitan/North Front Range ozone nonattainment area. The Commission’s deliberations underscored the importance of considering both current and foreseeable impacts when evaluating new energy projects.

The decision to stay the Draco OGDP also carries broader implications for other Colorado communities facing similar development proposals. Save The Aurora Reservoir (STAR), which has been advocating for the protection of its own community, welcomed the decision as a strong indication that the Commission will prioritize public health, safety, and environmental protection in future development considerations.

“Today’s ruling shows that the Commission is committed to assessing the full range of risks associated with large-scale oil and gas projects. This is a step in the right direction and sets an important precedent for projects like the proposed Lowry CAP pad, which we fear could have serious consequences for the region,” said STAR. “We encourage the Commission to continue applying the cumulative impacts mitigation hierarchy, ensuring that harmful projects are prevented and that our communities remain protected.”

Community Reactions
Residents of Erie expressed relief and gratitude for the Commission’s decision. “We are so relieved that the Energy Commission ruled on behalf of the public interest,” said Jennifer Hanan, an Erie resident. “This decision shows the importance of listening to the concerns of surrounding communities before moving forward with potentially harmful projects.”

Barbara & Tom Petruzzi, longtime residents of Erie, added, “After 43 years in the Boulder mountains, we chose to retire in Erie because we believed people here care about the environment and health of the residents. This decision proves we were right. The Commission upheld its responsibility to protect public health and safety, and we are incredibly grateful.”

“We’re thankful that the ECMC has chosen to prioritize our community’s health and safety over corporate interests,” said Paul VanTol, a local healthcare professional. “This is a significant victory for Boulder and Weld Counties.”

Looking Ahead
While the Commission’s stay on the Draco OGDP is seen as a win for public health and environmental safety, organizations like 350 Colorado continue to advocate for the full rejection of such projects, emphasizing the need to prioritize sustainable, community-centered solutions over harmful fossil fuel extraction.

“While today’s decision is a step forward, we are committed to ensuring that projects like Draco — which pose significant risks to our air, water, and residents — are not just moved but fully rejected,” said Melissa Burrell, 350 Colorado Boulder County Team Coordinator. “We will continue to fight for policies that put public health and environmental sustainability ahead of corporate profits.”

About Flatiron Meadows Oil & Gas Monitoring Group (FMOGMG):

Flatiron Meadows O&G Monitoring Group is a coalition of concerned residents and community members directly impacted by oil and gas development, specifically the Draco Oil and Gas Development Project. The group is dedicated to educating and empowering neighbors to take action to protect their homes, health, and environment. FMOGMG serves as an information hub, advocate, and mobilizer for local communities affected by energy development in Colorado.

About Save The Aurora Reservoir (STAR):

Save The Aurora Reservoir (STAR) is a nonprofit organization committed to protecting the Aurora Reservoir and surrounding communities from harmful oil and gas operations. STAR advocates for stronger environmental protections and public health safeguards in the face of industrial expansion.

About 350 Colorado:

350 Colorado is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing the climate crisis and advocating for a just transition to a sustainable, fossil-free future. As the largest grassroots climate organization in Colorado, 350 Colorado works to advance policies that prioritize people and the planet over corporate interests.

For media inquiries or more information, please contact:

Sami Carroll, Founder, Flatiron Meadows Oil & Gas Monitoring Group
samicarroll@gmail.com | 303.587.9171

Melissa Burrell, 350 Colorado Boulder County Team Coordinator
melissa@350colorado.org | 360.528.7408

The post Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission Stays Highly Contested Draco Pad Indefinitely appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

My name is Skylar Weitzel and I have lived in Erie since 2004.  I didn’t know a lot about Erie’s mining or O&G history when I moved here, probably because I was too distracted by the amazing view of the front range and all the open space.  I remember seeing O&G equipment out in the middle of the open spaces on my way out to I-25, conveniently overlooking them and quickly forgetting about them after they were beyond my rearview mirror when I went back into town from the highway.

Photo: Erie Protectors

In the years since I became an Erie resident, those open spaces east of where we’re tonight have been developed with houses to the point that you can’t even see the O&G equipment from Erie Parkway anymore because homes and families with children mostly surround them.  New families with their young children play outside in the yard, running through the sprinklers in the summer, while many of them have no idea what type of potential health dangers lurk just below the surface and under their basements.

In the last week, there have been multiple town notifications for oil and gas spills in Erie. 5 wells are leaking crude oil and other contaminants into the soil. All of these recent spills are from wells that are owned and operated by Civitas, the same company that is trying to drill the longest horizontal wells under thousands of Erie residents.  As if the size of the project and length of the proposed drilling weren’t enough, they will be attempting to do this while navigating the literal subterranean minefield and the graveyard of capped and/or abandoned wells that were left to spill and leak into the soil by their previous owner before those assets were sold and resold to different O&G companies like mortgage portfolios before the housing crash in 2008.

We are in the middle of a drought in Colorado, and we don’t know how long that drought will last, but I can’t see any logical rationale for allowing the use of nearly a billion gallons of water for this project, which will then be rendered useless due to the chemicals that the fracking will permanently contaminate for residential or even agricultural use.

Photo: Erie Protectors

The Draco pad is a future environmental disaster that can still be avoided if the ECMC does the right thing and puts a stop to the catastrophe before it ever begins.  I will finish with one last thought: imagine if we had all grown up using wind, solar, and other alternative sources of energy, and someone tried to convince us that burning fossil fuels was the newest, dirtiest, and best way to power our electric grid, how crazy would that sound to us?

To get involved in oil and gas operations in Erie, reach out to Erie Protectors: https://erieprotectors.com/

The post Letter to the Editor: Draco Pad appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

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Civitas Resources plans to drill twenty-six wells just outside Erie limits concerns residents and town administration.

When Kelsey Barnholt moved to Erie four years ago, she thought its reputation as a mining town was based on a past era, the Gold Rush or a time before we really understood the consequences of mining fossil fuels on people’s health and the environment. 

But she can see oil and gas drilling rigs from the window of what she thought was her dream home, where she worries about her own health, that of her two young daughters, and whether she’ll eventually regret having ever lived in Erie at all. 

“We can’t stay here that much longer — within the next two years, we’ll be gone,” Barnholt said. “I’m just really worn out on fighting this fight and trying to compartmentalize that the air around you is totally toxic.” 

Barnholt has spent months voicing her opposition to the latest drilling proposal near her neighborhood, the Draco Well Pad. This proposal would drill twenty-six new fracking wells in Weld County just outside of the Town of Erie city limits. The plan involves drilling five miles underground across county lines into Boulder—wellbores nearly a mile longer than typically used. 

Residents, town officials, and environmental activists are concerned about how the project would contribute to air pollution, water pollution and scarcity, traffic and quality of life for the neighborhood, and site-specific risks from the extreme-reach wellbores and the presence of abandoned wells. 

On the west side of Erie, Boulder County has largely ceased oil and gas extraction, having plugged and abandoned many of its 200 remaining oil and gas drilling wells and receiving its last applications for new drilling permits in the early 2000s. But to the east, Weld County is the largest oil and gas producer in Colorado, with 17,317 active wells as of Sept. 1, 2023. 

Since the well pad is outside Erie’s official jurisdiction, the Town of Erie cannot approve or deny the proposal. However, the Town has been clear about its concerns regarding the plan, including health impacts from poor air quality and ground-level ozone emissions from extraction in the decades the well has been active. Then there’s also nuisance concerns, like high traffic in the area, noise pollution, odors, and aesthetic degradation of the neighborhood, said Environmental Services Director David Frank. 

Additionally, a housing development plan that has been in progress since 2017 would be only 1,500 feet from the Draco Pad, less than the State’s 2,000-foot buffer regulation, put in place for resident safety in 2020. 

The proposal is also complicated by the presence of twenty-eight legacy plugged and abandoned wells and twenty-four active or shut-in wells within the proposed drilling and spacing unit. Drilling near those wells without proper remediation could stir up soil containing contaminants from past extraction, some of which are linked to cancer and other severe health conditions. Civitas would plug and abandon twenty-two wells as part of the proposal to offset the impacts of new drilling. 

“Though the development doesn’t occur within Erie, it is directly adjacent, and obviously, a lot of those impacts are going to be felt by our residents and by the town,” Frank said. 

Barnholt is also concerned by the volume of water that would be used to drill the site and how it could affect Colorado’s landscape overall. A cumulative impacts analysis from Erie Protectors estimates that 541 million gallons of water would be used to frack the twenty-six wells. 

“We are in a climate crisis, and that water never re-enters the water cycle,” Barnholt said. “It’s pretty unconscionable that they could even consider a project like this, it’s irresponsible.” 

The Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission — which grants or denies oil and gas permits in the state — requires mitigation, minimization, and avoidance measures for the protection of public health, safety, and welfare of the environment and wildlife resources on all drilling projects. The Draco Pad will be reviewed by the ECMC Commission to ensure that the project complies with ECMC rules, wrote Community Relations Manager Kristin Kemp. 

Kemp wrote that the ECMC will require an engineering review of the horizontal wellbore design, offset well evaluations, and aquifer coverage, particularly for the Draco Pad. 

Public Affairs Manager Rich Coolidge wrote in an email that Civitas would develop the Draco well pad using an all-electric, lower-emission drill rig and a quiet completions fleet that reduces sound and emissions. Civitas also plans to remove tanks and equipment located in and around Erie from the twenty wells scheduled for remediation and return close to twelve acres of land.

“We know that Colorado’s regulations governing oil and natural gas development are some of the strictest in the world, and we see the Draco pad meeting and even exceeding the state’s regulations,” Coolidge wrote. “Following conversations from stakeholders, local governments, and others, we’ve developed that pad site to minimize and mitigate impacts by locating it east of Erie in unincorporated Weld County.” 

Concerned residents in the area contacted Colorado Rising, a nonprofit action group that opposes oil and gas in the state, to get support as they pushed back against the proposal by submitting public comments, demonstrations, and protests and sharing information with their community. 

Colorado Rising is entirely opposed to any kind of fracking in Colorado, particularly in a place like Weld County where it is so concentrated, said Co-Director Caitt Maeve. Residents have to deal with the consequences of oil and gas on a daily basis, like increased risk of wildlife, air pollution, environmental degradation, and the mental stress and uncertainty that results from living near drilling sites, she added. 

“Erie’s full of young families, and our communities deserve clean air, clean water, healthy lifestyles, and not the toxic fallout from Big Oil’s selfish agenda,” Maeve said. 

While Barnholt is at her own crossroads, deciding whether to stay in Erie or move on from the town she loves for the sake of her family’s health, she sees the town as being at its own crossroads. Will this be a place where the community thrives or the oil and gas industry? 

“You can’t have heavy industry and a thriving community,” Barnholt said. “You just can’t. They can’t coexist and keep everyone healthy.” 

The Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission will hold a local public hearing on the proposed Draco Pad on Oct. 29, 2024, at the Erie Middle School from 5 to 8 p.m.

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The post Draco Well Pad Proposal Looms Over Erie appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Press releases are provided to Yellow Scene Magazine. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Public Invited to Address Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission on Draco Oil and Gas Development Project

Erie, CO – October 18, 2024 – The Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) will hold a public meeting on Tuesday, October 29th, from 5-8 PM at Erie Middle School, 650 Main St., Erie, CO 80516. The meeting will provide an opportunity for the public to voice their concerns and opinions regarding the Draco Oil and Gas Development Project.

Doors will open at 4:30 PM, and Spanish interpretation and child care will be available. Individuals wishing to speak at the public hearing or submit written comments can sign up on the ECMC website.

The Draco Oil and Gas Development Project is a proposed 26 wellbore fracking operation that extends 5 miles west from unincorporated Weld County into Boulder County. The project impacts the towns of Erie and Lafayette and over 20 distinct neighborhoods.

Community members are urged to attend the meeting and learn more about the potential dangers of this unprecedented and dangerous proposal.

Contact:

Sami Carroll

Flatiron Meadows Oil & Gas Monitoring Group

fmogmonitoring@gmail.com

The post Public Invited to Address ECMC on Draco Oil and Gas Development Project-Oct. 29th, 2024 appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Fighting the machine

Nick Saia lives in Colorado now, but he grew up on the salt marshes and estuaries of the Mississippi. He recalled swamp fishing, rabbit hunting, and boating out by the shack he and his father frequented. His memories of the outdoors, sharing time with his dad, and interacting with the mercurial tides where the river meets the ocean painted a vivid picture as he recalled his childhood. Then his tone changed. “My father told me one day this would all be gone.”

Even then, as a child, he saw the encroaching oil and gas operations that would forever change the face of the Gulf of Mississippi, dotting her face with pimples of oozing black pus. Saia saw the receipts, literally. He stayed busy as a busboy and later as the manager of his father’s restaurant. There he recalled seating and serving both oil and gas company men and local politicians where the sticky black substance lubricated the wheels of business and politics.

These twin memories of growing up — of seeing the marshland drained and tamed and witnessing the way politics and energy companies worked behind the scenes — inspired Saia to pursue a career as an attorney defending the average person. Many of his cases involved death, serious injury, and maiming of oil and gas workers.

Saia’s story began in Louisiana, but his career brought him to Colorado. Since the ‘90s he has represented Coloradoans who have been injured or received property damage from oil and gas sites. Saia’s observations about the dual harms of oil and gas in Louisiana are all too evident in Colorado. Vast environmental damage and overly friendly connections to politicians abound here as well.

Environmental damage and health impacts

Saia moved to Colorado for the environment. Most people do. Coloradoans, those born here and those who’ve made their home here, know the importance of open space, preservation, and balance in nature. Unfortunately, tales just like Saia’s have played out all across the nation but especially in Weld County, Colorado.

For years, both extraction operations and residential growth have been occurring side by side, meaning people are living closer than ever to fracking sites. Weld County experienced a population boom just as oil and gas operations were expanding alongside it. The County proudly proclaims directly on its website that they are “the number one producer of oil and gas in the State 83% of all crude oil production and 55% of all natural gas production in Colorado comes from Weld County!” Maps of extraction operations clearly show the impact of political decisions on where permits are granted. Weld County is covered in sites.

The number of sites, the number of wells, and the density of their locations add to a high health risk with groundwater pollution, noise pollution, and chemical byproducts from extraction, all playing harmful roles. Recent research from the CU Boulder Environmental Engineering Program found that “The chemical composition of the leaks in the Greater Wattenberg Area show that most are coming from failures of well pipes or cement, not natural stray gas migration. While the study only looked at oil and gas wells, the ability to conclusively show failure in an inner pipe or cement has major implications.” This means leaks and contamination are most likely from failures in extraction sites, a risk that even capped and closed wells still possess.

Politics, business, health, and the environment all coincide in one sticky problem: oil and gas operations are profitable but cause damage to those around them. Where new wells were located, where old wells are re-opened, and how fast leaks and contamination are cleaned are all influenced by money in the political system.

A tale of two counties

In 2019, Senate Bill 19-181 was passed which allowed local municipalities to adopt regulations for extraction operations, including things like setbacks — how far away operations must be from sensitive sites like homes and schools. Most counties have chosen to increase setback distances, and while the overall impact of the bill has been greatly beneficial to public health, not all counties have followed suit. “Weld County hasn’t met an oil well operation it doesn’t like,” said state Sen. Mike Foote, a sponsor of SB-181.

Recent reporting has also shown that even when residents thought extraction sites were finished, operations can resume with little to no warning. Additionally, if a well has already been sunk, current setback requirements from SB-181 do not apply. This grandfathers in a significant amount of sites and will continue to present a severe health hazard for any who live nearby.

“Local governments are not uniform, but they [setbacks] range from like 2,000 to 3,000 feet. Arapahoe County passed a 3,000 foot setback recently, but it also has exceptions,” Foote explained.

It’s not just the extraction operations — clean-up and decommissioning of sites can spread contaminants. About half of “orphaned” wells remaining to be plugged across the state are located in Weld County. So-called orphaned wells are defined as “…a well for which no owner or operator can be found, or where such owner or operator is unwilling or unable to plug and abandon such well.” This may be due to the company going out of business or being unable to afford the cost of plugging operations.

Storage tanks for crude oil in central Colorado, USA

In March 2024, Adams County filed a lawsuit that claimed oil and gas companies used a massive fraud scheme to avoid cleaning up abandoned wells that the lawsuit stated is, “to this day, endangering Coloradans.”

“The lawsuit raises serious questions about industry-wide practices in general that deserve an answer,” Denver7 quoted an attorney from the case. Companies allegedly knew the cost of cleanup but did not set aside nearly enough profits to cover the mandated cleanup expenses and then filed for bankruptcy, leaving no one financially responsible for the sites while executives and investors walked away wealthier than before.

Not every county is pushing back. In 2019, Weld County commissioners directly responded to SB-181 by declaring parts of the county an “area of state interest” for oil and gas operations. Based on a 1974 House bill, this move allowed Weld County commissioners to continue approving permits that would be blocked in other counties.

Oil and gas companies often promote the idea that new regulations will kill jobs in a state like Colorado, and a county like Weld, that produces lots of energy. “Every time there’s a regulation proposal, they talk about how it’s a job killer and how if the regulation passes, they will move out of the state … it’s too bad that some people continue to buy into it … they still produce a heck of a lot in this state regardless of the regulations,” Foote noted.

As proof, despite Adams County’s increased regulations, the industry is thriving, propelling Adams to the second-highest producer in the state behind Weld.

Influence on local politics

Yellow Scene Magazine conducts a yearly election guide where our reporters speak to candidates for all elections across the areas of the state we cover. We have interviewed hundreds of politicians, activists, incumbents, and folks who decided to run for office for the first time. One of the main topics that constantly arises in local elections is oil and gas regulation, expansion, and mitigation. Many have expressed their concerns that oil and gas companies tip the scales in favor of pro-extraction candidates, creating an undemocratic environment that is driven by money over citizen interest. This is a political reason why some areas have more health hazards than others despite similar oil and gas resources underground.

“The oil companies have made millions of dollars in Thornton … millions they would not have made otherwise. And that’s why they invest in [REDACTED]. That’s why thousands of dollars come from oil representatives, from people who work in oil companies, and not to mention the dark money that gets flooded in by the same companies because [REDACTED] is their investment that pays off for them,” a local activist told YS.

Anadarko Drilling in Dacono. Photo: Denver Post

“While the other side has boatloads of cash coming from special interests, specifically, land developers and oil and gas, and everybody knows it … I shouldn’t say everybody. A lot of people don’t even realize it. But the people who are interested in trying to serve all notice,” one local candidate expressed their frustration.

“We’re really heavily influenced by oil and gas and developers. For a while, it was mostly oil and gas. Now it’s developers too. We have to figure out some ways to balance that out,” a sitting city council member shared.

“I think the biggest thing is that residents deserve a campaign finance system that’s transparent and fair. We want a democracy where everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is playing by the same rules. Our current system, it’s not,” a representative said. “We don’t have the financial limits. The disclosure requirements and practices aren’t strong enough or user-friendly to be meaningful, and we need to ensure that our political leaders are representing the interests of residents and not just the wealthy and powerful,” they continued.

Even without undue influence, the political scales are tipped in favor of those who have resources, money, and workforce. It is much easier for a corporation to raise funds, sponsor ads, and donate money to local politicians than it is for the activists and regular folks who wish to stop them. There is a monetary reward for extraction companies succeeding that vastly overshadows the cost of paying politicians to play ball.

“They’re able to play in many different areas. They’re able to pay contributions. They’re able to hire a lot of attorneys. They’re able to hire folks that will show up in meetings. They’re able to come up with astroturf organizations. They’re able to run measures. They’re able to do all of these things which affect policy that community groups and environmental groups just can’t match. So when you combine things, you get a much bigger megaphone that they can use,” Foote elaborated.

Still from “Fracking the System.” Provided by Brian Hedden

Past wins and future fights

One notable success story is that of Brian Hedden. Hedden is an activist who filmed a protest of extraction operations at an oil and gas site near a school in Greeley. Details of the incident and subsequent lawsuit are posted on Hedden’s website. One protestor chained themselves to a piece of machinery, physically blocking operations from resuming. Hedden himself filmed the actions but did not block any machinery. However, he was still treated as a protestor by law enforcement.

Hedden was arrested by the police on behalf of the oil and gas company, with an eventual offer to drop all charges if he agreed to never release the footage he filmed. Saia represented Hedden in the lawsuit brought on by Extraction Oil & Gas in 2018.

Extraction argued that Hedden had also violated the airspace above the site by flying a drone to capture aerial footage. The judge was not amused by that idea and responded by asking Extraction if they were also an airport. The typically quiet and somber mood of the court was rocked by laughter from a crowd of activists there to support Hedden. With Hedden’s case, Saia finally had his “Atticus Finch” moment of fighting for a just cause with crowds of public support. The civil lawsuit was dropped.

Despite interference, influence, and wealth that extraction lobbies bring, wins like SB-181, and Hedden’s dropped lawsuit show there is hope. However, with the dangers of powerful lobbies, nearly unlimited money, and an intricate understanding of how to navigate the system, the odds are still very much stacked against the activists. This election season may be an important one in particular, with both activists and extraction companies looking at an air quality proposal in the Colorado legislature. 

There is a potentially even larger picture looming following a curious move by oil and gas companies who filed a ballot measure to ban all oil and gas drilling in the state. Although no one is yet sure why, the move may be an effort to have ballot initiatives themselves ruled unconstitutional rather than representing a change of heart on environmental issues from extraction interests.

Foote shared the difficulty of working against a powerful lobby: “It’s really tough as an all-volunteer community to go up against highly paid, highly trained [oil and gas companies]. Difficult doesn’t mean it can’t be done. But the deck is definitely stacked against you.”. It’s not all bad news, there have been huge improvements in statewide and local regulations.

“Where we found success has been a combination of volunteers, grassroots groups plus organizations that have some resources to draw from, so it’s not [fighting] with both hands behind our back but maybe with one hand tied behind our back,” Foote said.

The post Examining Oil & Gas’ Political Influence on the Front Range appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Press releases are provided to Yellow Scene Magazine. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

World Premiere

We had a wonderful world premiere at the 2024 Colorado Environmental Film Festival and we were honored with the Spirit of Activism Award. Producer Jessica Daugherty came in from Portland, director Brian Hedden’s parents came in from New Jersey and we had 12 activists from the film participate in the Q and A after the screening. It was a beautiful and momentous kickoff to our screening tour.

Watch my acceptance speech at CEFF.

Durango Film Festival and DocUtah

The weekend after the world premiere, we screened at two other film festivals, DocUtah and the Durango International. Director Brian Hedden attended Durango while activist-participant Patricia Garcia-Nelson attended DocUtah. In Utah, the film received a standing ovation and the Environmental Award. In Durango, Brian received continual praise for the film and feedback about the inspiring perseverance of the activists.

As a result of these screenings, we’ve gotten some great press and lots of leads for community screening tour.

A New Fracking Bill: SB24-159

SB24-159, commonly known as the ‘Phase Out and Clean Up’ bill, would phase out new fracking in Colorado by 2030 and would make the oil and gas industry liable for cleaning up abandoned wells. This is the first bill of its kind to be introduced at the Colorado capitol and would be a huge win for the environmental and impacted communities (most Coloradans). If you want to testify to support this bill, fill out this form from 350Colorado (the original hearing date was postponed but will be coming up again soon.).

There are four other key environmental bills at the legislature this session. (Summaries below from PSR Colorado)

• HB24-166 Air Quality Enforcement creates a more stringent penalty structure for repeat violators of air quality regulations and allows the Air Pollution Control Division (APCD) to directly assess civil penalties. Penalties will be higher for violations in disproportionately impacted communities (DIC)s.
• SB24-165 Air Quality Improvements will require the Air Quality Control Commission to adopt emissions standards for trucks and develop rules for controlling emissions from all structures emitting pollutants within the ozone nonattainment area. The bill will require oil and gas operators to submit an annual emission inventory report and develop a plan to reduce nitrogen oxides emissions in the nonattainment area.
• HB24-1330 Air Quality Permitting will require that the APCD cease issuing air permits in ozone nonattainment areas and in DICs, and that air quality modeling be done before any construction permit is issued. It will require the Division to aggregate emissions from all sources within oil and gas facilities (currently any one well pad may have hundreds of small air permits).
• Regarding Large Industrial facilities, including the Suncor Refinery, HB24-1339, Disproportionately Impacted Community Air Pollution expands the AQCC to include one DIC member and one climate scientist, prohibits emission increases from this sector in the near term, prohibits payments to the state to avoid compliance, and requires direct source specific reductions of GHG in DIC.

To get updates about these bills and how you can support them, sign up for updates from 350Colorado or PSR Colorado.

A Successful Climate Lobby Day

On March 1st, over 100 concerned citizens and climate activists attended Climate Lobby Day in Denver. After learning about this year’s environmental bills and lobbying procedures, they spoke with state representatives to educate and urge them to pass these laws. A huge thanks to all of the activists and Earth-lovers who continue to stand up for our planet.

Upcoming Screenings

The post Fracking the System; World Premiere, Awards, A New Fracking Bill, and Upcoming Screenings appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Press releases are provided to Yellow Scene Magazine. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

In its world premiere on February 23rd, 7:30pm at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, the feature documentary Fracking the System: Colorado’s Oil and Gas Wars, directed by Brian Hedden, will expose the racketeering and environmental racism employed by the oil and gas industry to undermine efforts of Colorado community activists in passing a 2018 ballot initiative to keep fracking drilling sites farther away from schools and residential areas. 

Thousands of drilling sites near homes and schools in Colorado have increased health risks for local adults and children, from nose bleeds to respiratory problems to child leukemia. And the volatile sites, severely under regulated, have also caused deaths due to explosion and exposure.

Fracking the System: Colorado’s Oil and Gas Wars is an investigative exposé about the harms of fracking, the lengths to which the government is complacent with industrial pollution, and the nefarious tactics that the oil and gas industry uses to undermine democratic elections. 

When Patrica Garcia Nelson learns about the fracking site going in behind her son’s school, she is in disbelief. She is even more shocked to learn it was moved to her BIPOC community from a predominantly White neighborhood after those parents protested. She joins the fight to stop the well and gets connected to the state-wide movement to push new oil and gas wells further away from all communities. The conflict erupts in 2018 when the activists’ state-wide ballot initiative prompts a $50 million response from the oil and gas industry, complete with dirty tricks, harassment, and sabotage. Finally, an oil and gas overhaul bill in the 2019 Colorado State Legislature fundamentally shifts the playing field. But, the Colorado Oil and Gas wars are just a small microcosm of the climate justice movement at large and a harbinger of climate battles to come. Fracking the System: Colorado’s Oil and Gas Wars reveals shocking and powerful lessons from the front lines of environmental activism that leaves the audience aghast and ready to join the fight.

Fracking the System: Colorado’s Oil and Gas Wars is a production by Boulder-based Earth Dog Films, helmed by first-time feature film director Brian Hedden. Hedden says, “The purpose of the film is to shed light on these grave injustices and to inspire the next waves of climate justice activism.”

Originally invited to consider making a film about fracking by local Lakota elders, Hedden began filming activists’ efforts to push for fracking site setbacks in 2018. Along the way, he was slapped with an 80-page lawsuit from Extraction Oil and Gas.

The oil company was after his footage exposing the environmental racism of their Bella Romero fracking site, and after a 10-month legal battle, Hedden retained the rights to his own footage.

At the world premiere screening of the film in Golden, Colorado, as part of CEFF, audiences will finally be able to see this controversial story that exposes the tactics of the oil and gas industry to uphold the status quo, which means continuing to poison Colorado communities through these massively polluting and under-regulated fracking sites.

The film is a herald of the next wave of the movement lead by Safe and Healthy Colorado and 350 Colorado who are leading the charge on a new statewide ballot initiative to phase out fracking by 2030.

Check out their websites safeandhealthyco.org and 350colorado.org stopping-fracking to find out ways you can get involved now.

The post Fracking the System: Colorado’s Oil and Gas Wars World Premiere – Feb. 23rd, 2024 appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Message courtesy of Safe & Healthy Colorado.

I’m serving as one of two designated representatives for Safe & Healthy Colorado’s statewide ballot initiative campaign to phase out new fracking permits in Colorado by 2030. This is not just about protecting our environment; it’s about safeguarding the health and well-being of every Coloradan and securing a brighter, sustainable future for generations to come.

I became active in the fight to stop fracking 2019 after a massive site was moved from a predominately white affluent school to less than 700 feet from the playground of my son’s school, Bella Romero Academy, which is attended primarily by children from less wealthy families, the majority are people of color, and many are immigrants.

Unfortunately, today there are still wells at Bella Romero. That is why I am committed more than ever to end fracking in Colorado. Our children’s health and safety must be protected  and prioritized. I am currently serving as a member of the Safe & Healthy Colorado Steering Committee and I have volunteered to be a lead proponent for the ballot initiative to phase out fracking.

Oil and gas industry attorneys have challenged the language approved by the Colorado Title Board after two hearings that would allow us to gather signatures to place the initiative on the 2024 statewide ballot. Because the Title Board is part of the Secretary of State’s office, challenges go to the highest court in the state. We need to raise $20,000 to cover legal and administrative expenses.

Will you make a donation today to help us win this battle for a safer, healthier future?

Your generous donation will not only fund legal representation; it will empower us to take this historic effort the next step toward the 2024 ballot so voters can create tangible change toward a clean energy future.

By investing in this campaign, you are taking a stand for a safer and healthier Colorado. You are supporting efforts to preserve our precious land, purify our air, and safeguard our water resources. You ‘re actively participating in the development of a 21st-century economy, built on clean energy and sustainable practices.

Timing is crucial. Early donations like yours, have a tremendous impact on the rest of our campaign. They not only demonstrate widespread support but build momentum for the movement.

Please join us in this fight for a better tomorrow and learn more at safeandhealthyco.org.

Thank you for being an unwavering supporter and for your commitment to the protection and well-being of all of our children and our beautiful state. With your help, we can turn our vision of a Safe & Healthy Colorado into reality.

En Solidaridad,
Patricia Garcia-Nelson
Designated Representative
Safe and Healthy Colorado

Paid for by Safe and Healthy Colorado.

The post The Oil & Gas Industry is taking us to the Supreme Court this week! Please help us Phase Out Fracking By 2030! appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

From Brian Hedden:

We are hosting two private fundraising screenings of our newest edit version at in the next month, and we’ve raised over $5,100 which has been paying for some beautiful new graphic design for the film (sneak peek video below).

UPCOMING EVENTS

In-person, Boulder, Colorado – June 30th, 7:00pm
Ticket info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/661308450377

In-person, Boulder, Colorado – July 21st, 6:30pm
Ticket info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/662562581517

These are private preview work-in-progress screenings for the purpose of raising awareness about the issue, the upcoming ballot initiative, and our fundraising efforts.

CROWDFUNDING UPDATE

A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has joined our campaign and given us the strong start of $5,000! We have been already putting the funds to good use by commissioning more amazing work from our graphic designer, Joe Presser. Below is a video sample of his newest creations, set to the dialogue of the film.

Please help us continue to finish the film and prepare for its premiere this Fall. We are preparing to submit to film festivals starting July 1st so NOW IS THE TIME to help us reach our goal and give us the energy we need to finish the film. More info on where the funds will go in our video. In addition to contributing to the campaign, please also share it with your friends and colleagues asking for them to join us on this journey to end the toxic practice of fracking in Colorado and the world. Join us today! https://bit.ly/fts-crowdfunding – and please tag us in your social media platform of choice! Facebook Instagram Twitter TikTok Youtube

SNEAK PEEK VIDEO

And now, here it is, our newest draft of some graphics we are adding to the film THANKS TO THE CROWDFUNDING EFFORTS SO FAR. (These clips are from different scenes in the film so the sound will be disjointed and the transition will be abrupt in the compilation)

https://vimeo.com/838515632 Password: gfx

Follow Joe Presser on instagram to see more of his awesome work.

!!! ALSO !!! Last but not least,

I just learned about this virtual event next Wednesday evening that I am excited to attend and tell you about. It is hosted by people I know through The ManKind Project and I think it is going to be a wise and enlightening conversation:

The post Fracking the System – Upcoming Events and Crowdfunding Update appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

The post Coalition Turns to CO Voters to Phase Out Fracking Permits appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Denver, CO – As Governor Polis gives his 2023 State of the State address, environmental and community organizations and impacted residents will gather at the Capitol to oppose continued approval of thousands of drilling permits in residential areas by his administration’s regulatory agency – the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commision (COGCC), despite passage of “reform bill” SB19-181 four years ago. The groups are calling on state legislators to ensure that Coloradans have healthy, safe, and livable air quality, water supplies, and climate conditions by opposing residential drilling permits and supporting a phase out of oil and gas permitting by 2030 or sooner.

WHAT: “Frack of the State/Frack of the Climate” rally and press conference

WHEN: Tuesday, January 17th at 11:00am. Group reps will be onsite for interviews between 10am and 11am.

WHO: Environmental and community organizations including Physicians for Social Responsibility of Colorado, Safe & Healthy Colorado, 350 Colorado, Colorado Rising, and others.

WHERE: West steps of the Colorado State Capitol, 200 E Colfax Ave, Denver

WHY: The COGCC has denied only one permit while approving over 4500 wells since SB19-181 passed. Emissions resulting from more oil and gas permits further degrade our air quality and escalate climate hazards such as fires, drought, and heatwaves in Colorado and worldwide. The COGCC is failing to protect Colorado’s health, safety and environment as required by SB181. Permits recently approved in Aurora and Weld County will have a disproportionate impact on communities of color, despite the Colorado legislature’s recent commitments to address environmental injustice.

The post MEDIA ALERT: ‘Frack of the State’ Action to Address Oil & Gas Wars Under Polis Administration appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Who are 350 Colorado Volunteers? “We are motivated Coloradans from all walks of life that are working hard to build the climate movement in Colorado. We all have unique skills and motivations, but we have come together to form a community of climate protectors! We are committed to ensuring a livable climate for all and are focused on promoting local change through grassroots advocacy.”

Policy & Regulatory Action Committee – Ever wonder what happens after a law is passed or who holds polluters responsible? You may be surprised that it is the agencies and commissions, who create and enforce regulations that put laws into action, and that they legally have to listen to you, the public! The Policy and Regulatory Action Committee will aim to hold our agencies accountable by involvement in rulemakings and hearings and by taking action to make our voices heard. Interested? Sign up here! 

Suncor Action Committee – Suncor makes the 80216 zip code one of the most polluted in the United States, and is a blatant example of environmental racism in our state. Join the 350 Colorado Suncor Action Committee as we follow the lead of community members impacted directly by the Suncor Oil Refinery. We take a variety of actions including providing information in Spanish and English, targeting regulators, empowering community voices and supporting community events. Email Lucy Molina at lucy@350colorado.org and/or Victoria Sunkel at victoria@350colorado.org to get started! 

Fracking Action Committee – Are you interested in fighting the frack? Join us as we fight fracking at all levels; from supporting communities who are fighting new drilling or trying to address legacy wells, to targeting policies at the state level, including regulators who rubber stamp permits and the governor’s plan to increase drilling over the next ten years. We work to counter industry messaging that oil and gas is good for the state and we have fun while we do it! Sign up here or email Kate at kate@350colorado.org. 

Climate Legislation & Action Committee – Grow your legislative understanding and confidence and push elected officials to take strong positions on climate change. Each year there are new bills we focus on supporting and/or opposing, many of which have significant climate impacts! We track policy efforts, we provide training opportunities, we build relationships with our legislators, and we organize Lobby Days at the Capitol (even virtually). Sign up here and help create strong climate laws in Colorado! 

Defunding Climate Disaster Committee – Join our Defund Climate Disaster Committee to help promote fossil fuel divestment and reinvestment in solutions! Our campaigns include calling on Colorado’s state pension fund, PERA, to divest from fossil fuels, supporting the Fossil Free Federal Reserve campaign, promoting climate finance policies, supporting local divestment efforts and calling out the role of Wall Street Banks in financing the climate crisis. Sign up here to receive ongoing action alerts and stay up to date with campaign planning! You can also reach out to Giselle at giselle@350colorado.org for more information.

Administrative Assistant Volunteer: 350CO needs a dependable volunteer to support administrative activities, such as tracking and thanking donors and entering information into our online systems. If interested, please email micah@350colorado.org and/or info@350colorado.org.  

Writers: Are you interested in joining a dedicated team of writers focused on writing letters to the editor and/or opinion pieces on key climate issues in 2022? Schedule is flexible! If so, email deborah@350colorado.org.

Interns: We frequently have opportunities for youth/students to join our team as interns. Contact chelsea@350colorado.org if you’d like to be considered for a volunteer internship.

The post 350 Colorado Volunteer Opportunities appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Yellow Scene welcomes Letters to the Editor and is happy to publish your thoughts, within limit. Please send all love letters, hate mail, curious thoughts, and open letters to De La Vaca at editorial@yellowscene.com

Depositphotos

Letter to the Editor by Lauren Swain (In response to Racism in the Environmental Movement, by Sara Loflin)

How inconvenient, annoying, and uncompromising those trying to prevent more drilling from reducing the length and quality of our lives on the Front Range have been over the past decade! Good thing they have listened to Sara Loflin and her “League of Oil and Gas Impacted Citizens” (LOGIC) and have thereby moved away from “banning fracking” to “health and safety first” and a discussion of “impacted communities”, as Sara so eloquently put it. Yes, it’s far more copacetic to stop trying to prevent local and state governments from issuing permits to the oil and gas industry, and, instead, to hold a years-long conversation about how we might become “healthy and safe” while we let our favorite elected officials continue allowing the industry to jeopardize our health, safety, and climate with more fracking.

Yes, it is too bad human physiology and the climate of humanity’s only planet don’t understand political reality. Too bad that – even as we come to accept the violation of our own right to breathe clean air – our children’s bodies, and all humans yet to be born, are likely to suffer irreparable harm without even one chance to cast a vote on the matter. We just can’t afford to worry about these things because… “other priorities.” So when a child or elderly person is hospitalized with asthma or killed by leukemia because they inhaled one too many breaths of benzene emanating from thousands too many oil and gas wells far too close to their homes, and when thousands too many hurricanes, fires, droughts, and floods kill and make refugees of millions more people each year as global coastlines are eroded by rising, dying seas, we’ll just sigh wistfully and move on. After all, it wasn’t we who had to pay that price, was it? What’s more important is for us to get along with the nice people we know who say they are helpless to relieve themselves from dependence on the oil and gas industry’s paychecks. And I think I heard someone somewhere say the law won’t let us stop the industry anyway. I bet you heard someone somewhere say that, too, didn’t you?

To those who don’t know me, I have devoted my activist career to fighting toxic waste and neighborhood fracking in the 1980s and the 2010s because I felt obligated to actively oppose polluters who profit by endangering, sickening, and killing the vulnerable populations that find themselves in the way.

I have also actively advocated for the right of refugees and immigrants to find a safe home in our country and against the use of violence and physical intimidation to achieve even the noblest goals (like saving the planet), because I believe that protecting human rights is the highest value in politics and life in general. I believe every human has the right to be free from unacceptable danger and harm imposed by those with an economic or political incentive to benefit from that harm, despite arguments about what the law says on the matter.

The politically expedient approach to the climate crisis differs by nature from the activist approach. Activists seek to stop fossil fuel operations where the pollution, spills, explosions, and fires they generate do the most harm, while pursuing an end to all production as soon as possible, in order to protect the climate. The result of success in our efforts would be a reduction in the supply of GHG-generating fossil fuels, which would lower availability, raise the price, and ultimately reduce demand, by incentivizing adoption of the solutions that the expedient side champions – i.e. wide scale adoption of renewable energy technologies and efficiency strategies. We have identified the fossil fuel industry as the enemy of the people and the planet.

The expedient side bypasses this “ugly rhetoric” by focusing its energies on promoting those alternative technologies to the public and through policy, rather than directly confronting the industry and its puppets in government who have caused the problem in the first place.

Has anyone noticed that adding solar panels to a roof or building a “green home” hasn’t yet protected even one person from having another well drilled in their backyard, or from dangerous benzene levels and ozone levels in our air, or from the next wave of fossil-fueled forest fires? Although it’s noble and essential that everyone who can afford to convert to renewable energy do so, it won’t protect the people breathing fracking fumes now or prevent new wells from endangering more people, and it won’t for years at best. Only cutting the production of hydrocarbons will do that. We need to phase out production now, DESPITE demand, because those in the line of fire can’t afford to wait for reduced demand to work. We need to produce AND use less now – period. And we need to cut production where it causes the greatest harm – near neighborhoods, water sources, and vulnerable ecosystems – or they will be harmed unacceptably and unjustifiably.

One of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced is climate compromisers attempting to place the blame for our dilemma on the backs of the general public – willfully including ourselves as the culprits, when the evidence points to the fossil fuel lobbygarchy as the obstructors of change. While the lobbying and PR apparatus of the industry successfully uses their leverage to make it nearly impossible to suppress production or reduce demand for the GHG-emitting fossil fuels, they are also hoodwinking our friends into voluntarily serving as mouthpieces for their messaging.

A more frustrating thing to me is that “mainstream” groups and individuals have chosen to focus the resources provided to them by both well-meaning and intentionally-undermining individuals and entities on making the intrinsically unsafe and unhealthy production of fossil fuels “safer and healthier” for those living in the fracklands or on incremental demand-side strategies that won’t alleviate the harm done by fossil-fuel polluters for decades.

Compromisers accept that communities impacted by oil and gas production are lambs to be sacrificed on the altar of “peace” between the industry and nice politicians who think they can advance their careers by avoiding pissing off their friends or enemies in the industry too much. Even more frustrating is seeing concerned residents in the fracklands listening to the “reasonable” voice of experts hired by mainstream groups who tell them they can’t reasonably hope to keep the industry away from their doorsteps. Good thing we have experts we can trust explaining with confidence why the interests of the weakest among us, i.e. the children who are more subject to asthma, leukemia, and the end of a livable climate, must be ignored in favor of the “political realities” and “positive solutions” that reasonable, peace-loving organizations opt to push and pass through incremental legislative and administrative initiatives.

The post Good Riddance to the Inconvenient Activist | Letter to the Editor appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Editor’s Note: this article was edited for length and clarity

Photo: Vincent Janssen

Creating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs is nice, but enviro and alt-left organizations need to actively address their own cultures of racism and work to support BIPOC and emerging leaders.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks debating whether to write this because it is painful. I am a bi-racial, Vietnamese American woman, and I identify as BIPOC and White-adjacent. As the daughter and granddaughter of refugees, and as an organizer, I have seen my community suffer from the Trump administration’s anti-Asian scorched-earth rhetoric.

It is easy to be outraged at racist right-wingers. What about the White left? I have worked for nearly two decades in progressive organizations that have grappled with their own racism and anti-racism initiatives.

I have always been aware of and worked to address internal issues of racism, from the inside-out, and my approach has always been “people are people first.” I’m not one for a family fight in the front yard.

As I stepped into the environmental movement, I had over a decade working under the progressive umbrella across many areas and issues. In 2014 I was the Director of Clean Water Action (CO) and, in fall 2015, I founded the League of Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradans (LOGIC). For much of that time I was the only person of color, let alone woman of color, leading a statewide environmental organization.

I founded LOGIC to bring people living with O&G to the forefront of O&G policymaking. We worked to support local fracked communities and to move impacted Coloradans to the forefront of discussions. LOGIC moved the political and policy language of O&G in Colorado from “banning fracking” to “health and safety first” and to a discussion of “impacted communities.”

Four years later, in 2019, LOGIC was a lead organization in passing SB19-181. This was the most comprehensive O&G reform in more than 50 years. In 2020, LOGIC led the way and pushed the COGCC to implement a 2,000-foot setback and other critical O&G regulations.

Despite this leadership and success, never have I experienced more blatant and vehement scrutiny, threats, and dismissiveness than I have received from the alt-left (often economically privileged) fractivists. For years, I questioned my own qualifications and personality, and this scrutiny was regularly and loudly voiced by White activists. Among the things I have heard:

“She’s an ‘establishment Democrat,’ and you know she’s paid for by…”

”Use her up for all she’s worth, and dump her…”

“What do you actually add to this movement?”

“LOGIC is a new organization, it’s listed to a residential address at XXX. We need to bring the revolution to her door,” was posted on Facebook. A sitting city council member replied, “can you imagine if we went there and rose up? Hickenlooper would have to call out the National Guard.”

My organization was hosting a forum. I was eight months pregnant. A group of White men surrounded me, and a man said, “…You need to quit this LOGIC stuff or fear for the life of your unborn child.”

My home address and salary were released annually for about three years.

When raising money for literature in support of Prop. 112, people held a FB discussion of whether I was running some sort of scheme.

These attacks were directed at me or at the organization I founded or led. These are just the surface. When pointed out, White activists justify their long-time friendships and dismiss the incidents as “he didn’t really mean it that way,” or “he’s harmless and not really violent,” or “you just have to be the bigger person and forgive…”

When I called out my experiences of being doxed, White women dismissed their behavior as “I didn’t release or say anything that wasn’t publicly available anyway, so it’s not doxing, and I didn’t wish you harm or anything.”

Eventually, I noticed a pattern. While Standing Rock, for some, makes a great poster or social post about environmental justice, publicly undermining, dismissing, and attempting to erase the work of BIPOC leaders has also been a reality. Some White fractivists have had a habit of erasing and publicly questioning the integrity of BIPOC leaders and organizers in this movement who step out of the “victim” role.

Perhaps the most pointed realization for me was when an individual began publicly extolling the virtues of Sen. Sanders across Facebook, while dismissing and disparaging every BIPOC member of Congress who has led the way on legislation like the Green New Deal.

Many organizations extol anti-racism and DEI work and hiring practices. It’s the “thing to do.” Unless these organizations work to change their organizing models, the racist language, and culture of their activists, the White privilege and racist inclinations in these organizations remain a danger to BIPOC leaders and to the environmental movement as a whole.

The post Racism In The Environmental Movement | Sara Loflin for Community Corner appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

PRESS RELEASE: Press Releases are provided to Yellow Scene. In an effort to keep our community informed, we are now publishing some press releases in whole.

Dear Board of Trustees,

I am writing to express how important it is that the town of Erie take seriously its obligation to protect residents and mitigate the dangers posed by oil and gas development.

In September we moved to Colliers Hill from out-of-state. It was easy to be attracted to this growing community and the signs effectively blasting “come raise a family here” speak to what we are looking for in a new home. As the walls around the Mae-J pad have gone up this excitement for the future has turned into fear. The law in Colorado now requires 2,000 ft. setbacks because of the danger posed to residents and especially children. And yet here is a massive site developing around 500 ft. from brand new homes. The timeline of permitting and development has no attachment to the ever-growing scientific consensus of the risks. There are now homes within shouting distance of a mega-pad (if only the nuisance concerns were so quaint) and it is not safe.

It is unconscionable that the town has allowed this to happen through the simultaneous approval of heavy oil and gas operations next to rapid exurban residential expansion. It was a choice to permit both. The Anadarko expansion especially was a devil’s bargain that may have brought revenue for growth, but also sold out the health of this community. Nevertheless, here we are, and now it is up to you to mitigate the risks and damage of these previous decisions.

We must have active air-quality monitoring in Erie for the VOCs linked to cancer and disease. We must enact strict protective regulations and reverse setbacks prioritizing health and welfare. We need leaders who will fight for the community at every turn, and prove this is a safe place to raise a family. We proudly join the other residents who have long advocated for just protection and we request your support.

Sincerely,

Eric & Sandra Duggan

The post PRESS RELEASE: Get the Frack Out! Erie Oil & Gas Protest: Feb.27, 2021 appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Hello Friend, 

As you already know, the oil and gas industry is working to expand its drilling activities throughout Colorado. Weld county is of course a hotspot for fracking, at the expense of community health and safety. In the midst of a respiratory health pandemic, new fracking permits are still being approved in this state, when it is common knowledge that oil and gas industry development is a major contributor to the F-grade air quality along Colorado’s front range. Fortunately, there is an easy action that you can take, which can help delay the expansion of new fracking sites in your county.

Currently in Weld county, there are 78 pending oil and gas permits for which written comments are still being accepted – with some comment deadlines as early as this week. As per COGCC regulations, pending permits for new drilling operations have a time period open for public commentary, and public comments that are submitted during this time can help to delay new oil and gas development. It is crucial that concerned citizens push back against an expansion of the industry in their communities, by raising their important concerns. Please let the COGCC know that all permitting should be put on hold to ensure that health and safety is properly prioritized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here’s how you can take action now:

• Share this information with friends and family who live in Weld County where permits are pending, so they have the opportunity to send a comment opposing additional fracking near them.

• Submit your comments about one or more of the proposed drilling permits by clicking here. Find the Weld County list and then click on the individual permit links to make a comment. Click “Make Comment,” and let the COGCC know why you do not want an expansion of oil and gas drilling. Need talking points for your comments? Click here. The same comment can be submitted for each pending permit, and the more comments that are submitted by concerned citizens, the better. New permits are added to this list weekly, you can refer to the spreadsheet to stay up-to-date on new permits and comment deadlines in your county.

• For more detailed information on the pending permits in your county, please refer to the COGCC Pending Permits page.

We recognize there are a number of permits in Weld County so please comment on any number of permits. Thanks so much for your support in helping to keep our communities and environment frack-free!

Sincerely,

Giselle and the 350 Colorado Team 

The post PRESS RELEASE: 350.org: Oil & Gas Expansion in Weld County appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

 

 

More on the Acme Pad. 

Polis v Earth: Reckoning

You can sign the ballot initiative here. 

Colorado Activists Revive Anti-Fracking Ballot Iniative, New York Times

The post New 2500 Set-back measure collecting signatures for the ballot appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Graphic by De La Vaca 

The environment is a crucial issue for the current generation of Coloradans. Environment is critical to our state identity, yet concerns are heightened due to the impact of environmental conditions on the health of residents, the quality of communities, and the sustainability of the planet. It’s a global concern, but especially contentious in Colorado due to the prevalence of the oil industry and the concerns of environmental advocates.

Governor Jared Polis was able to tap into this issue during his gubernatorial campaign, garnering support from progressive groups – even while doubted by our local health and safety organizations – by expressing a determination to regulate the oil and gas industry, and by articulating plans to implement renewable energy programs.

Now that Polis has completed his first year in the Governor’s Office, let’s evaluate his progress.

Before diving into the details, it can help to analyze the crucial factors that contribute to environmental conditions in Colorado. By far the two main sources of pollution in the state are vehicles and oil extraction activities. It’s Spring. Let’s lean into the green by discussing the environmental issues facing Colorado, the progress that Gov. Polis has (or hasn’t) made, and the challenges that must still be overcome.

Vehicle Pollution

The abundance of cars on the road have contributed to historic air pollution in Colorado. Anyone remember the brown cloud? Cars and buses that are fueled by traditional gas and diesel fuels emit hazardous greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane gases. RTD reports owning nearly 1000 buses, with annual diesel fuel use of 5.214 million gallons. While moderate levels of greenhouse gases can be manageable, the transportation trends in the state have led to exorbitant and dangerous emission levels.

According to a study conducted in 2018 by the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the number of cars on the roads in the Front Range area have soared with average vehicle miles traveled by cars reaching 84.3 miles per car per day, which reflected a 15 percent increase from just five years earlier. These numbers are predicted to grow. State transportation systems have also been unable to manage the growth, which has further exacerbated pollution rates via congestion.
Colorado has failed to manage the increased growth. CDOT has engaged in construction projects, such as the I-70 expansion. Experts have criticized the I-70 project by pointing to data suggesting that adding more lanes increases the cars on the roads and maintains congestion levels. Additionally, many communities – specifically in Denver’s District 9 – have complained that the projects has been highly disruptive, and is splitting neighborhoods and displacing residents.
CDOT also attempted to alleviate traffic congestion by expanding the routes and stations of its bus and light rail systems. Despite these efforts, the volume of passengers on public transit has been declining in recent years, presumably in response to inadequate route planning and increasing costs; until recently, Denver had the nation’s highest transit cost.

Oil and Gas Pollution

The frequency of drilling activities and the operations of oil companies are also contributing to our environmental problems. Expansive subsurface minerals make Colorado very appealing to extraction companies. A historically pliant CO political class has enabled the industry’s expansion. Data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) verifies that Colorado has among the largest reserves in the country. We’re the 5th largest oil producing state with the 6th largest natural gas reserves, the 8th largest coal reserves, and the most coalbed methane reserves of any state. Drilling activities were rampant in Colorado in the 20th century, but recent decades have seen increased operations with the new extraction technique known as fracking, or hydraulic fracturing.

As a result of the advances, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the amount of active wells and drilling sites has steadily risen since the year 2000, and between 2017-2018 the state experienced a whopping 70 percent increase in drilling applications. The state has approximately 60,000 currently active wells and 20,000 additional wells that have been recently abandoned.

Statistics also specify the most common locations of these wells. Over half of all Colorado wells are located in the Weld County region, stretching from the North Denver metro area to the Wyoming border. Though 191 separate oil and gas operators are in Colorado, the majority of drilling activities are facilitated by a handful of companies. Just eight companies account for about 81 percent of all oil and gas production, with the largest being Noble Energy, PDC Energy, Occidental Petroleum, and Extraction O&G.

Supporters of oil and gas promote the benefits the industry provides. They emphasize lucrative jobs, energy services, and tax revenue paid to local and state governments. The facts underlying these claims are reasonable on the surface. The petroleum industry in CO employees about 90,000 workers (out of over 3 million), and every year the industry generates about $13.5 billion (out of nearly $350 billion) in economic activities and contributes around $1 billion to local and state taxes.

“Oil and natural gas is a a fundamental building block that exists in countless products we all use, from medical supplies and construction materials to smartphones and clothing,” says Jake Taylor, Communications Coordinator of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, which serves as the primary political and regulatory voice for the industry in CO.

Environmental advocates counter that modern technology can and should replace many of these services, and that the benefits provided by the industry are outweighed by the destructive impact extraction activities have on the environment and, by extension, the likelihood of human survival on earth. Pollution is exacts severe consequences at the local, state, and global levels.

The Local Consequences: Residents Health

Studies have shown that air pollution is harmful to humans and community life. One study showed the health risks incurred by people who live near wells sites. Conducted by ICF International (Oct. 2019), the report analyzed the overall impact of oil and gas operations on residents. The researchers concluded that residents living within 2,000 feet of drilling locations are vulnerable to respiratory problems, headaches, dizziness, nosebleeds, and nausea. This is largely due to hazardous chemicals released into the air, including benzene, ethylbenzene and toluene.

Another study conducted by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center (2012) showed residents living near well sites are also at a disproportionately higher risk of developing cancer.

National studies also illustrate the health impacts. Research from over 150 studies, for example, demonstrated that the pollution generated by fracking can render residents susceptible to birth defects, respiratory disorders, neurological problems, reproductive deficiencies, blood disorders, asthma conditions, and developmental impairments.

This body of research has indicated that people living close to well sites have an increased risk of minor and short-term health impacts as well as severe and long-term conditions. With Colorado having a modest setback requirement of only 500 feet from homes and 1,000 feet from schools, many residents express legitimate and well founded concerns.

Statewide Consequences: the Brown Cloud

The brown cloud hovering over the Front Range area is another detrimental consequence of the pollution in the air.
[Editor’s note: for a longer conversation on the Colorado Brown Cloud and air pollution, see Deb Cameron’s piece page 53.]

According to the American Lung Association, this ozone problem establishes the Denver and northern Front Range area as one of the most polluted metropolitan regions in the country, only ranking behind New York, Houston, Phoenix, and the major California cities.

The Global Consequences: Approaching Climate Change Catastrophe

The global climate crisis is the large-scale consequence of environmental inaction, a fact agreed on by the global scientific community. Climate change is caused by human behavior, especially industrial activities, oil drilling, and vehicles; a viral study found that over 70 percent of climate change was caused by just 100 companies – 99 are oil and gas companies.

We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, including melting ice glaciers, rising ocean levels, and submerging coastal cities. This is also leading to the ensuing hazards of destroyed ecosystems, extreme weather, extensive droughts, and unprecedented storms. Collectively, this is known as climate catastrophe.
Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests that climate change will be irreversible by 2030. The two most essential methods by which Colorado can help alleviate the climate change crisis is to reduce the emissions from vehicles and the pollution from drilling.

Even the oil and gas industry emphasizes the need to address climate change concerns. “One would be hard-pressed to find an industry that employs more environmental management experts than the oil and natural gas industry,” Taylor points out.

It should be pointed out that, historically, when industry research emerges that counters industry claims, it is suppressed. See Exxon. Arguably, non-industry scientists should have full access to industry based science for peer review.

With environmental issues being crucial to Coloradans, Polis campaigned as an environmental progressive. So let’s take a look at the solutions he has proposed and policies he has implemented during his first year in the office of the Governor.

Increasing Electric Cars to Improve Air Quality

Implementing the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) program was one of the first actions Gov. Polis took upon entering office. In January of 2019, Polis signed an executive order that established Colorado as a Zero Emission Vehicle state. The program aims to reduce carbon emissions released from Colorado vehicles by increasing the number of electric cars sold in dealerships and by diversifying the electric models that are available.

The amount of electric cars offered by dealerships has been severely limited by Colorado not being a ZEV state. ZEV states require auto dealers to ensure that a specific proportion of vehicles offered on their lots are electric. This compels manufacturers to send electric cars to ZEV states to meet the requirements. Polis hopes this can have a substantial impact on emissions levels, as the plan aims to reduce emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050.

Increasing the number of electric cars that are available can also be advantageous for the state. While Colorado only had about 24,000 registered electric vehicles as of July 2019, the ZEV program aims to have 130,000 registered electric vehicles by 2030. Despite having far less electric cars and models available than many other states, Colorado actually ranks fourth in the nation for percentage of electric vehicle purchases, according to statistics from EVAdoption.

Using Renewable Energy to Protect the Environment

With Gov. Polis campaigning on a plan to have Colorado use 100 percent renewable energy by 2040, it’s important to assess the actions that he has taken to help reach that mark. Investing in renewable energy can influence the renewable adoption rate.

Currently renewable energy sources constitute a relatively small portion of electricity generated. Wind is the most effective source of renewable energy for Colorado. The state has substantial wind resources on the eastern plains and the mountains to the west. Currently 79 percent of Colorado’s renewable electricity derives from wind technologies, the use of wind turbines has tripled since 2010, and now Colorado’s 2,275 wind turbines establish us as the 8th-ranked state in the nation for wind power capacity. The state can also capitalize on solar, as Colorado currently ranks 12th in the nation for solar power capacity with 1,300 megawatts already installed.

Certain programs implemented by Gov. Polis and policies passed by the state legislature can help amplify the use of renewable energy throughout the state. The governor is offering an array of financial rebates and tax incentives that encourage homeowners and businesses to install solar panels, including deals to entice the use of community solar gardens in which one centralized solar source can generate electricity for several homes in the area. The state also recently negotiated a pioneering agreement with the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to streamline the licensing process that would convert existing infrastructure into hydropower facilities. Furthermore, in January of 2020 the governor formed two pilot programs that can help the beer and cannabis industries become more energy-efficient and renewable-dependant.

Gov. Polis also worked with the statehouse in 2019 to pass a renewable friendly budget. The budget passed for fiscal year 2020 designated $3 million for renewable investments, such as modernizing the electrical grid, funding renewable technology projects, and enhancing infrastructure capabilities for solar and wind energy sources. Other bills signed by the governor also serve to support renewable energy and alleviate environmental pollution.

HB 1003 expanded the access and availability of community solar gardens, HB 1231 established new energy efficiency standards for plumbing appliances, HB 1260 developed new energy efficiency codes for buildings, and SB 236 intensified the requirements for regulating the carbon emissions of electrical utility companies. Additionally, HB 1272 allows owners of commercial buildings or residential complexes to receive financial assistance when they renovate the electrical systems of their buildings to improve the energy standards on their properties.

Oil and Gas Regulations: The Mixed Response to SB 181

The most pivotal piece of legislation of the 2019 legislative session was also the most controversial. SB 181 is a massive omnibus bill that modifies and overhauls the regulatory standards for the oil and gas industry and gives unprecedented new local controls to local governments. The bill was received with a mixture of praise and criticism from people on both the environmental and industry sides of the issue.

Many groups that advocate for the oil and gas industry lament that the bill is too extreme and could impair the ability for the industry to operate in Colorado.
“One of the reasons our industry opposed SB 181 is because of the patchwork of regulations it would incentivize, which we are now seeing take place,” explains Taylor. “Companies of all types prefer consistency and predictability, and regulatory efforts that are constant moving targets between local and state government agencies can lead to confusion.”

In contrast, some environmental groups are concerned with critical limitations and the long delay to implementation diminishing its intended effects. For example, because the bill cannot be implemented until the rulemaking stage is complete, and that extensive process is expected to be finished during the summer of 2020, hundreds of wells have been pushed through, often with a rush, to ensure they are permitted by the state under current, industry friendly, rules. To evaluate the potential impact of SB 181, it can help to elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of the consequential legislation.

Strengths of SB 181

Some policies incorporated into SB 181 have been applauded by environmental advocates. One fundamental change involves the role that the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) fulfills. The previous policy specified that the role of the COGCC was to “foster” oil and gas development, which implied that the agency functioned to support the industry. SB 181 made a subtle but important change. Instead of “foster,” the bill states that the role of the COGCC is now to “regulate” oil and gas development, which implies that the agency functions to manage the complex operations of the oil industry according to established state and federal rules and to decrease excessive pollution resulting from drilling activities. Arguably, the bill now compels the agency to focus on promoting the health, safety and wellbeing of the public. Additionally, SB 181 dramatically changed the structure of the COGCC board. The board previously consisted of 9 members with 3 from the oil and gas industry, but the bill reduces the board to just 5 members with only one from the industry.

The bill also modifies the responsibilities of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). The bill empowers the Air Pollution Control Division to enact more effective emission requirements and to impose fees on heavy polluters. Reporting standards have also been improved by SB 181. Whereas the CDPHE previously only collected and reported information regarding greenhouse gas emissions every four years, the bill now requires the agency to compile data and file reports every year. Furthermore, the bill magnified the ability for the CDPHE to enforce strict emission standards, monitor air pollution levels, and collect climate change data.

The increased local control over the oil and gas industry is perhaps the most appealing part of the bill for many communities. Previously local governments had very little influence over the details of the permitting process and were generally required to accept the decisions of the commission. SB 181 grants local governments greater authority to approve, regulate, and monitor the oil and gas companies trying to operate in their communities. The local control and land use authority granted by the bill require the companies to first receive approval from the local government before they can apply for the permits from the state commission. During the review process, the local governments can have a significant impact on drilling sites, well locations, and setback requirements.

Local governments can also establish emission standards, implement monitoring programs, and impose fees for the inspection process and fines for any leaks or spills. Another new power granted to local governments is the ability to establish official noise limits that the drilling companies must accommodate. Thus, many communities are hopeful that, once the rules are finally enacted and the law goes into effect, SB 181 provides their local governments with the necessary authority to ensure the health and safety of their communities.

The Weaknesses of SB 181

Certain identified weaknesses with SB 181 have generated complaints from both the environmental and industry sides. Regarding the oil and gas industry, companies claim that the local control aspect of the bill enables communities to establish strict rules that can be prohibitive to their operations. Even though it has not been implemented yet, some oil and gas companies blame the overhaul of the regulatory process for the struggles that their businesses are facing. While some companies contend that SB 181 is responsible for their problems, Gov. Polis and many environmental advocates argue that the financial difficulties of the Colorado oil and gas industry are caused by natural market forces and intense foreign competition.

Environmental advocates also criticize the scope of the bill. Some point out that it is not ambitious enough to solve our environmental issues and that the policies will not provide the substantial reduction in drilling that the state – and earth – requires. For example, shortly after SB 181 was signed, oil and gas companies in Colorado – including Noble Energy, O&G Extraction, and PDC Energy – sent company memos to inform their investors that the bill will have a minimal impact on industry operations and that they should be able to maintain the same productivity.

The long delay to implementation has been especially frustrating for many environmental advocates. While finishing the rules process by the summer would already have been difficult, the Coronavirus pandemic has forced the board to pause discussions until the crisis subsides, a further delay.
Meanwhile, COGCC records show that during the delay an abundance of permits have been issued to build many new wells. Since Gov. Polis signed the bill almost one year ago, about 2,000 permits have been approved for additional wells and no permit applications have been denied. In turn, the permitting and drilling process has been continuing for the past year under the same flawed standards that SB 181 is supposed to reform.

In 2019, the industry shattered the previous oil production record in Colorado and enjoyed a 12 percent increase in overall production over the previous year. This encouraged the environmental group Colorado Rising to file a lawsuit against the COGCC to have the permitting process suspended until the rules are finalized. The lawsuit is still in progress, but the commission is not expected to suspend the permitting process and the industry should expect to continue to operate under the same favorable conditions.

The lack of official setback requirements in SB 181 also concerns many communities. With studies indicating that fracking and extraction activities present severe health hazards for people within 2,000 feet of operations, experts contend that the current Colorado setback standard of 500 feet is inadequate and that the state should establish a uniform distance requirement of about 2,000 feet. SB 181 leaves the setback standards to local governments.

Having local governments determine setback requirements creates problems for residents, depending on their local government’s commitment to health and safety. This will lead to piecemeal regulation and subject communities adjacent to more lax areas to the whims of those officials and the winds that blow pollution across legal boundaries.

Industry advocates often resist the concept of setback requirements and refute the claims that drilling is harmful to communities. “Colorado’s oil and natural gas industry is safe,” says Taylor. “Our operators are committed to producing our resources cleaner, better and safer than anywhere in the country, utilizing cutting-edge technology and innovation alongside one of the toughest regulatory frameworks in the country.”

But environmental groups believe the research confirms that drilling near neighborhoods is harmful to residents and that SB 181 failed to address the setback requirement issue. Colorado Rising is attempting to address this flaw in the bill as well. For the past few election cycles, the organization has placed initiatives on the ballots to propose statewide setback requirements but have not yet been able to pass the requirements. In the 2018 cycle, Prop 112 sought to establish a setback requirement of 2,500 feet, but it was defeated by a 45-55 percent margin. With SB 181 failing to address the setback requirement issue, Colorado Rising plans on placing another statewide setback measure on the ballot in the upcoming election cycle.

Final Thoughts

Because many factors contribute to the environmental conditions and health standards of Colorado, it is helpful to identify the problems that confront the state and the solutions that our lawmakers propose. The primary factors causing air pollution in the state include vehicle exhaust and the drilling activities of oil and gas companies. With Gov. Polis campaigning to address environmental concerns in the state, residents must remain engaged by keeping track of the successes and failures of his environmental record and initiatives. Establishing the Zero Emission Vehicle program should be advantageous in moving towards a cleaner air environment in Colorado. His investments into renewable energy could substantially improve the ability of the state to reach his ideal target of becoming 100 percent renewable by 2040, going a long way toward reducing or dependence on gas and, thus, our unwillingness to seriously regulate oil and gas, up to and including a full ban on extraction and drilling.

The oil and gas issue, however, is very contentious. The state needs to encourage completion of the rulemaking process so local communities can make full use of the powers they were given by this legislation. Anything less diminishes the accomplishment and is viewed as the state delaying completion to ensure drilling levels are maintained and the industry is happy, at the expense of communities. Currently the Gov. Polis administration and his signature SB 181 bill have not significantly altered the excessive rate at which oil and gas companies are receiving permits from the state and building wells in our communities. Supporters remain hopeful that the implementation of SB 181 and the increased control of local governments can reduce the amount of drilling that occurs in the state, improve the quality of the air that we breathe, and maximize the safety of our communities and the health of our residents. For all these reasons and more, we feel that Governor Polis has done much for the environment – thought mostly in word.

Will the deeds ever be accomplished?

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The post Polis v Earth: Reckoning appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

By Rachel Balkcom, Erie resident

At a meeting a couple of weeks ago with Crestone Peak Resources about Acme, a 30-well project the company has proposed in the middle of my 35-year-old residential neighborhood, I spoke with environmental engineers, a number of external affairs folks, and even a Vice President of Environmental Affairs dressed down for the occasion.

I asked an engineer a  simple question: If it is now uncontested that there are high carcinogenic emissions near hydraulic fracturing sites, and those sites are located near our homes and schools, then hydraulic fracturing causes carcinogenic gasses to be emitted near people who could be affected by them. Right?

She responded, “I would never, never do what I do if I thought I was harming anyone.” Speaking with her face to face, I believed her.

At least, I believed that she believed what she said.

One of the things that makes this struggle difficult–which has also been true in resident struggles with companies that deal in tobacco, coal, opiates–is that the information employees receive is so completely different from the information residents receive… and observe, as some of that information involves first-hand accounts of harmful health effects.

I think it’s probably true that the majority of the folks at that Crestone meeting don’t believe they are harming people. While there are certainly people for whom harm to human beings is immorally justified as a necessary expedient, I don’t think most mid-level employees in harmful industries are knowingly doing others harm.

The challenge is that they also aren’t using the precautionary principle (the idea that we should know the harm we might cause before we act), and there is so much at risk in this project–not to mention the close to 100,000 other wells in Colorado in operation or under consideration at the COGCC.

Acme is sited at the border between Broomfield and Erie in Weld County within 522 feet of the nearest house.

Jessica Gillman, Research Chemist in Tropospheric Chemistry with the NOAA, said in an email exchange, “You can see VOCs from oil and gas development throughout the Front Range, but the concentrations will be highest closer to the sources” of oil and gas.

The equation seems simple. Acme is also about 500 feet from, and within the flight path of, the Erie Airport, where there have been several crashes in recent years. The proposed site sits over shallow, abandoned coal mines with a history of subsidence (land collapsing into sinkholes), as well as multiple fault lines that threaten the containment of harmful fracking fluid.

522 feet away is the home of my kind neighbors, who learned about the proposed site a week after closing on their house. They opted to keep their house in Denver, leveraging themselves to the gills; and if the project moves forward, they refuse to bring their grandchildren to the neighborhood because of health risks.

1000 feet away, just into neighboring Broomfield, is a 55+ retirement community, where reports of breathing problems and nosebleeds have been increasing as the march toward the production of almost 200 wells at four different projects continues, threatening to surround them on three sides.

Friday was the last day to submit comments to the COGCC about Crestone’s Acme pad.

Our best bet is to be the first project the COGCC has ever rejected, and with the passage of Senate Bill 19-181, hope for such rejection exists for the first time.

SB-181 changed the COGCC’s mandate to a regulatory body charged with the protection of “public health, safety, and welfare, including protection of wildlife resources.”

I hope thousands of people directly affected, and even those who aren’t, participate. While I don’t blame Crestone employees for their work, it is time to help them align their actions with their words: to not harm their neighbors.

While the public comment period is closed,  you can still contact the COGCC through the Statewide Complaint Line: 888-235-1101 or by emailing, Director Jeff Robbins, who is overseeing this project: jeff.robbins@state.co.us

The post Acme pad highlights information gap between O&G workers and residents  appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

*Update 2/24/2020

It is our understanding that the COGCC has not yet approved this well site. This personal blog has a more current status of what is taking place with legal actions around Oil & Gas. Broomfield Concerned also reports as of Oct. 31st, 2019 it is delayed.

*Updates include information on the number of inactive wells in 2015, and statements by the COGCC and CGRS

Tuesday Night, September 12th, 2019 I attended the Erie Oil & Gas Fair.  I had low expectations going in.  Those expectations were met. 

Right now there is an onslaught of advertising paid for by the Oil & Gas industry to tell us how wonderful fracking is. However, from our experience we have learned that the information we get from the industry is often misleading, key information is omitted, and sometimes is just wrong. 

The number of active oil and gas wells in Colorado almost doubled from 22,228 in 2000 to 43,354 in 2010. *Map of all of the oil and gas wells in Colorado through June 29, 2015. At that time there were 52,235 active wells, 49,919 inactive wells, and 5,551 permit locations, for a total of 107,705 wells. Colorado Geological Survey

Today we have over 60,000 active wells, plus another 20,000+ that are inactive but are open for future drilling, with several thousand more applying. Drilling applications have risen (and been approved) by 70% each year since 2016 in Colorado. 

We could face hosting one of the worst sites in the state if the Erie Acme Pad gets approved by the COGCC (Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission). New director Jeff Robbins’ allegiance to the community’s Health and Safety and implementation of SB-181 will be tested with this application. 

*To date, the COCGG has never not approved an application. Some have been rejected for improper completion, but to date, no application has ever been turned down. 181 is supposed to change that by changing the language from ‘foster development’ to ‘health and safety’.

The Acme site got approved right before SB-181 passed, but the city was being told by Crestone, that if Erie did not approve it and the Operator Agreement, they would bypass the city and get it approved by the state. 

For those not aware of the Acme Pad, it is considered the worst site in the state after the Battlement Mesa/Ursa site on the Western Slope, based on proximity to homes and potential impact to nearby residents. The spacing unit for Acme is 36 wells within 500 feet of homes, 100 feet from the airport runway and a few hundred feet from Highway 7—a major thoroughfare for residents and business. This is a MASSIVE site and should concern anyone who lives near it. Erie Thriving, a local group concerned with health and safety has a lawsuit against this project. 

The surface

disturbance area

is 550 x 1000 feet.

Roughly equal to

three average-sized Walmarts. 

I met with the following people at their respective tables at the Erie Oil & Gas Fair: 

• Jeff Webb, Assistant Fire Chief, Mountain View Fire Station
• Tara Webster Environmental Health Coordinator, and Sean Hackett, Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment
• Three representatives from CGRS, “an environmental-consulting company, providing industry- and regulatory-compliance expertise and services to owners and operators in the upstream and downstream petroleum industry”, but only Randy Kenyon gave me his card
• Mark Morton and Mike Leonard, COGCC representatives
• A couple of town officials, as well as the legal consultant to Erie regarding Oil & Gas regulations

I asked a lot of questions and recorded the answers. Here is my summary from this event:

• The Erie administrator present was not involved in the Acme Pad and was brand new, so “couldn’t really answer” any questions on Acme. We did spend quite a bit of time talking about regulations and the pipes being laid up Road 10-1/2 for the Wooley-Sosa site, and which 2,500 homes will eventually be built. Most of the Erie staff there representing seemed ill informed to answer O&G questions, except the outside legal counsel. 

• The Colorado Department of Health was by far the most disappointing. They told me they don’t have “values” for blood because they don’t test blood. They test air, but citizens can petition to have their blood tested. All blood testing is self reported data as the Colorado Department of Public Health (CDHE) does not collect that information. I was told the air samples are what they test for, and their studies show the data at or below their ‘health guideline values.’ The Health Guideline Values are not regulatory limits, but are based on values derived from toxicology studies and do not look at the B-Tags (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and o-xylene) in blood streams. B-Tags are the chemical compounds often found in blood tests of those living or working around fracking. The CDHE was overseen by Larry Wolk for many years, who has publicly opposed marijuana and supported Oil & Gas. He is currently employed by Wonderful Foods — who owns POM, who uses water produced from frack sites for their crops. 

• They told me that the effects people report are often short term and “go away” because the emissions are intermittent. The official statement said to me Thursday night, “if the CDHE saw a health risk, they would work to reduce that risk, and at this time based on the data they have, they do not see a risk around fracking”.

Much of the state now has an “F” rating for air and the data the state is using to demonstrate safety, is outdated.

It is important to note: The tests the Department of Health are using are based on data collected from 2008-2016. However, from 2016-2019, we have seen significant increase in the number of active wells with no current data available. 

• The COGCC (Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Committee) told me that the Acme Pad is up in the air for approval. They stated that 181 would resolve most of the community’s concerns. However, after speaking with activist groups around the state, we found that they do not feel 181 does enough to protect residents. I was told that they do work to oversee accidents/spills on a regular basis. 

• The environmental consulting group CGRS told me that they were consultants for governments, some water boards, and when I asked, confirmed they also consult for the industry. They did not have much to offer in the way of risks to the public, most likely because they are on the payroll for many Oil and Gas companies. It is concerning that cities are employing environmental consultants that are employed by the industry itself. I was told they also help manage mistakes through their services and there are fines involved when these happen. I asked if this happened often, which was responded with a shrug. Fines do not do much for the actual damage caused to the environment, so it is concerning to hear governing bodies appear as if this is all it takes to address the issue. 

• Mountain View Fire Department told me that they have had a couple of accidents/spills a year reported in Erie and have given me the national contact to access all reports statewide.  Statewide we have 12 spills a week. 

• I enjoyed talking with the legal counsel but was told that the overall legal view is that harder regulations will be the answer, because a ban would lose in court. This is where the second part of the debate comes in. There are many people who believe a ban can hold up. In 2016 the Colorado Supreme Court struck down the bans passed by Fort Collins, Longmont and Lafayette, however, that was prior to 181 passing. 

In short, Erie currently has 149 active wells within the city. Out of Erie’s $106,000,000 budget, fracking generates approximately $800,000 a year. Not much money for the extreme dangers connected to the activity.  

We have had three explosions in the area in the last couple years, of which one was deadly, and over 12 spills a week in the state. The IPCC warns we are down to 10 years to get it together.  

Overall, the message I walked away with is that this group of experts was there to tell us that fracking is safe, with a small few telling me that O&G essentially has a gun to Erie’s head and there is little they can do even though they wished they could do more.

No one really addressed the Climate Crisis and fracking’s impact on it.

To learn more about SB-181 the new regulatory bill passed this year, read The Blue Puddle. https://yellowscene.com/2019/02/27/the-blue-puddle-colorados-legislators-v-oil-and-gas/

If you would like to contact the COGCC regarding Acme Pad or any other regulatory issue around fracking: 

dnr.ogcc@state.co.us

The post Will the COGCC approve a fracking site the size of five Walmarts? appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Hi,

My name is Libby and I live in Crestone, Colorado (formerly known as Erie).

Here in Crestone, you can go to work or run errands all day and return home to be surprised to see one of these towers has gone up adjacent to your property.

On beautiful blue bird sky days, you will be able to spot Crestone from miles away by the dirt brown haze on the skyline.

There is a lot of truck traffic here too…24/7 as a matter of fact, so if you’re ever lost you can just follow one home.

When you want to cook out on your grill, you never have to be bothered by the smell of burgers or sizzling steaks because HERE our air smells like dryer sheets.

We have elections here in Crestone but we don’t worry much about who wins or loses because most of the candidates just want our town to be run by the industry that our town is named for.

If you ever DO decide to sell, you’ll want to plan your showings on days when the Thumper Trucks (Thumper…like the cute bunny in the Bambi movie) aren’t out and about. (Some ignorant people don’t understand how completely awesome it is to live in a town run by the O & G industry)

I love my house here.

I have wonderful neighbors.

And what we have in common is that we were all fooled, bullied, ignored, silenced, and pushed around by the company for whom our town is named.

The post Hi, My name is Libby and I live in Crestone, Colorado (formerly known as Erie). appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Image curtesy of Colorado Rising

We caught up with Suzanne Spiegel of Colorado Rising (CR).

YS: What is CR and what are the goals?

CR: “Technically, Colorado Rising is an issues committee—a 501(c)(4). It is a coalition of over 80 groups, both local and national. We’re working to pass a state ballot initiative (I-97) that would enact 2,500 foot setbacks on fracking activity from homes, schools, playgrounds, and water sources. Right now, the existing setbacks on homes is only 500 feet. From school buildings it’s only 1,000 feet. This is a citizens movement that aims to protect the health and safety of Coloradans and these precious areas.”

YS: What’s your role?

CR: “I am a volunteer organizer, and I deal a lot in fundraising. I’ve been organizing on the issues since 2012. I worked on those local city bans and moratoria in the Front Range. I worked at an organization I founded called Frack Free Colorado.”

YS: What are some of the ways CR is fighting fracking?

CR: “We’re grassrootsy. We organize in communities, teaching people about what we’re doing and why it’s effective. We host community trainings to bring up new leaders. I was also a proponent for the bill, which means I was legally one of the people that brought the state ballot initiative through the court system.

YS: How big is this grassroots org?

CR: “We have over 750 active volunteers. Those are people that collected signatures or became notaries or manned [sic] offices or did behind-the-scenes work. We have a large volunteer base that spans across the state. It really is a grassroots organization. Our success in collecting signatures is a direct reflection of that. The volunteers collected half of our signatures, which is uncommon for a state ballot initiative. We had over 171,000 signatures.”

YS: What are the biggest challenges CR face?

CR: “When you’re taking on the oil and gas industry you’re going to face a lot of challenges. So far, the oil and gas industry has put in $10 million to fight us, and we expect them to put in a lot more. They’re going to be buying the radio waves, television ads — they’re going to be in the face of Coloradans constantly with their propaganda. They’ll be saying things about how safe it is to live next to fracking, and how the economy would fall apart if it weren’t for fracking. We don’t have nearly the money the oil and gas industry does, so we have to be creative. That means being on the ground, and that means having a lot of conversations. We have to get our volunteers excited about getting the information out. A more immediate challenge is the oil and gas industry fighting us tooth and nail to keep us off the ballot.”

YS: What is the next issue CR wants to focus on?

CR: “It will be protecting the law. You never have a clean win, because the oil and gas industry is always trying to undermine it. It’s never over and done with. We imagine that our job will be to defend the initiative and to hold our representatives accountable to defending the initiative and the will of the people. We know that even though oil and gas companies have money and power, they are also a delicate industry. At some point, fracking won’t be economically viable because fracking is built on debt. Wells produce a lot at first, but they fall steadily over time. That’s why they have to keep drilling. Because of that, we know that every single delay really impacts this industry, and makes room for a transition.

YS: Is that transition you’re talking about away from oil and natural gas economy in Colorado?

CR: “Yeah, and also toward a green energy economy. Green technology is becoming more economically viable and is far more efficient. Green technology is far more relevant. The transition is really already happening, and what a shame it would be to lose such beautiful areas of our state in the meantime…this is really just the last gasps of a dying industry. We can’t go down in those final moments.

YS: Thanks for talking with us, Suzanne.

The post Grassroots Rising appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

In a Fort Lupton field that showcased a dazzling view of the mountains on a blue-sky day, Mitt Romney gave a speech on energy this morning in front of a towering oil rig draped with the American flag. His message to the hundreds of supporters there—many of them workers in the oil-and-gas industry—was that President Obama’s energy policies are outdated, stifling oil production by not leasing federal land to oil companies, and focusing too much on above-ground energy sources, such as wind and solar, and not enough on underground sources, like coal and oil. As evidence, he not only touched on fracking, but also pointed to Republican-Democrat debates over ANWR, the Keystone Pipeline and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Romney did concede that the oil-and-gas industry has been flourishing with increased production and jobs, but argued that the industry’s prosperity is occurring in spite of the President’s policies.

“Now, the President tries to take credit for the fact that oil production is up,” Romney said. “I like to take credit for the fact that when I was governor, the Red Sox won the World Series. But neither of those would be the case.”

The comment elicited laughter and applause, the kind of warm reaction Romney got a lot of today, while comments about Obama elicited occasional booing—little wonder then that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed relaxed and jocular before the crowd, even joking about Obama’s triumphant nomination four years ago in Denver.
“I want to remind you of what happened not far from here four years ago,” Romney said. “Then-candidate Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, got up and gave a speech at the Democratic Convention. He was not surrounded by mountains; he was instead surrounded by Greek columns. I don’t think he’ll be surrounding himself with Greek columns the next time he speaks at a convention, because he won’t want to remind people of Greece and the trouble they’re in, and the fact that he borrowed too much money.”

Romney was hosted by K.P. Kauffman Company, Inc. at one of the company’s drill sites. In attendance were numerous KPK employees, along with employees of other regional oil companies such as DCP Midstream and Noble Energy, all of whom seemed to be pro-Romney.

“I feel that he would support it [drilling] a little bit more, that’s for sure,” Shuyler Eagen said, a KPK employee in Weld County.

The dozen or so co-workers surrounding Eagen nodded in agreement.

“It’d open more doors for us, you know? The more drilling, the more work we’ve got, more production, the more jobs we can keep over here, especially here in Colorado,” KPK employee Bruce Bickel said.

Fort Lupton government officials were also present, including Mayor Tommy Holton, who has been an outspoken proponent of increasing fracking production and is a self-identified Romney supporter. Holton’s own kids work in the oil and gas industry, and he credits oil production with boosting job numbers in Weld County.

But while those gathering at Romney’s speech were overwhelmingly pro-Republican and in favor of decreased fracking regulations and increased oil production, a more dynamic crowd gathered throughout the morning on the corner of County Road 19 and Highway 52, just down the road from the drill site where Romney spoke.

In the early morning, the corner was occupied by the sort of pro-fracking types that attended Romney’s speech en masse, including Ann Cooke of Weld County, who described herself as a mom who supports fracking.

“You hear from a lot of moms: Oh, we’re against fracking. Well, there’s a whole bunch of us out there who are moms as well who know the benefits of natural gas for our communities, for our kids,” Cooke said. “We can’t enjoy the civilization, the lifestyle that we have without natural gas, and frankly without hydraulic fracturing”

After Romney’s speech, however, the corner was populated by an entirely different sort who decried what they perceived as lax fracking regulations.

“It’s not regulated nearly enough,” Lesley Manring of Occupy Greeley said. “They don’t really have full disclosure.  What really bothers me about this industry, besides the fact that there are very long-term, lasting effects, is that these jobs are temporary. These are dirty jobs that will be gone in two years after they’ve just milked everything out of Weld County and left a lot of waste behind.”

The effect of exiting the Romney event and encountering the more polarized reality on the corner of County Road 19 and Highway 52 was something like stepping out of the college bubble and into the real world. Inside the bubble, the course for Romney seemed clearly defined within an atmosphere of political equilibrium. But outside, the world of the corner represented the more fractious nature of the general election, a place where activists from both sides of the political debate seemed to rotate by the hour as a noisy stream of traffic drove by, with drivers honking and yelling epithets about both Romney and Obama.

It was a reminder that things are anything but decided here in Colorado, a crucial swing state where fickle Independent voters now hold as much sway as Republicans and Democrats. And for a brief moment, Romney himself seemed to acknowledge that things in the Centennial State were more difficult than the bubble made them seem, and anything but decided.

“I need Colorado’s vote in November,” he said, as if conceding the point.

“Yes, you do,” responded a supporter in the audience.

The post Romney Talks Fracking In Fort Lupton appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

There’s a change in the air around Erie, and residents don’t like what they smell.

Last week, Erie town officials said they are upping the ante on regulating air and water quality in the wake of data from a regional NOAA observation tower that recorded propane in the air at 10 times the levels found in Los Angeles.

In response to such data, as well as a growing sense of unease from residents who worry about the specter of wells cropping up near school zones and housing developments, the town plunked down $50,000 on a device that tests for water contamination.

And last week, the town requested that Encana, the gas production company that operates a number of wells in the area, capture 100 percent of air emissions from new wells. Town officials have also requested to be in on the loop for drilling plans to ensure new wells comply with local development guidelines.

The local action is well and good, but it has its limitations. Erie is free to inspect air and water quality all it wants, but it is powerless to enforce anything. The job of enforcement falls to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the division of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources that doles out well permits, and is also in charge of monitoring and inspecting drilling operations. And COGCC’s enforceable requirements are not as lofty as Erie’s unenforceable ones.

For example, COGCC requires that well operators use devices that achieve a 95 percent air-control efficiency of volatile organic compounds, which overrules Erie’s request for 100 percent control efficiency. And since Erie’s local inspection efforts are not under the auspices of COGCC, Erie will have to pony up its own dough to hire out the right personnel to conduct studies on drill sites—money that could prove difficult for the town to scrape together.

Assembling the resources for local inspections isn’t just a head-scratcher for Erie officials. Responding to a recent request from Erie Rising, a group of concerned residents, to investigate drilling’s potentially harmful effects on the town, the state health department said it did not have the resources to launch a study in the area.

In an interview with the Denver Post, Town Administrator A.J. Krieger acknowledged that Erie’s options for regulating drill sites are limited, but expressed the resolve that the town has the responsibility to do what it can: “We have to do everything in our power to protect our residents’ health and safety.”

The post Frack Focus: Erie Watches Air and Water appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

My, how a little science can change the equation.

Last month, the Erie Board of Trustees rejected the idea of imposing a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling to address citizens’ concerns that hydraulic fracturing—or “fracking”—had led to a rash of health problems. They preferred to implement new water and air monitoring and to work with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to explore Erie-specific requirements on future drilling permits.

But then Erie resident April Beach—a member and spokeswoman for Erie Rising, an anti-fracking grassroots group—stumbled across a year-old report by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration showing that the air in Erie is more polluted with drilling-generated volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than major metro areas like Pasadena, Calif., and Houston, Texas. VOCs such as ethane, propane and butane—byproducts of oil and gas operations—are found in Erie’s air at up to (and sometimes exceeding) 10 times the volume as can be found in those cities.

“For ethane, you’re seeing average levels on the order of 50 parts per billion and I will tell you now, that’s a very large number,” NOAA researcher Dr. Steve Brown, who was involved in the 2011 study, told the trustees at Tuesday’s meeting. “Levels on the order of 20-30 parts per billion, even at night, are very large levels of a compound like propane.

“Propane is much, much larger in Erie than it is in major urban areas elsewhere and that’s a clear signature that we’re impacted by the oil and gas (operations),” he said.

Ethane, propane and butane are all explosive in the right gas/air mixture. Exposure to propane can produce symptoms such as dizziness, bloody noses, nausea and vomiting, unconsciousness and damage to the central nervous system, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The study, which was conducted over the course of a month last spring, wasn’t initially meant to study how drilling causes air pollution. The scientists initially wanted only to better understand how weather and temperature affected the habits of certain pollutants and to study the composition of Denver’s infamous “brown cloud.” But because of the high level of data collected on the composition of Erie’s air—data that included wind speed and direction, and which took into account pollution migrating from Denver—it was expanded to include a study of emissions from the oil and gas industry.

The study was never made public and it’s only through Beach’s curiosity that it came to light at all.

“I had no clue what I was looking for” when she called NOAA asking if anyone had studied air pollution in Erie, she said. She called Brown, whose name she found on the NOAA website, on something of a whim. He sent back pages of technical data indecipherable to most laymen and it took some back and forth with him to have it interpreted. When she showed the study to Erie Town Administrator A.J. Krieger, she said he urged her to have Brown present the trustees with the results.

It’s safe to say that many trustees were stunned by the high levels of alkanes (the family of oil-and-gas-related compounds that include ethane, propane and butane) in Erie’s air.

“Would you say they were extraordinarily high?” Trustee Mark Gruber asked Brown.

“You could use that language,” Brown replied.

The Board of Trustees voted unanimously to draft an emergency ordinance placing an immediate 180-day moratorium on future drilling, which will be voted on March 13. The moratorium will not affect current drilling operations taking place at 58 active well pads within two miles of downtown Erie.

What Brown couldn’t comment on were the potential health impacts of his findings. That discussion will take place tonight, March 1, at the Erie Community Center, 450 Powers St., at 6:30 p.m. Erie Rising will feature a talk by Sonya Lunder, a toxicologist and senior analyst for the Environmental Working Group. The event is free and open to the public.

Lunder’s talk was scheduled weeks ago, but it’s due to Beach’s blind luck in uncovering Brown’s report that she’ll be able to address his findings.

“It was a total shot in the dark,” Beach said. “I’m so thankful I asked. But it makes me wonder, what else do we need to know that we’re not asking for?”

The post Erie’s air is worse than L.A.’s for oil and gas pollution appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

If you hadn’t been paying attention, it would be easy to believe that oil and gas companies crept into rural suburban communities like Erie under cover of darkness and drilled scores of wells while no one was looking. In fact, the opposite is true.

“Erie has really grown up around existing oil and gas development,” said Wendy Wiedenbeck, the community relations advisor for Encana Oil & Gas, one of several companies drilling for oil and gas in Erie’s back yards, sometimes literally. “Most people probably aren’t aware that they’re living on one of the most prolific gas fields in North America.”

They are now.

Community awareness of drilling operations happened seemingly at once, as Encana prepared to open an eight-well drilling pad within a few hundred yards of Erie’s two elementary schools. These wells, and many others, use a practice called hydraulic fracturing—or “fracking”—to extract energy resources that would otherwise be impossible to reach. Well operators love the method, especially in East Boulder County and Weld County, which are situated above the Wattenberg oil and gas field. Extending from Greeley to Longmont to near the northern edge of Denver, the Wattenberg field is the richest oil and gas reserve in the Denver-Julesberg Basin, which extends into Wyoming and Nebraska. Encana alone works 900 wells, which draw 60 million cubic feet of gas per day from depths of up to a mile and a half below the surface.

But the method of extracting that gas has become a major concern to the communities that sit atop it. The Environmental Protection Agency blames fracking for contaminating drinking water in Wyoming with cancer-causing benzene, synthetic glycol and alcohol. Encana, which owns the wells in question, has denied responsibility, calling the EPA report “speculation.” In Pennsylvania, the EPA delivers fresh drinking water to the residents of Dimock, a town where fracking operations are blamed for polluting well-water with methane, causing some wells to explode. Type the words “flammable tap water” into YouTube and you can readily see why homeowners near fracking wells take little comfort in oil and gas companies’ claims that the practice is safe.

Another concern is air pollution. Fracking operations can release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the air, vaporous chemicals that can cause an array of health effects if inhaled, including respiratory distress; ear, nose and throat irritation; memory, hearing and vision loss; and other effects that vary widely and depend on both concentration and time of exposure.

The number of permitted oil and gas wells around Erie. (Wells marked by a water droplet are currently in production.)

Although fracking has been a fact of life in Erie for decades, it wasn’t until Encana prepared to open an eight-well drilling pad within a few hundred yards of both the community’s elementary schools that parents became concerned enough to research the practice. When Angie Nordstrom, a parent with elementary school children in Erie, found a website with the locations of oil and gas wells in Erie, she was stunned by how many there were.

“That was absolutely shocking when you look at those aerial maps and see all those wells,” she said. “It’s alarming.”

In fact, there are 58 well pads within two miles of Encana’s proposed drilling site and each pad can contain as many as eight wells. Wiedenbeck, the Encana spokeswoman, says the community needn’t be concerned.

“We are very heavily regulated,” she said, noting that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment requires well operators to capture at least 95 percent of a well’s VOCs and maintain a 90 percent compliance across the gas field as a whole.

“We work diligently to control and manage air emissions,” said Cindy Allen, Encana’s air quality expert for the D-J Basin.

Those assurances aren’t enough for concerned residents, in Erie and elsewhere. The Longmont City Council imposed a moratorium on fracking in December, and in early February Boulder County followed suit. Both said they were examining their land use regulations to be sure they provided the maximum protection to human health and the environment as possible. In Erie, Mayor Joe Wilson said he would approach the CDPHE to help design and implement an air monitoring program and take steps to begin monitoring inflows at the water treatment plant for fracking chemicals.

Erie Rising, a grassroots group that formed in early January hopes to raise awareness about the potential hazards of fracking and, if possible, but an end to the practice.

“The fact that they decided to put an eight-well pad directly between the two elementary schools, when they did that it came to everyone’s attention,” said Erie resident Wendy Leonard. “There’s not enough data to prove that it’s safe. … There is exposure and ventilation into the air. How much we’re breathing, they can’t tell us. … So we and our children are guinea pigs. We will be, in ten years, living proof of the impacts of fracturing on our health.”

Nordstrom is particularly aware of the irony that the wells will be located within sight of Red Hawk Elementary School, which has environmental stewardship as one of its primary educational missions.

“Red Hawk is a green school and that kids will be looking outside and seeing this process going on is horrible,” she said. “We absolutely don’t want those eight wells to be built. We don’t want this process to continue in Erie.”

But despite this flurry of activity, there may be little more that can be done about it. Communities can’t permanently ban drilling because regulating is done on the state level.

Gov. John Hickenlooper has said he would fight bills seeking to give local governments more control over drilling, claiming that the state already has some of the toughest regulations in the country and that creating a patchwork of different regulations from county to county would be a hardship on gas companies. Those regulations are overseen by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), whose director, Dave Neslin, recently announced that he would be leaving his position to join the legal team of Davis Graham & Stubbs, a law firm that represents many of the oil companies drilling in Colorado, including Encana. (See full story here.)

Still, Wilson said he was going to try to work with COGCC to institute Erie-specific requirements for new drilling permits, including that they contain specialized equipment to further reduce air emissions and that all fluids used in the process be utilized in a “closed loop” system to prevent possible contamination of water sources.

“We would set in Erie a new standard for quality,” Wilson said. “We would be addressing the concerns from all sides.”

But again, the best Erie can do is ask; COGCC isn’t obligated to add these additional requirements to permits issued in Erie. And even if it agreed to do so, it would only apply to new licenses, not the dozens that are already issued.

Erie Rising plans a month-long series of public educational programs around the issue of fracking on Thursdays, beginning with a screening of the documentary Gasland on Thursday, Feb. 16 at the Erie Community Center, 450 Powers St., at 6:30 p.m. For full details of this and other events, click here.

The post Frack Attack appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

It’s been a fast week for news in Boulder County, from fracking to murder convictions, so on this snowy Friday—whether you’ve braved the forecasts and trekked to work a little disgruntled, or stayed home and are fending off guilt that it’s not really all that bad outside—here’s a quick recap of top news in BoCo this week:

›› Fracking jockeyed for the top spot among news items this week (competing with the murder trial of Kevin McGregor, more on that below), starting with the news that the state’s top oil and gas regulator has decided to join the state’s top law firm representing oil and gas companies. Dave Neslin practically wrote Colorado drilling regulations and once he joins Davis Graham & Stubbs on March 1, he’ll be assisting well operators to navigate them. Late in the week, Boulder County announced that it is imposing a moratorium on oil and gas drilling by suspending development planning for drilling applications that are in the pipeline. The issue of local control over drilling operations is one of the many issues dividing the state. Local governments responding to citizen concerns about potential health impacts of fracking are powerless to ban the practice outright … and that’s just the way that oil and gas companies, as well as some state officials (including Neslin and Gov. John Hickenlooper) want to keep it. Still, cities and counties have the power to impose certain guidelines through land-use rules and several (including Longmont and Commerce City, to name just a few) have halted new approvals while studying what other tools they might have at their disposal. Or, as Boulder County officials explained about its moratorium in a press release Thursday: “This will give us time to make sure that, within the limits of our legal authority, we are able to mitigate local impacts from these activities and to maximize protection for the people and environment of Boulder County.” The county will hold a public meeting on March 1 at 4 p.m. in the Commissioners Hearing Room on the third floor of the Boulder County Courthouse, 1325 Pearl St. to get input from citizens.

›› Also late on Thursday, a jury in the first degree murder trial of Keven McGregor, accused of shooting and killing 20-year-old University of New Hampshire football player Todd Walker during a botched hold-up on The Hill was found guilty on all counts and immediately sentenced to life in prison without parole. The jury rejected the defense’s contention that McGregor accidentally shot Walker in a struggle over control of the gun. A Colorado Bureau of Investigation firearms expert testified earlier in the trial that evidence showed Walker could not have been shot from closer than five to six feet, casting doubt on the “grappling for the gun” theory. McGregor’s attorneys said they will appeal. See a comprehensive article about yesterday’s verdict in the Daily Camera here.

›› In the lightening round of lighter fare we have: Boulder Police arrested a very hungry man who gives a new perspective on folks who say “I’m going to destroy this meal” before scarfing into a plate of vittles … he’s accused of literally destroying (and eating) about $1,000 worth of prepared food he pawed through after breaking into the Alfalfa’s Market to satisfy a case of the late night munchies. / Judy Volc, the beloved storytime reader from the Boulder Public Library who was unceremoniously and arbitrarily fired from the volunteer position she’d held for more 50 years by new library Director Valerie Maginnis, essentially told Maginnis to pound sand when rejecting Maginnis’s feeble counter-offer intended to turn down some of the heat the decision has generated. Maginnis wanted Volc to act as a “greeter” at the library, for free. According to the Daily Camera, Volc responded by saying, “If I wanted to drive four or five miles to meet and greet, I would do it at Walmart and get paid.” BAM. / And lastly, while Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter, some rodent called “Flatiron Freddy” saw overcast skies in Boulder and prematurely called for the onset of spring. As we dig out from a nice winter drubbing less than 24 hours later, it’s easy to see that Freddy still has a to learn from Phil.

The post Weekly news wrap-up: Fracking, murder, and groundhogs appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Dave Neslin, the director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—the state agency in charge of regulating oil and gas operators who’ve created much uproar and controversy in Boulder County through their use of hydraulic fracturing—announced he will step down from his industry oversight position to join Davis Graham & Stubbs, a Denver law firm that represents (you guessed it) oil and gas companies.

Davis Graham & Stubbs counts Encana Oil & Gas among its clients, the well operator that sparked a fracking controversy in Erie with plans to open an eight-well drilling pad just a few hundred yards from both of its elementary schools. Just weeks ago, Neslin attended an Erie Board of Trustees meeting to discuss fracking in his role as industry watchdog. Encana representatives were also present at the meeting and, as of March 1, he’ll be part of Encana’s outside legal team.

“This says a lot about where he’s been coming from when he’s been at public hearings for God knows how long,” said Erie resident Wendy Leonard, a member of an anti-fracking grassroots group called Erie Rising.

As an organization, Erie Rising had no comment on Neslin’s move, said spokeswoman April Beach.

Davis Graham & Stubbs represented Encana as recently as last year, when it petitioned the state engineer for a finding that certain groundwater formations beneath Encana oil fields in Garfield County were “nontributary,” meaning Encana wouldn’t need to go through the added cost and headache of obtaining a water permit for extracting it as a byproduct of drilling activities from deep below the surface.

Chris Richardson, the law firm’s managing partner, said that although Encana is a client, they don’t get involved in the company’s day-to-day operational issues, which are usually left to in-house lawyers. Therefore, Encana spokeswoman Wendy Weidenbeck said, Neslin’s new job would have no impact on local issues.

Still, Davis Graham & Stubbs touts many areas of expertise among its lawyers that are of direct concern to Erie residents. On the law firm’s website are links to presentations detailing strategies for dealing with lawsuits alleging fracking-related health effects and updates on pending litigation and regulatory issues.

And regulatory issues are Neslin’s forte. Appointed as acting director of COGCC in 2007, he “piloted the overhaul of Colorado’s drilling regulations—a long and politically charged exercise,” writes the Denver Post. Thanks to Neslin, Colorado has what are widely regarded to be some of the toughest drilling regulations in the country and Davis Graham & Stubbs is clearly excited to have him on board to help its oil and gas clients navigate them.

“Dave’s expertise and history with the COGCC will be a tremendous asset to our energy clients who are committed to developing their projects in a responsible manner,” Richardson is quoted as saying in a press release.

To be sure, the law firm represents more oil and gas companies than just Encana. Richardson would only say that there are a “variety of them.” The law firm’s website goes into a bit more detail:

“These clients range from individuals, partnerships, independents, and small companies to major joint ventures and Fortune 500 companies,” it says. “Many of our clients are foreign, including companies based in Canada, France, Germany, England, Japan and Australia. We also assist U.S. clients with activities in numerous foreign countries.”

There is a bright side to the top state-level overseer of the oil and gas industry now working on behalf of that industry, at least in the eyes of one fracking opponent.

“The positive piece on this is that hopefully we’ll get someone in there that isn’t biased,” said Leonard.

Neslin could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The post Oil & gas regulatory chief quits to advocate for oil & gas industry appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

The town of Erie is moving forward with plans to mitigate, as much as it can with its limited authority over oil and gas operations, potential hazards posed by well operators who use hydraulic fracturing to extract resources.

Fracking—the process of injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals into a well to fracture oil- and gas-rich shale deep underground—became a concern earlier this month when residents learned that Encana Oil & Gas planned to open eight wells within a few hundred yards of both Red Hawk and Erie elementary schools. Even though Encana officials say the practice is both safe and heavily regulated by the state, many community members report a variety of health affects they suspect are connected to air emissions from fracking operations.

On Tuesday, the Erie Board of Trustees announced the formation of a Comprehensive Community and Environment Action Plan that seeks to increase air and water monitoring for signs of fracking-related pollution and to beef up the town’s oversight of land use issues around drilling operations.

Mayor Joe Wilson said last week that the town is working with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to help design and implement a new air-quality monitoring system at six sites in Erie, and that the town’s water treatment facility would begin testing incoming water for signs of fracking chemicals.

Additionally, he said the town would be working with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the state agency that issues drilling permits, to request that future permits only be issued after oil and gas companies agree to additional rules specific to Erie. Those include requiring operators to fit equipment with high-capture ventilation devices to further protect against air emissions, agree to limitations on truck traffic, and require a closed-loop system for all drilling and fracking operations to eliminate the use of open pits, among other requirements.

“We would be addressing the concerns from all sides,” Wilson said.

But as proactive as the town is being, it can only do so much. Municipalities cannot ban fracking and the COGCC isn’t obligated to demand oil and gas companies comply with Erie’s wish list of enhanced safety requirements. It is, however, moving forward on what it can—the water and air monitoring plans. Wilson said the cost of installing air monitoring stations “is negligible in the long run,” at a cost of about $6,000 per site. He said he would ask oil and gas companies to contribute to the cost as a sign of good will. Monitoring inflow at the water treatment facility can be added to ongoing operations at little cost.

Even if COGCC agrees that oil and gas companies must adhere to Erie’s heightened requirements to qualify for a drilling permit, it will not affect the dozens of currently permitted well sites in and around Erie. However, Wendy Wiedenbeck, the community relations advisor for Encana, said the company has agreed to install high-capture equipment on its eight wells to be located near the elementary schools to ensure they go “above and beyond the requirements of the CDPHE” for air emissions, even though they’re already permitted and not required by the state to do so.

The community will be updated on Erie’s plan at the next trustees meeting on Feb. 14.

The post Erie quick to tackle fracking, but limited in options appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

If Erie residents who are concerned about hydraulic fracturing thought they would be alone in their fight against oil and gas companies, they may be pleasantly surprised to learn that they’re wrong.

Fracking—the practice of pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals into wells to crack rock and release oil and gas—has generated opposition across the country due to fears that the practice is unsafe. U.S. officials quoted in a recent Bloomberg article say even though fracking has been a common practice for 65 years, not enough is known about the potential hazards of the chemicals used. Erie residents are worried about air and water pollution and many have reported health problems ranging from headaches to nosebleeds to gastrointestinal illness, according to recent articles in the Daily Camera. These complaints are echoed by people across the country living near fracking operations. If there’s any bright side to others experiencing similar symptoms, it’s that they’re eager to help those in Erie who have suddenly found themselves thrust into the national debate

Erie Rising, a 10-day-old grassroots group calling for oil and gas companies to prove that fracking is safe, has been fielding offers for help and assistance from as far away as New Mexico and California on its Facebook page. A Boulder group called Earth Guardians has offered to “join forces to stop fracking in Erie;” an anti-fracking coalition in Huerfano County has offered messages of support and advice; California-based Global Community Monitor has been in touch about DIY pollution monitoring; and activists in New Mexico have forwarded information and resources.

“We’ve even been contacted by a community in England that wants to support us,” said Erie Rising member April Beach, who emphasized that she is just one of scores working to hold companies accountable.

Such support is likely welcome after a packed meeting of the Board of Trustees Tuesday night, where the idea of a temporary moratorium on fracking operations was floated but ultimately not acted upon. More than 100 people attended to air their complaints. Some residents are reportedly so concerned that they are considering moving out of town and many described illnesses they attribute to oil and gas operations.

Beach said the point of the meeting was less about a possible moratorium (which she said Erie Rising members never officially requested), but to demonstrate that “the town doesn’t know as much as it should” about the potential health and environmental impact of the chemicals used.

Industry representatives—and those of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees drilling throughout the state—have said the practice is safe and well-regulated. Regardless, there’s little the town can do if it believes otherwise. Erie’s control over drilling operations is confined to land-use issues and local governments don’t have the power to banish oil and gas companies. In fact, as Erie residents packed Town Hall on Tuesday, Commerce City residents were listening to a panel of state experts tell them just that. Commerce City, like Longmont, instituted a moratorium on fracking in December, which will expire this month. Longmont’s expires in April.

Fracking opponents in Erie have more than just similarly affected civilians on their sides. On Monday, a group of doctors at a drilling conference at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington called for a nationwide moratorium on fracking until the health effects of chemicals used in the practice can be better understood.

We don’t have a great handle on the toxicology of fracking chemicals,” said Vikas Kapil, chief medical officer at National Center for Environmental Health, in an article in Bloomberg.

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