The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is holding hearings Monday and today on the agency’s proposed rules drafted to incorporate two recommendations from Gov. John Hickenlooper’s Task Force regarding State and Local Regulation of Oil and Gas Operations. The evenly balanced group comprising industry representatives, local government, agriculture, landowners, developers and neutral parties reached an agreement on a series of recommendations designed to strike a better balance between the rights of gas and oil industry to develop the subterranean resources and the authority of communities to regulate activity within their jurisdiction.
One such recommendation was designed to give cities and counties a greater consulting role when large-scale facilities are proposed within their bounds, but the COGCC’s proposed rule incorporating the task force’s findings waters them down significantly. It is a missed opportunity that gives communities less leverage than is appropriate – and less than that sought by the task force.
The task force’s recommendations called for a robust consultation process between industry and local governments, particularly with respect to the location of large-scale facilities. This premise honors the rights of cities and counties to regulate land use within their jurisdictions, and encourages cooperation so as to best manage the inherent conflict between gas and oil development and the residential communities it affects.
The proposed rules contain no clear statement requiring that proposed gas and oil activities go through a local land-use approval process prior to receiving state permits; they encourage the consultation but do not enshrine it as essential. Without that requirement, cities and counties will lack the authority to negotiate siting of large-scale facilities – which was the intent of the task force’s recommendation. That must be remedied before the rules are finalized – a request local governments and counties, including La Plata, have made since the rule-making began.
Further, a COGCC cost-benefit study of the rule’s effects found that less than 1 percent of the drilling and storage facilities in the state would be subject to the consultation requirements. This is largely because the language focuses on the “urban mitigation area” – namely those sites within 1,000 feet of development. By so narrowly limiting the scope of the consultation requirement, the COGCC strips communities of the role the task force’s recommendation intended: to be able to plan effectively for future development – oil and gas, residential, commercial and otherwise – and mitigate the negative impacts when various land uses come into conflict.
Bernie Buescher, a task force member and former Colorado secretary of state, wrote the recommendation for the consultation rule and is rightly concerned about the COGCC’s interpretation of it. “It was my intention that the recommendation apply regardless of whether the proposed location was within an urban mitigation area,” Buescher said.
His colleague on the task force, Matt Sura, a Grand Junction attorney, went further: “As written, the draft rules are nearly meaningless,” Sura said.
But not to the oil and gas industry, which has expressed continual concern that the rules would unduly hamper activity in the state. The numbers simply to do not support claims that the task force recommendations and the rules that embody them will constrain the gas and oil industry. With fewer than 1 percent of large facilities subject to the consultation requirements, the industry can breathe easy with the knowledge that few roadblocks exist in the regulatory environment. The same cannot be said for the communities that will live with these facilities.
