Fort Collins is now the second Front Range city to continue a legal battle over hydraulic fracturing. The Northern Colorado city was one of three municipalities that had their measures on the practice thrown out in court.
The town's city council voted Tuesday to appeal a court ruling overturning a 5-year pause on fracking that voters approved with 56 percent of the vote in November, 2013.
The 5 year moratorium would apply to the city and areas that the city owns, like Soapstone Natural Area north of Fort Collins.
Mayor pro tem and member of the Fort Collins City Council Gerry Horak voted in favor of the resolution.
“We have two things happening at the same time, one is the appeal of the decision, the other is a stay of the decision. So one deals with we’d like to see the decision overturned, the other says we’d like to see the decision not enforced, until the appeals court makes their decision,” he said.
The council voted 6-1 in favor of the appeal, with council member Wade Troxell the only dissenting vote.
The Fort Collins decision to appeal follows Longmont's unanimous decision to appeal a ruling against its voter-approved fracking ban which was approved in 2012. Mayor pro tem Gerry Horak spoke on the council's decision and his impression of Governor Hickenlooper's Oil and Gas Task Force during an interview that aired on All Things Considered.
Interview Highlights
Is it worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the legal case and the environmental studies?
“Well it’s an ordinance. So it doesn’t matter if it passed by one citizen vote or 100,000 citizen votes. Our fiduciary responsibility as the city council is to defend that. If we thought there was no chance of the appeals court changing it, maybe the vote would be different on the city council. But it is a very broad ruling that could make it so we could not have regulations for oil and gas which is totally unreasonable to me and obviously a majority council.”
Do you think the Governor's Oil and Gas task force will handle some of your concerns?
“I don’t have much faith in that…I had not seen the state legislature willing to tackle the issue. I’ve seen the state legislature willing to tackle fringes on the issue and they’ve basically ignored it over the last so many years.”
What role does the Colorado Oil Gas Conservation Commission play in regulating the industry with regard to municipalities?
“Allegedly they get to deal with regulations for under the ground. And allegedly jurisdictions, cities and counties could deal with the stuff above the ground. But every time cities and counties have passed something and it has gone to court, cities and counties have lost. And they go back to the Greeley case as one of the reasons why you loose. And so we have this hypothesis we can do things above the ground for regulations but in reality it doesn’t ever seem we can. And like I said I think the issue is this is now encroaching on where people live and people don’t want it next to them.”
