May 01, 2012 04:58 PM UTC

McNulty's "Local Control" Hypocrisy Falls Flat

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

A Republican bill to punish cities and counties that get in the way of natural-gas and oil drilling appears to be dead before it even got off the ground…

The bill would withhold payments of severance taxes to any city or county that “in any way restricts or delays” energy production.

…As Monday’s hearing began, [Rep. Jerry] Sonnenberg said he intended to greatly narrow the scope of the bill, so that it would cover only moratoriums on drilling. Boulder County, the city of Longmont and a few other Front Range jurisdictions currently have temporary drilling bans.

The committee delayed a vote until Wednesday to give Sonnenberg a chance to craft new language for his bill.

But even the narrower version of the bill appears set to fail.

We talked a little over a week ago about the results of a task force looking into the interplay of local and state law with regard to oil and gas production, a result that GOP House Speaker Frank McNulty expressed dissatisfaction with. McNulty, as the Herald reported then, is looking to “rein in” local governments who are passing their own restrictions on drilling in their jurisdiction–including moratoriums. Although the GOP’s stated position on just about everything is a preference for “local control,” this oddly doesn’t hold true with oil and gas drilling.

Unfortunately for the Speaker, it looks like at least two Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee, Reps. Marsha Looper and J. Paul Brown, are not okay with this apostatic hit on local government power. Looper’s primary against Majority Leader Amy Stephens makes this another chance for her to show that House leadership is unprincipled. Brown is a pickup target for Democrats after reapportionment, and is being extremely careful after a rough first year.

Something about all of this seems very bad for McNulty’s speakership, not to mention the GOP brand going into an election. As Hanel reports, this very late bill could not have been introduced without McNulty’s blessing. The whole exercise comes across as fundamentally unethical, not unlike the “Midnight Payday Payback” battle last year (which McNulty also lost).

“This is very, very unsavory public policy being proposed here,” said Kevin Bommer, a lobbyist for the Colorado Municipal League.

What’s different now is fellow Republicans with anything to lose are unwilling to stand by him.