February 22, 2009 07:17 PM UTC

Whose Rights, Anyway?

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• by: Colorado Pols

An article in today’s Durango Herald speaks to the main issue overarching the whole fight over oil and gas drilling regulation in Colorado. Tell us if you don’t agree:

Sen. Jim Isgar has placed a new piece on the board in the long-running chess match over new rules for gas and oil production.

Isgar’s Senate Bill 229 puts him in the middle of a skirmish between Republicans and the Ritter administration over rules the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has adopted to protect wildlife.

The bill attempts to clear up confusion about what rights property owners have under the new rules by allowing them veto power over Division of Wildlife recommendations.

“It kind of shifts the burden and gives the surface owner more power than he had,” said Isgar, D-Hesperus.

The latest maneuvers began Tuesday, when Republican Rep. Cory Gardner of Yuma tried to convince a House panel to pass his House Bill 1255, which was a much broader assault on the Division of Wildlife’s power than Isgar has in mind…

On Friday, it was checkmate for Gardner’s bill. The House Agriculture Committee voted 7-6 to kill it.

Gardner didn’t sound happy about the new Isgar-Curry bill.

And here’s where we come to it: where all the vague talk about “protecting rights” you hear from both sides in this long-running debate is disambiguated once and for all.

There are two sets of property rights at issue: the surface landowner’s and the mineral owner’s. Surface landowners worry that the oil and gas commission’s rules will force them to comply with Division of Wildlife mandates, and gas companies worry that landowners could use wildlife as an excuse to not allow any drilling.

Now, everybody says they’re on the side of the surface property owners (otherwise known as voters) who breathe the air and drink the water around drilling sites, and can be expected to care much more about protecting wildlife that lives on or transits their land than energy companies do. And don’t let the current temporary slowdown in drilling activity fool you–whatever the rules turn out to be, there will be more oil and gas drilling in Colorado.

It all comes down to where you split the difference–marginally in favor of landowners or energy companies. Jim Isgar’s bill would tip this balance we’re talking about toward surface rights holders in terms of approving wildlife protections, with specific limits to protect mineral rights holders. It’s a compromise that tries to protect both sides’ interests.

The key focus here is rightly on the landowner, though, since it’s not usually the energy companies calling the health and wildlife departments. But protecting those poor landowners from Big Guvmint Regulation is the GOP’s rallying cry here, so there you go. Take that “issue” off the table, uncontroversially since the interests of the Wildlife Department will align a hell of a lot more often with landowners than the energy companies. The idea of residential landowners upset about DOW drilling regulations to protect wildlife on their land seems kind of rare to us.

Get it? Both sides are talking about “rights,” but it’s clear who’s rights really matter to whom at the end of the day–the Rocky Mountain News revisits Rep. Cory Gardner’s killed “property rights” bill.

The House agriculture committee Friday killed a proposal to limit the involvement of the Division of Wildlife in issuing oil and gas drilling permits…

Health agencies and the wildlife division have become more involved in the oil and gas permitting process since Democrats gained control of the legislature, and a Democratic governor last year began making appointments to the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission.

Proponents of HB 1255 argued that tighter restrictions on drilling proposed by the commission could violate the property rights of landowners.

Rep. Cory Gardner, R- Yuma, the main sponsor of the bill, said landowners have a greater stake in the issue than environmentalists who opposed the bill. [Pols emphasis]

You see where this is going, don’t you? Gardner’s bill hid behind the people everybody says they want to protect, Joe and Suzy Ranchette and their back Garco forty, but in reality he wanted to strip the people most primarily concerned with protecting Joe and Suzy (and the wildlife on their land) from the process. It takes about two seconds to realize who actually benefits from that–the same energy companies who want all of these new rules junked.