

Soapbox: Officials not acting in Windsor's best interest by allowing fracking

1:33 AM, Mar. 18, 2014  |  Comments

Be careful, Larimer County, you might become Weld County West. And look no further than to Windsor to get a glimpse of your impending doom.

As Front Range cities and towns grapple with the threat of rapid industrialization from unconventional drilling practices for unnatural gas and a resultant health crisis, the town of Windsor and its public officials sink their heads further into the silica in blind deference to the oil and gas industry.

The greatest common factors behind their moral transgressions against the citizens of Windsor are greed, complicity and fear. The greed-driven persuasions of an industry and the local land barons who fan them have blinded the mayor, town board and planning commission into placing profiteering over public health.

They've become complicit in the process by inviting drilling activity onto public lands astride neighborhoods, schools and churches. They've gone further by not only selling the town's water to the "frackers" but purchasing with public dollars a newly developed reservoir (County Road 13/Colorado Highway 392) for the benefit of future drilling operations, all the while paying fees to a "land man" (a local attorney and land baron) to broker deals for further energy exploration.

They fear to weigh the consequences of their actions. They fear to ask whether they are indeed acting in the best interest of Windsor and roughly 20,000 residents. They fear the truth - that taking $140,000 in royalties from drilling has been a colossal mistake. Jeopardizing the well-being of their friends and neighbors for roughly $7 per head in 2013 was simply a decision they will stand to regret as this tale of boom-and-bust energy development plays itself out.

Absent in this storyline are laws to protect and safeguard Coloradans. There are no consequences other than shame that confronts public officials when in five or 10 years' time we see a spike in cases of breast cancer and birth defects, which have been reported in heavily drilled areas of Texas and Western Colorado. Real men seek to protect their women and children.

I propose that a law be enacted that makes it unlawful for a public official (past or present) to promote, permit or profit from any industry that either harms the public health or robs the common wealth. You'd think it would stand to reason that those entrusted with acting in the best interests of their constituency need not be restrained from "fracking" things up. Alas, Windsor and Weld County officials provide moving evidence in their misdeeds to support such pertinent legislative action.

Devoid of a threat of criminal and civil penalties for felonious fratricidal behavior, you can bank on it that some misguided public officials will continue to succumb to the greatest common factors of greed, complicity and fear as they bow to industry pressure to despoil Colorado's lands and communities so that fossil fuels may be harvested and ported to overseas markets.

It's an unfortunate consequence that cowardice rather than courage permeates the political air in tandem with benzene, toluene and other "trade secret" cancer-causing agents of hydraulic fracturing.

I'd much rather get back to learning fourth-grade Singapore math than penning pleas or speaking out at town board meetings. Is it too much to ask that public officials act in our best interest and not endanger our communities? Apparently so.