Colorado Law Could Force Boulder to Sell Oil and Gas to a Private Company

State regulators could order Boulder County to sell its gas rights without the consent of voters or property owners.

By

 

Angelika Albaladejo , 

CAPITAL&MAIN

Published

January 1, 2023

Lauren Petrie, of Food & Water Watch, holds up a photo of a fracking site near a playground and wears a mask to show opposition to Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) board members during a public comment session on October 30, 2017 in Denver, Colorado.

HELEN H. RICHARDSON / THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

Extraction Oil and Gas, a Denver-based energy company, sent Boulder County an offer this summer. It’s one that local officials don’t want, but can’t refuse.

The company, a subsidiary of one of Colorado’s largest oil and gas producers, Civitas Resources Inc., gave the county three options: Sell access to its oil and gas, partner up as a working interest owner or get thrown into a legal process known as “forced pooling,” whereby the state can give a company permission to drill for a nonconsenting owner’s oil and gas.

Boulder, one of Colorado’s most populous counties, is pushing back against the private company’s efforts to extract oil and gas worth millions of dollars. The company is urging the state to give it access to the lucrative minerals, despite the county’s objections. But the county is arguing that the process would be illegal, and that local governments should have the power to reject drilling because of its harmful environmental and health effects.

Colorado established its forced pooling process in 1951 with the intention of reducing helter-skelter drilling, preventing waste and protecting the rights of mineral owners. Many oil and gas producing states have similar legal tools for compelling landowners to accept oil and gas operations.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), a state regulatory agency that oversees the industry, has sole decision-making power over who gets forced to pool their oil and gas into a company’s planned drilling. The COGCC told Capital & Main that it can’t comment on pending legal matters, but acknowledged that Colorado passed a law in 2019 that transformed the commission’s mission from “fostering oil and gas development” to “regulating in a manner that is protective of public health, safety, welfare, wildlife and the environment.”

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Extraction requested a forced pooling proceeding from the COGCC just two days after submitting its offer to Boulder County, and months before county officials decided to reject it. The COGCC has scheduled a hearing for Jan. 25, 2023. However, the county is hoping to end the process early.

“We believe that the whole concept of forced pooling is outdated,” said Boulder County Deputy County Attorney David Hughes, who filed a motion with the COGCC on Nov. 21 asking to halt the process through summary judgment.

The county is arguing that if the COGCC forced it to pool its oil and gas with Extraction, the commission would be violating both the state constitution and local laws. Boulder County argues that these laws give it “clear and largely exclusive authority over its own property and budget.” Forced pooling would infringe on this local authority by requiring the county to enter into a multiyear financial partnership with a private entity “against the will of its elected officials and its electorate,” the county claims.

If the COGCC decides to make Boulder pool its oil and gas, Hughes said the county is prepared to appeal.

When Extraction proposed the drilling project in 2018, the company hoped to drill up to 32 horizontal wells on a 13-acre well pad just 1,000 feet outside of Boulder in neighboring Weld County. Boulder County objected, arguing that while the well pads would be built in Weld County, the oil and gas would be removed from Boulder. Nonetheless, the COGCC approved the permits.

Boulder County challenged the permits in 2019 on the grounds that a conservation easement and several existing leases don’t allow for the drilling. But the lawsuits failed.

Because the oil and gas in question lies beneath 552 acres of land purchased by Boulder County with tax money designated for open space parks, various county agencies were required to hold public hearings to decide what to do next.

The Boulder County Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee unanimously recommended not to accept Extraction’s offer, for reasons including an ongoing dispute over whether Extraction owns or has control of more than 45% of the mineral rights, the legal threshold for forced pooling.

The Boulder Board of County Commissioners rejected the offer in November. Commissioner Claire Levy said in a press release that Extraction’s offer “is not in the best interests of the county, our residents or our open space.” Levy said that the drilling project would bring detrimental health and environmental impacts, and “require Boulder County to be in business with a private corporation on oil and gas development — something the county cannot and will not do.”

Environmental lawyers and activists told Capital & Main that the Boulder case exemplifies broader problems with Colorado’s forced pooling process, even after the state passed its 2019 law intended to better protect owners of oil and gas rights.

As the oil and gas industry’s technologies have improved over time, companies have been able to expand the acreage of their proposed drilling sites, increasing the potential for there to be multiple owners of the land and minerals, said Matt Sura, an attorney who represents land and mineral owners in lawsuits against oil and gas companies.

Meanwhile, with the advent of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing, also known as fracking, the industry has been able to pool resources beneath larger swaths of land. In the case of Boulder County, the company would be extracting oil and gas from several miles away using horizontal pipes connected to wells built in a neighboring county.

But even as the proposed drilling areas grow, options remain limited for objecting to forced pooling.

Kate Merlin, an attorney who has represented mineral rights owners in COGCC proceedings for about a decade, said she has only protested forced pooling a handful of times because “the odds are incredibly stacked against [those who own oil and gas beneath their land].”

“It’s a travesty against property rights,” Merlin said. “It seems to be capitalism run completely amok” because the state tends to side with companies seeking access, rather than owners, whether they are local governments or average homeowners.

Some Colorado legislators attempted to establish additional protections in 2017 for oil and gas interest owners who are subject to pooling, but the bill didn’t pass.

Legal challenges have also been unsuccessful. In 2019, a residential community in Broomfield, a city between Boulder and Denver, launched a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of forced pooling. Ultimately, a judge dismissed the case, and the COGCC gave Extraction Oil and Gas the go ahead to drill against the community’s objections.

Nonetheless, that same year, Colorado passed the law that altered the COGCC’s mission and introduced new rules for forced pooling. Now, a driller must secure consent from the owners of more than 45% of the mineral interests in order to pool. The changes also prohibit oil and gas operators from using the land of nonconsenting owners without their permission, slightly increase the royalties due to nonconsenting owners and remove liability that nonconsenting owners previously faced.

Even with these changes, Kate Christensen, an activist with the advocacy group 350 Colorado, said the state regulation has been twisted into an “industry tactic” used to scare the owners of oil and gas rights into entering agreements with companies.

“Oil and gas has a total stranglehold on the state,” Christensen said. “It’s really hard for local electeds to fight against oil and gas. They’re fighting the regulators, they’re fighting the commissioners, they’re fighting everything.”

Extraction, the company seeking access to Boulder’s oil and gas, has hired several lobbying firms to represent its interests in recent years, among them the 76 Group, whose past clients include Chevron and ExxonMobil. In 2022, Extraction’s parent company Civitas also paid the lobbying firms Husch Blackwell Strategies, Collective Strategies and Axiom Politics. Extraction did not respond to Capital & Main’s emails or phone calls.

Christensen said this type of industry influence is why forced pooling continues to play out in companies’ favor.

“If an oil and gas company dot all their i’s and cross their t’s, then they’ll get approved,” Christensen said. “It’s hard for people to get their heads around that in our country, with all these personal freedoms. … An oil and gas company can just take your minerals [even] if you say no.”

OPINION DIVERSITY AFFIRMATIVE ACTION/RACIAL PREFERENCES

An Ahistorical Argument About Asian-American Bias

A critique of affirmative action fails to account for the flawed

data used to "prove" bias.

Letters to the Editor

 

January 1, 2023

Historian of education Jonathan Zimmerman’s superficial commentary on “affirmative action and anti-Asian bias” (Dec. 12) demands a response. Without checking any evidence, Zimmerman parrots opinion essays in The New York Times and elsewhere that repeat the undocumented, ideologically fueled court filings—not initiated by either Asian-Americans or other American—by a well-funded right-wing campaign of assault on the proven (if never 100 percent perfect) record of affirmative action for almost one half-century.  

Its leader, Ed Blum, first made a name for himself as litigant in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He almost succeeded in ending affirmative action with Fisher v. University of Texas in 2016, stopped by Justice Scalia’s death. 

It is no secret that the purposefully misleadingly titled Students for Fair Admissions—that is, fair for middle- to upper-middle-class white students—leads with its own bias, misrepresentations and distortions. Among them is the repetition of false, ahistorical and non-contextual comparisons with Jewish quotas while ignoring the parallel Catholic, Black, Brown, and Asian limitations. (See among many reports, Evan Mandery, “The Supreme Court is Set to Kill Affirmative Action. Just Not for Rich White Kids,” Mother Jones, Oct. 31, 2022.) 

Both scholars and journalists who have demanded access to the actual data on which the cases leading to the recent Supreme Court hearings are based find the Southern California researchers’ studies inadequate both quantitatively and qualitatively to sustain any arguments, respectively, in support of anti-Asian bias at Harvard in particular, or in related filings addressed at secondary and post-secondary school white bias in admissions.  

These observers also maintain that the researchers commissioned by the anti-affirmative action groups who purport to respond to Asian-American claimants but in fact solicit the Asian-Americans refuse to reveal their complete data and supposed analytical results. This is unscholarly as well as suspicious. 

I do not understand why a historian takes his stand in support of the opponents of affirmative action—policies he claims to endorse—without making an effort to review any data, other than what he reads in The New York Times. The text of his essay is an exercise in muddled, self-contradictory “what-aboutism,” much like the recent NYT “Applying to College, and Trying to Appear ‘Less Asian,’ ” by Amy Qin (Dec. 2, 2022) that ends by arguing the opposite of what it begins. Another parallel is the Manhattan Institute’s Renu Mukerjee’s “Affirmative Action Is Wrong: There’s a Better Way to Make Campuses Diverse,” NYT, Oct. 30, 2022.  

--Harvey J. Graff

Professor Emeritus of English and History
Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies 

https://www.insidehighered.com/

Facebook whistleblower says company isn’t ‘committed’ to civic integrity

BY JARED GANS -

 01/01/23 


Frances Haugen, who became known as the Facebook whistleblower after she released thousands of documents about the platform’s content moderation policies and algorithm, said the company is not “committed” to civic integrity.

Haugen said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Facebook is more concerned with its stock prices and profit margins than public safety. She said she was initially optimistic about the company’s plans when she was hired as part of its civic integrity unit, which she said was one of the best in the industry.

But she said she realized Facebook was not serious when it dissolved the unit after the 2020 presidential election.

“When Facebook dissolved civic integrity, I saw that they weren’t willing to make that commitment anymore,” she said.

Haugen released thousands of internal documents from Facebook in 2021 about the company’s algorithm and its response to misinformation on the platform. She testified before Congress in October of that year that Facebook is prioritizing profits over its users’ safety.


She also alleged in complaints filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Facebook misled investors about its efforts to stop the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 and climate change.

Haugen said Facebook’s stock price declined by more than 5 percent compared to Nasdaq overwhelmingly when something demonstrated that the company needed to spend more on public safety. California, Nevada face flooding, power outages amid winter stormEx-Capitol Police chief warns agency still ‘not in a better place’ two years after Jan. 6 failures: book

“Facebook is scared that if we actually had transparency, if we actually had accountability, they would not be a company with 35 percent profit margins — they’d be a company with 15 percent profit margins,” she said.

Haugen said a problem exists in that social media companies are so sensitive to growth that growing at a lower level than what the stock market expects causes their stock prices to drop. She said this causes them to be afraid to take even small actions toward safety because it could decrease the profit margins.

She said social media platforms allow “invisible” lies to be spread because of the algorithm, unlike with television or radio and that such companies need to become much more transparent.

SOCIALISM FOR THE RICH

When It Comes to Greed and Tax Dodging, Sanders Points Out “Trump is Not Alone”


Sen. Sanders called out seven major companies that also payed no federal income taxes in 2020.

By Jon Queally ,

COMMONDREAMS

Published  January 1, 2023

Donald Trump greets guests as he arrives for a New Years event at his Mar-a-Lago home on December 31, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida.

JOE RAEDLE / GETTY IMAGES


Senator Bernie Sanders is not asking anyone to be shocked that Donald J. Trump was very good at not paying taxes, but he also wants people to know that the disgraced former Republican president is far from the only rich person or powerful corporation who gets away with paying little or nothing each year federal income tax.

In a tweet on Friday evening, Sanders said: “When it comes to tax avoidance, Trump is not alone.”

Sanders then listed a handful of well-known and highly-profitable companies that paid nothing in federal income tax in 2020, the most recent year detailed figures are available for many companies.

“Yes. Dr. King was right,” added Sanders: “We have socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the rest.”

On Friday, the House Ways and Means Committee released to the public Trump’s tax returns after a yearslong legal fight to obtain them from the IRS after the former president broke with precedent by refusing to release them voluntarily.

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What the returns and associated documents released by the committee show is an inside look into how very wealthy individuals diminish their tax liability or pay nothing at all year after year.

Specifically in 2020, Trump — despite his vast business holdings — paid no federal income taxes at all. Also in 2020, despite repeated promises to the public that he would donate all his presidential salary to charity, the New York Times reported Saturday that the tax returns reveal he made no charitable gifts that year.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), at least 55 major U.S. corporations — including those named by Sanders — paid $0 in federal taxes on massive profits in 2020.

ITEP’s analysis shows that these 55 corporations “would have paid a collective total of $8.5 billion for the year had they paid [the staturory federal rate of 21 percent].” Instead, including by benefiting greatly from the tax law that Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress passed in 2017, those companies collectively “received $3.5 billion in tax rebates.”

In all, that’s $12 billion less in taxes paid by some of the most profitable and largest companies in the nation.

As numerous outlets have detailed, Bloomberg’s reporting states how “massive losses and large tax deductions in Donald Trump’s returns reveal how the former president was able to use the tax code to minimize his income tax payments.” According to the outlet:

The records illustrate how Trump, as a business owner and a real estate developer, is eligible for a bevy of tax breaks that most taxpayers can’t claim. The filings, which cover 2015 to 2020, also detail how Trump was affected by the 2017 tax-cut bill he signed into law.

The documents further show the sheer complexity of the tax code. As for many US business owners, the filings span hundreds of pages to account for domestic and foreign assets, credits, deductions, depreciation, and more.

Warren Gunnels, a top aide and advisor to Sen. Sanders, said Friday night that far-reaching tax breaks is not the only benefit that Trump received which too many regular people are still denied in the United States: free, taxpayer-funded healthcare.

Throughout his presidency, including when he was suffering from Covid-19, Trump was provided care via the Veterans Administration.

“In 2020, not only did Trump pay nothing in federal incomes taxes, not only did he get a $5.47 million tax refund, he also paid ZERO for his hospital stay at Walter Reed—a 100% government-run hospital,” tweeted Gunnels.

“Yes,” he added, echoing Sanders. “Trump loves socialism for himself, rugged capitalism for the rest.”

U$A

Some of the Biggest Labor Contracts Are Expiring in 2023

Workers are hoping to take advantage of a tight labor market to win big raises to help cope with inflation.

By

 

Dan DiMaggio , 

LABORNOTES

Published

January 1, 2023

Longshore workers walk off the job in solidarity with the teamsters to picket and disrupt traffic in San Pedro, California on Wednesday, April 14, 2021.

BRITTANY MURRAY / MEDIANEWS GROUP / LONG BEACH PRESS-TELEGRAM VIA GETTY IMAGES

Negotiations will take place in 2023 for some of the biggest contracts in the labor movement, including at UPS and the Big Three automakers.

Workers are hoping to take advantage of a tight labor market to reverse years of concessions and win big raises to help cope with inflation. New leaders in the Teamsters, and potentially the Auto Workers (UAW), have promised to put up a more aggressive fight.

UPS

The Teamsters contract covering 340,000 package car drivers and warehouse workers at UPS expires July 31. New Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has promised the union will be ready for the first strike against the parcel giant since 1997.

“The days of concessions and walking all over our members are over,” he said in August, kicking off the contract campaign. “We won’t extend negotiations by a single day. We’ll either have a signed agreement that day or be hitting the pavement.”

Among the issues are excessive overtime, low pay for part-timers, subcontracting, driver-facing cameras, and ongoing harassment by supervisors

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There’s a target on two-tier. Already infesting UPS facilities, two-tier was expanded in 2018 to create an underclass of package car drivers. That contract was so unpopular that the old Teamster leaders could impose it only by invoking an undemocratic two-thirds-to-reject rule. That language was repealed at the 2021 convention.

Auto

The Big Three contracts, covering 150,000 auto workers at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), expire on September 14.

Members are hungry for a new direction — that is clear from the results of the recent UAW elections.

Among the issues in negotiations will be two-tier wages and benefits — new hires start at just $17 an hour and get a 401(k) instead of a pension — and winning back cost-of-living adjustments. Job security will also be a major issue, as the industry shifts to electric vehicle production.

Postal

The contract covering 200,000 city letter carriers expires May 20. (Postal workers, the nation’s largest union workforce, are split among four unions.)

Understaffing is severe. Letter carriers are working till long after dark, with few days off. New hires start on a lower tier and are made to work Sundays delivering for Amazon; turnover is high.

If ever there was a year to defeat two-tier, this is it — the Postal Service is so desperate that in some areas it’s already hiring straight into tier one. And high-profile contract battles against two-tier at UPS and the Big Three should put the wind in labor’s sails.

A letter carrier strike is highly unlikely, though — not only because it’s illegal (which didn’t stop the great postal strike of 1970) but also because this not a union that mobilizes. Last time around there was no survey on bargaining priorities, never mind rallies or shop floor action. Prove us wrong!

Caterpillar

UAW contracts covering 5,000 workers at heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar in Illinois expire on March 1.

The 2021 John Deere strike, where workers won immediate 10 percent raises and preserved the pension for new hires, will likely serve as inspiration. Meanwhile, 1,100 UAW members at CNH in Iowa and Wisconsin have been on strike since May over three-tier wages (lower than their counterparts at CNH’s non-union plants) and forced overtime.

Caterpillar has viciously fought its unions for 30 years; the company is already training managers and has begun its fearmongering campaign in case of a strike.

Locomotives

The United Electrical Workers (UE) contract covering 1,400 locomotive manufacturing workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, is up on June 9.

Workers there struck for nine days in 2019 and beat back most of the concessions being pushed by new owner Wabtec, which had bought the plant as part of its purchase of GE Transportation. Wabtec was attempting to impose a new contract that instituted mandatory overtime, slashed pay for new hires and recalled workers, and allowed the company to hire non-union temps for 20 percent of the plant’s jobs.

Keeping jobs in Erie is a longstanding issue at the plant; Wabtec operates a nonunion factory in Texas. The union is backing efforts to force railroads to swap older, dirty locomotives for new green locomotives that could be produced in Erie.

GE

The contract covering 3,000 members of International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE-CWA) locals at several General Electric manufacturing facilities expire on June 18. They make jet engines, among other things.

GE union members from as far away as Kansas and Kentucky rallied at the company’s headquarters in Boston in October demanding the company invest more in its U.S. plants, including adding thousands of jobs to recently closed plants.

Workers are also pushing for cost-of-living increases and more affordable health care. Earlier this year GE announced plans to split its remaining assets into three separate companies — aviation, health care, and power — which the union says is just another scheme to reward Wall Street.

Airlines

The five unions at United Airlines, including the Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), Machinists, the Airline Pilots Association, the Teamsters, and a union of flight dispatchers, just announced they have formed a new coalition to coordinate bargaining. The pilots overwhelmingly rejected a contract offer.

Contracts have expired for most of these unions, but bargaining is governed by the lengthy process laid out under the Railway Labor Act.

Over at American Airlines, the flight attendants are picketing to protest overwork, exhaustion, and health care costs as they negotiate their contract. The pilots’ contracts are outstanding at American and Southwest, too.

Education

Members of United Teachers of Los Angeles have been working under an expired contract since June. They are pushing for a 20 percent raise over two years, smaller classes, and less standardized testing.

The 30,000 teachers at the nation’s second-largest school district struck for nine days in 2019, winning class-size reductions and a commitment from the district to provide a nurse in every school and a librarian in all middle and high schools.

In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, 110,000 educators are also working under an expired contract.

Meanwhile, 3,700 teachers in Portland, Oregon, are gearing up for a major contract mobilization; their agreement expires in June.

Other Expired Contracts

The 22,000 Longshore (ILWU) union members at West Coast ports are working under a contract that expired in July. Issues include jurisdiction, wages, benefits, and automation.

NewsGuild members at the New York Times staged a one-day strike December 8; their contract has been expired since March 2021.

First Contract Fights

Some of the biggest fights in 2023 are likely to be around first contracts. That includes the 7,000 Starbucks workers who have voted to unionize, as well as workers at Trader Joe’s, REI, and Amazon.

Have a contract expiring in 2023 (or 2024) you want to tell us about? Write to dan@labornotes.org.

A version of this article appeared in Labor Notes #526, January 2023. Don’t miss an issue, subscribe today.