Sometime prior to this meeting, Ric Morgan sent a copy of the draft Oil & Gas regulations to Jake Matter at the Attorney Generals office for his review. Jake Matter also represents the COGCC. Matter responded to Morgan’s email ex-officio with respect to his COGCC duties. Morgan shared this response with Carolyn Parkinson, who then distributed it to other Oil & Gas Edit Committee members. Matter’s analysis apparently raised the issue of an operational conflict with COGCC regulations on the issue of Elbert County banning open pits.
The edit committee struggled with this new information. Committee members Crisan and Corrado lobbied for the regulation to be written in an adversarial progressive direction, notwithstanding that the majority of edit committee members thought that litigation with the state would likely ensue from that approach. Environmentalists in the audience agreed with the adversarial approach. As Mr. Blotter put it, such an approach might deter him from going on the “attack.”
Carolyn Parkinson spoke to the duty of the edit committee to produce a regulatory document that the BOCC could sign with some assurance that doing so would not open the county to litigation. Several others experimented with language that would preserve a county disposition against open pits without putting in place an outright ban to trigger the operational conflict.
It would be interesting to see this letter from Jake Matter that caused so much kerfuffle in the meeting.
Taking a step back, what was notoriously under-represented on the edit committee, and absent in the environmentalist (all but one person) audience, was a non-presumptive attitude toward the whole business, grounded in objective science. For the majority in the room, conclusions have been made, future negative outcomes are beyond doubt, and the agenda reigns supreme.