Elbert County Planning Commission on oil and gas zoning
Some comments
Meeting summary
The room was packed last night [May 23rd] at the Elbert County Planning Commission meeting for approval of the county’s new oil and gas regulatory package. Approval was never in doubt. This was a dog and pony show from start to finish.
Not a single elected representative of the citizens of Elbert County was involved with the drafting, approval, support, or criticism of this substantial body of local law. Citizens empowered by fiat made up a new branch of local government out of whole cloth for this exercise.
No standards exist for evaluating the successful outcome of the oil and gas regulatory package in terms of economic impacts, environmental impacts, health impacts, governmental overhead impacts, public finance impacts from consequential taxing and expenditure, impacts to air and water quality, impacts to traffic and infrastructure, etc.
Oh sure, all of those concepts get subjectively applied to applicants in the intangible touchy feely world of planning. And everyone knows that all of these things, and more, will somehow be impacted by the regulatory regime itself. But no one dares to quantify the status quo of these elements of our local existence prior to enactment of a planning regime that intends to materially change all of them.
To contemplate baseline standards for the county is to risk an objective measurement about outcomes. In government circles, “standards” and “outcomes” amount to four letter words that must never be spoken. Those two words change the entire governmental game from one of promises, emotively seductive language, and the lure of empowerment, to one of measurement against cold hard facts where performance matters more than promises. After all, people can get fired if they don’t perform, and we can’t be subjecting any public servants to the risk of that sort of thing happening.
Only people in the private sector worry about getting fired.
Many comments came forth about all of the sacrifice of participants and spectators alike to create this new local experiment in governance. People seem to think that that’s the end of the analysis. So long as there’s a good effort with good intentions, whether it actually works and delivers on the presumed benefits, that analysis never quite gets done.
Well, almost never. Occasionally a politician needs to be hung out to dry by an opposition candidate and that’s generally when you hear about things that didn’t work as planned. That’s when the standards surface, post hoc, too late for any constructive application, good only to facilitate regime change.
With objective standards in the first place, we could actually measure alternative regulatory regimens to decide which one shows promise of working better. In the present case we actually have a choice between a state regulatory alternative and this newly created local body of law. But no one in the room last night went anywhere near the notion that local government was not the be all and end all of oil and gas regulation.
The massive body of regulatory law already in place at the COGCC, functioning, delivering, working against measurable standards, solving real problems, paid for by state finances, no one wanted to talk about that last night. The political correctness du jour was puffing up the local effort – a mutual back slapping display among local appointees of heraldic magnitude. Anyone who has been to a school board meeting knows the drill.
B_Imperial