P.S. After meeting update.
The Left played nice last night as they ratcheted regulations for minor oil & gas facilities into place. Groundwork is laid for future battles on MOU contents and language designed to precipitate operational conflicts. CDS’s Fenner, EC’s LGD, knows that an “official” MOU walks a zoning line that can be construed as regulatory, and by its expected content, will operationally conflict with state regs. The Left would love nothing better than a good long lawsuit on the question. And of course there is a commissioner on the ballot to be peppered with mudballs. While the playground was orderly last night, I expect their diplomacy won’t last long.
This evening Kyle Fenner will offer oil & gas regulatory language for incorporation to Elbert County zoning law, and receive the Elbert County Planning Commission’s opinion about the language. Fenner was instructed by the BOCC to propose language that the BOCC could sign. They asked for a local oil & gas zoning law that wouldn’t place Elbert County on a litigious footing by generating potential conflicts with State of Colorado regulatory law. Fenner will deliver a document that avoids the potential for legal conflicts with state oil & gas regulations.
Pro-regulation activists will raise hell about it. For them, the end of the world is nigh, and this law will surely push us over the edge and ruin all that was good and worth preserving about Elbert County.
From the very beginning of the oil & gas zoning regulation development process in Elbert County, lawyer activist Jerry Dahl pushed Democrat activists on the Planning Commission, environmental activists who regularly attended Planning Commission meetings, and selected employees of the Community and Development Services department including director Richard Miller, to set up a new zoning code that would have landed Elbert County in state court.
We’ll probably never know the opportunity cost from this folly. We’ll never know the value of potential energy development foregone in the last 3 years while the activists ran amok with their de facto legal threats. How many companies representing how much significant capital investment were discouraged by this sideshow and invested their money elsewhere rather than risk getting stuck with an Elbert County eco tar baby?
How much material wealth will never be realized by the majority of Elbert County citizens who sat on their hands while a fringe element controlled a legal zoning process that the majority barely understands?
If you give a cult activist the floor and invite him to speak, he will speak for as long as he can, and he will never say anything new. Elbert County has practiced inclusive politics for too long. It certainly pleases all of the unelected loudmouths who think they should run things around here, but the fact is that either despite or because of their loud mouths, they weren’t elected to leadership positions.
As for appointed Planning Commission members who serve “at the pleasure” of the BOCC, what don’t they get about that phrase? Some of them act like their appointments are a ticket stamped by God.
It’s time Elbert County officials stopped kowtowing to the clamoring Left, and stopped Elbert County planning from continuing to obstruct material economic improvement and new jobs from coming into Elbert County.
B_Imperial