Rio Arriba County’s draft of an ordinance that would regulate oil and gas drilling in Rio Arriba County was not going to be completed by the time the County Commission was scheduled to meet Wednesday (2/18) in Tierra Amarilla, but Lindrith residents were all ready to tear apart what portions of the ordinance have been publicly released.
The County had scheduled the meeting to coincide with the date that a temporary moratorium on oil and gas drilling was to lapse. The Commission had planned to pass an ordinance that would lay out regulations for drilling in the County. Instead, it will probably be necessary to extend the County’s gas and oil drilling moratorium to give the Planning and Zoning Department more time to complete the ordinance, County Manager Lorenzo Valdez said.
County Commissioner Alfredo Montoya said Tuesday that he had not been told of plans to extend the moratorium — but said he would support such an extension.
“I’ve felt like we rushed through this whole thing,” Montoya said. “We underestimated how technically complex the industry is and the learning curve has been steep.”
Much of the public feedback to the draft ordinance is likely to come from residents of the Lindrith area, which is in the western swath of the County, where the local economy depends heavily on gas and oil drilling, Valdez acknowledged.
The news that the draft won’t be ready for the Commission will be welcome news to several Lindrith residents who have said they’d rather see the County’s temporary moratorium on drilling extended than the proposed ordinance become law.
“If we adopt these regulations, we’re stuck with them,” said Craig Schmitz, the director of TNT Environmental’s Lindrith office (TNT is a drilling company). “It’s hard to go back and change it. I’d rather (extend the moratorium) than have something hodge-podged together and crammed down our throats. This is an extra bureaucratic deal industry’s gotta go through.”
Several Lindrith residents complained that County officials are unfamiliar with the oil and gas industry.
“They just sent the (ordinance) to an attorney somewhere who wrote it, I think,” independent drilling contractor Steve Stevenson said. “They have no knowledge of what it takes. They’re writing things in there that’s not doable.”
County Planning Director Patricio Garcia and Assistant Planning Director Gabriel Boyle wrote the draft ordinance and presented it to County Attorney Ted Trujillo for legal review. Trujillo and the County Commission have sided with acequias and landowners in the eastern part of the County who could be affected by drilling planned by Approach Resources.
‘The County took public interest in drilling only after the Texas-based drilling company planned to start drilling on private lands near Tierra Amarilla last June. This area had not been drilled before and is part of the Rio Chama watershed, a source of water for acequias downstream.
Many Lindrith residents feel the County’s concerns about pollution in the Rio Chama watershed are misplaced, Schmitz said.
“Those fears aren’t legitimate,” Schmitz said. “Their concerns for their waters and acequias and stuff is irrelevant because Colorado has more water than the Rio Chama does, and they’re drilling all up and down there and nothing’s ever happened there that’s even remotely close to contaminating anything.”
Lindrith Community Association Chairman Chuck Nielsen said Lindrith tends to be “out of sight, out of mind” to County officials. The Lindrith area consistently votes for Republican candidates while Democrats dominate County government.
“They started the moratorium last April and we only heard about it the morning of the meeting where it was approved,” Nielsen said. “If oil and gas goes away tomorrow, there might be three families in this part of the County. There’s nothing else, no backup. It’s really a scary issue for us.”
Lindrith resident Larry Nelson mentioned the importance of oil and gas revenues to the County’s budget.
“We’ve been drilling over here since 1948, got oil and gas wells all over,” Nelson said. “I don’t know what they’re thinking because that’s where the County’s money comes from.”
The County ordinance would have a profound economic impact for other businesses in Lindrith and northwestern New Mexico, Schmitz said.
“We’re already feeling it,” Schmitz said. “Colorado is done. The oil industry is shutting down because of all the regs and new legislation on environmental issues. Companies are saying the heck with it and going back east. New Mexico’s really close (to being in the same situation). They’re laying off people in Farmington.”
Nelson was somewhat reassured by the Department’s plan to split the county into an eastern Energy Development District and a western Frontier District with stricter drilling regulations.
“I’d like them to split it and let our end of the County do our thing,” Nelson said. “And if they want to stop drilling out on the east end — well, I can understand those people over there not wanting wells in their backyards. I’d be okay with that, if that’s what the majority of the people want to do. I can understand that. But (new drilling) doesn’t bother us a bit out here. We don’t mind rules to build roads right and put pipelines in the right place. We don’t mind that at all. But they need to come up with something that will work.”
When the County held public meetings about gas and oil regulation in Española, three people attended.
In contrast, Nielsen said, the three public meetings in Lindrith saw 57, 27 and 37 people attened. That, he says, is a measure of how crucial these regulations are to Lindrith’s economic future.
“They have public meetings, but they have a draft 50 to 100 pages with all kinds of legalese,” Nielsen said. “We’re going to ask Wednesday for the County to please, please let the private landowner have a chair at the table during the design phase, not when it’s done. They’ve divided the County in two halves, energy and frontier. We really need landowner representatives from both parts of the County. Tierra Amarilla has its set of issues, and we have our issues. The people working on this ordinance need to ask themselves a very serious question: When the smoke clears, are oil and gas companies going to look at our county as a place they want to do business? I’m really worried about that.”
Montoya rejected Lindrith residents’ concerns.
“We’ve done the best we could to give everybody their say on these regulations,” Montoya said. “Our officials got an earful in Lindrith. I respect Lindrith but they almost mirror industry concerns, and industry rejects any regulation 100 percent of the time. I seriously doubt our ordinance will affect that business.”