Recently, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled for fracking and against the rights of the people in Longmont and in Fort Collins, citing pre-emption by state law. Due to health and safety concerns, both Colorado cities had decided by popular vote to ban oil and gas drilling within their city limits.
In its decision the court ruled against the rights of all Colorado citizens to have a say about oil and gas development in their neighborhood.
Barbara Mills-Bria, president of Colorado citizens’ advocate group Be the Change, said: “This is the opposite of democracy. The people are not happy waking up to find an oil rig in their back yard and being told they have no real say in the matter.”
Under Colorado’s Constitution Article V, the right of citizens to legislate has been termed a first right superior to that of the state’s; but the court ignored the first right of the citizens in Longmont and Fort Collins.
Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled the citizens’ inalienable rights as guaranteed in Colorado’s Bill of Rights was preempted by the Oil and Gas Conservation Act passed by the state legislature. By that legislation, those rights belong to a small state agency, the COGCC, which works primarily to encourage oil and gas development.
Weston Wilson, EPA engineer and whistle blower featured in the movie “Gasland,” said: “You know at some point people will start to understand we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Hell, apparently every acre in the state is up for grabs. And the (Colorado) Supreme Court is in on the job.”
What the court said is that we have no inalienable rights when it comes to oil and gas development. The Legislature took those rights and gave them to their true friends on 16th Street (in Denver). But the power structure can only steal from us if we let them.
Be the Change attorney Dan Leftwich said it’s still up to the people and that the court’s decision “marks a new chapter, not the end of these disputes.”
Leftwich referred to the state constitution: “In Article V, the people reserved the power to pass legislation of every character, independent of the general assembly, precisely to put such decisions beyond the reach of the state. These fundamental rights cannot be preempted because they are superior to the powers of the legislature, the executive branch, and the municipal governments in which these initiatives were enacted. These rights were not presented to the (Colorado) Supreme Court because the voters were not represented there, only the municipal governments that were opposed to these initiatives from the beginning. As a result, the court’s opinions issued today are not controlling precedent where the people’s right of initiative is raised as a defense.”
Phil Doe was an environmental compliance officer for the U.S. Department of Interior and wrote federal regulations governing irrigation water subsidies. In 1988 he was featured on 60 Minutes as a whistle blower describing big agricultural corporations’ attempts to thwart the controls set by Congress on agricultural water subsidies. When he retired, Phil joined Be the Change, a Colorado not-for-profit group of volunteers who advocate for protecting our environment and for protecting the rights of American citizens.