All the fixin’s for a “perfect storm” are gathered in Weld County, the state’s fastest-growing county. Compounding the problems of supercharged residential growth are commercial plans for more oil and gas drilling.
Rapidly growing towns like Frederick (which grew threefold, to 6,000 residents, in five years), Firestone, Dacono and Mead are worried about the county’s laissez faire approach to growth. They want more county planning and open-space buffer zones.
“The county isn’t equipped to provide [essential] services, especially safety and policing services,” said Firestone town administrator Cheri Andersen. Adjacent municipalities often end up paying the tab.
County Commissioner Glenn Vaad disputes that officials are doing little to regulate or channel the county’s growth. He said developers must provide water and sewers and pay for needs like roads. That’s hardly a strategy to cope with the coming boom.
Open-space advocates want the county to ward off development by keeping farmland zoned agricultural. Vaad’s view is that if people want open space, they should pay for it. Weld County voters have turned down an open-space tax, but the idea is unlikely to die. In Boulder County, voters made three trips to the polls before passing an open space tax in 1993. Receipts are used to purchase development rights from farmers.
The conflict between residential growth and increased energy development begs for a resolution. Weld hardly qualifies as a scenic paradise, but housing developers know that a drilling rig is a vista few people want outside their picture windows.
Oil and gas wells have long been a fixture in the county, and now three firms – EnCana, Kerr-McGee and Noble Energy – want to drill more wells. They are seeking approval from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reduce well spacing from 40 acres to 20 acres.
One political observer predicts a battle royal over drilling rights vs. surface rights in the next legislative session as a “giant coalition” of real estate interests array against oil and gas companies. (State law allows producers to extract underlying resources even if they don’t own surface rights.)
Ken Wonstolen, executive director of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, says Weld activity would involve “drilling windows” where wells already have been tapped. The county’s 12,000 current operating wells are about 40 percent of the state total and have coexisted with other interests. “The sky is not falling from this proposal,” he says.
Weld County needs to address the realities of residential growth as it moves from a farming past to exurban future. It has a duty to plan adequately so growth is orderly and balances the interests of farmers, developers, energy companies and new residents in a fair and equitable way.
