Washington – With gasoline topping $3 a gallon in Colorado in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the state’s federal lawmakers have begun asking questions about those prices.
“My concern is, was there price-gouging going on after this hurricane and what can we do about it?” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver. “People in Denver, Colorado, were seeing their gas prices go up almost hourly even in the day or so after the hurricane when there’s no way the supply could have been diminished.”
DeGette plans to ask questions about price-gouging at a U.S. House hearing today.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ken Salazar asked for congressional hearings to look at the effect of high fuel prices on farmers.
“During harvest, agricultural producers are some of the largest fuel consumers in the United States,” the Colorado Democrat said in a letter to the chairman of the Senate’s Agriculture Committee.
“I have heard from one Colorado farmer in Kit Carson County who has estimated that in order to harvest this year, he will need an additional $46,000 to cover fuel costs alone,” Salazar said. “I have also heard from another farmer in northeastern Colorado who, in order to cover the increasing price of fuel, has applied for additional loans at his bank only to be turned down because he is already overextended with existing loans.”
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., has been pushing for a better energy policy since he arrived in the Senate, said his chief of staff, Sean Conway.
“He has said for a long time that it’s a national security issue, our reliance on foreign oil,” Conway said. “We haven’t built a new refinery in this country in two decades. I think what’s happening here is things are coming home to roost.”
The average price for regular gasoline in Colorado on Monday was $3.04 per gallon, up 29 cents from a week earlier, according to the federal government’s Energy Information Administration.
