Rifle – City and county officials on the Western Slope made their case for more minerals-tax dollars on Monday, giving state lawmakers and policymakers a tour of jails, schools and drilling rigs to show the strain Colorado’s energy boom is putting on resources.
Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, said the increased traffic, dusty roads and crowded correctional facilities are proof the state needs to honor commitments to spend the tax dollars in areas hit hardest by the impact.
“They don’t have any additional capacity,” she said after lawmakers took aerial and ground tours in Rifle and Parachute.
Gov. Bill Ritter said he wants to balance the extraction of resources with the concerns people have expressed about impacts to the state’s water, air and land, but he doesn’t believe the funding needs to be limited to counties that have oil and gas wells.
He said 1,500 complaints have been filed with regulators because of adverse impacts over the past five years.
Garfield County Manager Ed Green told lawmakers on Monday that his county is getting millions of dollars in aid from the minerals taxes, known as severance taxes. He said it’s impossible for the county to plan roads and schools because of the helter -skelter pattern of new drilling rigs.
“We don’t know where we need to build new roads because we don’t know where they’re going to drill,” he said.
He said Garfield County how has 3,800 wells and expects 10,000 more over the next decade. Tens of thousands more wells are expected elsewhere in the region.
The population influx over the next five years will require Garfield County to add 150 people to its staff at a cost of about $9 million a year and build nine facilities at a cost of $33 million to accommodate them, Green told lawmakers.
“What we don’t have is money for the unknowns, the roads and equipment we’ll need,” he said.
