RIFLE, Colo.—City and county officials on the Western Slope made their case for more minerals-tax dollars on Monday, giving state lawmakers and policy-makers 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 last 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 for new 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.
Susan Avillar, spokeswoman for the Williams Production drilling company, said she has seen the impacts firsthand. She has worked in the region since 1982, when the oil shale economy collapsed and houses were left empty. Now small communities have traffic jams and motels have waiting lists since the workers flooded back.
“It’s nice to be in the economic situation we’re in now,” she said.
Avillar gave lawmakers a tour of the Williams Flexrig No. 277, a state-of-the-art drilling rig working in the shadow of the Roan Plateau, one of Colorado’s most scenic wildlife areas. She said the rig, which can minimize surface damage by drilling multiple wells horizontally, shows energy companies can drill responsibly.
With generators whirring in the background and roughnecks scrambling up and down ladders, Avillar told lawmakers that instead of taking years to drill multiple wells, the new rigs can drill them in months.
“Our main goal is to lessen the impact. Our goal is to have more gas with less money,” she said.
Rep. Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison, said the new rigs are the exception, not like older rigs that have prompted a flood of complaints about noise and pollution. Pointing to the rising wall of the Roan Plateau less than a mile away, she said the state-of-the-art rig shows the industry can do better.
“If we’re going to do this, this is the way to do it. This sounds like a success story,” she said.
