I guess I was wrong.
I’ve thought, for nearly 62 years now, that I was “people.”
Apparently I’m not, at least according to the Colorado Oil & Gas Association (COGA) and the usually less strident Colorado Petroleum Association (CPA).
“Certain species are covered. People are not.”
That’s the headline in statewide newspaper advertisements and in two direct mail pieces I’ve received at my home recently, all sponsored by the two industry organizations and complaining about proposed new regulations under consideration by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Apparently COGA and the CPA think only oil and gas industry employees in Colorado count as “people” – not the rest of us.
That’s OK by me. As a “species,” I’m in good company. And it’s not just those pesky sage grouse and cutthroats and the deer and elk I love to hunt.
I’ll be hanging out with ranchers and farmers, guides and outfitters, hunters and anglers, a majority of the folks we’ve elected to lead our state, local government officials, those involved in Colorado’s tourism and recreation industries, retirees and hard-working young families. All of those “species” anxious to see some balance between efforts to extract needed natural resources, maintain public health and safety and protect the landscape and environment that Coloradans cherish.
Whether “people” or “species,” there are a lot of good reasons why we’re in the majority.
According to economist Tucker Hart Adams, the oil and gas industry provides between 4 percent and 5 percent of Colorado’s gross domestic product. That’s the total net market value of goods and services produced in the state annually, taking into account the usual adjustments economists could talk all day about while the eyes of most of the rest of us glaze over.
This assumption that only energy workers count as “people” also smacks of the tail trying to wag the dog in terms of jobs. It’d be interesting to see who all is included in the industry’s estimate of 71,000 employees in our state.
The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) lists 25,200 Coloradan’s employed in its natural resources and mining category in 2007. According to the department’s most recent statistics, there were 2,631,200 working Colorado residents in May. Accepting the oil and gas industry’s estimates of 71,000 workers would leave the industry employing just 2.7 percent of Colorado’s total workforce. It drops to less than 1 percent if you use the CDLE’s number for all of the natural resources and mining category.
Figures provided by the industry in 2007 to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, which distributes some severance taxes to local communities based upon the number of production workers living in a jurisdiction, showed 6608 resident oil and gas field workers in all of Colorado. DOLA also distributes some federal mineral leasing monies based upon 6775 reported resident field workers who are not categorized according to the minerals they extract from federal leases.
I’ve heard it said that it takes four or five support workers for every hand in the patch. Let’s assume every one of the workers reported to DOLA on the federal mineral lease side is in oil and gas and isn’t duplicated on the severance tax report. The most generous arithmetic based on industry’s reported figures and multipliers still doesn’t get you to 71,000 oil and gas workers in Colorado.
While energy employment is growing, other parts of Colorado’s economy are adding jobs at a much faster pace. From May 2007 to May 2008, the CDLE reports that job growth has been led by government and education and health services, each up 9,500 workers. Another 8,600 new workers came in professional and business services. Trade, transportation and utilities added 7,000 jobs with leisure and hospitality employment up by 6,100 workers. Then came natural resources and mining, adding 3,200 workers in the last year.
This is not an attempt to negate the positive economic impact of one of Colorado’s important and growing industries. It is an attempt to inject some fact and perspective into what has been a largely emotional discussion fueled by no small amount of misinformation from industry sources.
Case in point: the accusation in the recent advertising that proposed wildlife-related regulations could shut down operations in critical areas for three months every year and claiming 10,700 workers “will lose their jobs” as a result. Never mind that the COGCC had already delayed the implementation date of those proposed rules and watered them down before ads were purchased and direct mail pieces dropped. The commission had also already clarified that any shutdown would only come if industry operators elected not to take advantage of multiple opportunities for uninterrupted production by using what they already tout as “best practices” like directional drilling and sensitive pad placement to avoid impacting critical areas during mating, birthing and migration seasons.
I don’t think I’m much different from most Coloradans.
I wish gas prices would go down but also know increasing natural gas drilling won’t help me at the pump. I’m willing to share our natural resources with others, although I’m grumpy because, even with skyrocketing production, my utility costs increase as new pipelines export as much natural gas each day to other states as we consume here in western Colorado in a year.
But I’d like to not feel like an endangered “species” just because I expect truth in advertising and want facts, not misinformation and emotion, to be the basis of decisions regarding natural resource extraction in Colorado.
James Spehar is a former Grand Junction mayor and Mesa County commissioner and also served on the Colorado Economic Development Commission. A fourth-generation Coloradan, he writes from Grand Junction, where he is a columnist for the Grand Junction Free Press. He can be reached at jimspehar@bresnan.net. Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to openforum@denverpost.com.
