ERIE — Frustrated residents in this town want to know why the Boulder Valley School District spent nearly $1 million planning and designing a K-8 school when district officials knew the site wouldn’t comply with state-mandated setbacks from oil and gas operations.
The promised opening date of the 750-student school is in jeopardy as BVSD officials scramble to find a solution ahead of a hoped-for groundbreaking next month in Erie’s fast-growing Flatiron Meadows neighborhood.
While the 15-acre site falls under a grandfather clause and could be built under less strict setback rules, BVSD officials do not feel it would be prudent to do so given the state’s decision in 2013 to double the distance between schools and new well pads.
District representatives will meet with officials at Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas Onshore, a subsidiary of Anadarko Petroleum Corp., on Tuesday to discuss options, including a request that the energy company drill from an entirely different location.
Kerr-McGee is the surface owner of the 2.7-acre parcel adjacent to the school site.
In the meantime, residents are firing off e-mails to school board members and Superintendent Bruce Messinger asking why the community was only notified last month.
They want the district to stick with its commitment to having the school built by fall of 2017.
“You would expect that they would exercise due diligence that the site was suitable for its intended purpose,” said Karen Saks, a Flatiron Meadows parent of a 4-year-old girl who has eagerly awaited the opening of the school. “A lot of people were motivated to move here because of the school.”
The district has conceded that if it can’t break ground on the $39 million school next month, its opening likely will be delayed to 2018 or beyond.
“There’s some frustration, there’s some disappointment, there’s some urgency,” Messinger acknowledged. “It was obviously all not worked out, but there is a commitment to building a school in Erie.”
This isn’t the first time school districts in Colorado have come face to face with an oil and gas industry edging ever closer to homes and schools. Late last year, defending its decision to approve mineral leases beneath two schools to energy companies.
In 2014, prompted Mineral Resources Inc. to withdraw its application for a drilling permit.
Messinger said the trouble with the Erie site arose in 2013, when the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission . The rule change essentially killed the site, which sits southeast of Erie Parkway and U.S. 287, as a viable location for a school.
He said the district continued with preliminary work on the school partly because of pressure from the Erie neighborhood to get the building opened by the fall of 2017 rather than the following year.
“To honor the community’s request to move it up a year, we felt we had to start the design process,” Mes singer said. “We were hopeful we could get (the oil and gas issue) resolved.”
Until some kind of assurance is obtained from Kerr-McGee that it won’t drill at that location, the district is reluctant to move ahead with construction.
“We are not comfortable with that,” said Messinger, noting the state changed its rules for a reason.
Robin Olsen, a spokeswoman for Anadarko, said the company isn’t planning to challenge BVSD moving ahead with its school.
“There’s no one stopping that school from being built,” she said. “We want to see that school built on time.”
Kerr-McGee, she said, is working to identify other pieces of ground in the area where it might be able to use horizontal drilling to access the underground mineral deposits near the school site.
But she said the options for remote access are limited.
“A lot of stuff has been built up,” Olsen said. “We’re not the developer. We are simply a small surface owner in that 160-acre development.”
And the company, she said, is in a “binding legal contract” to develop those minerals at some point.
Erie Mayor Tina Harris, who wants the school to be built, is proposing a solution whereby the town would allow BVSD to “repurpose” a planned park adjacent to the school site for the project.
“Ultimately, the decision for where and when BVSD decides to build the school is up to them,” Harris said in .
Whatever the solution ends up being, residents just want their school — sooner than later.
“I just want the school built as promised,” Saks said, pointing a potential added benefit to moving ahead. “Having a school there might deter efforts to drill in the future.”
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or @abuvthefold
