ERIE — A battle raging over a proposed 26-well fracking project just outside town is unlike other Colorado oil and gas disputes that have come before.
It’s complex and multilayered, with a 48-page minerals access agreement at its heart that has stirred questions and suspicion among residents of fast-growing Erie, which straddles Boulder and Weld counties.
The quarrel related to what is known as the Draco oil and gas pad, which has received clearance from the state to move forward, is now likely headed to a special election — a vote that will test the tolerance of Erie residents for the latest fracking project in a town that sits at the edge of the energy-rich Denver-Julesburg Basin.
Opponents are crying foul over a controversial deal Erie’s elected leaders approved in June — on the second try — to sell town-owned underground minerals to SM Energy for up to $35 million over the next two decades. The agreement calls for the company to give the town 160 acres of land as well. SM also would plug and abandon old wells in exchange for access to the subterranean riches.
Many in this town of 42,000 question whether there was enough openness in the way town leaders crafted the minerals agreement with SM Energy — and why a consultant who once worked for a company that recently merged with it was hired to help Erie close the deal.
In a larger sense, the community pushback in Erie is the latest flashpoint in a long history of standoffs between residents, industry representatives and state regulators. Those disputes have centered on the question of how the state’s communities can co-exist with an industry that employs thousands of Coloradans and injects billions of dollars into the economy — including — while also posing threats to human health and the natural environment.
Fights over proposed drilling operations are gearing up, or already underway, in other burgeoning areas of the Front Range, including southeast Aurora, Adams County and Windsor.
The Draco pad would be located just east of the Erie town line in unincorporated Weld County. SM Energy’s lateral wells, drilled 7,000 feet deep, would extend westward .
For Amy Becker, an 11-year Erie resident, people’s health and peace of mind outweigh any financial benefits the town might accrue from doing business with an oil and gas operator.
“To me, it’s not about the money,” she said, “it’s about doing the right thing.”
The right thing, she says, would be to resist SM Energy’s plans and make it as hard as possible for the company to do business at the edge of the bedroom community, where new suburban houses are sprouting from the ground just a mile from the proposed well pad site. The site is at the northwest corner of Weld County roads 6 and 7.
“Do we want to make it easier for them or do we want to make it harder for them?” Becker said. “We have been fracked enough — we want to be done with this.”
Becker has been helping collect signatures for a petition to send a measure to a special election ballot, asking voters if they want to keep the agreement Erie made with SM Energy, a $7 billion oil and gas firm based in Denver — or scuttle it.
Last week, Erie’s clerk determined the petitioners had to go to the voters. Assuming it isn’t successfully challenged over the next month or so, the measure will appear on a ballot in the fall.
An election date has not yet been set, though a town spokeswoman last week said Erie would do all it can to include the measure on the Nov. 3 general election ballot. If the timeline doesn’t allow that, it will likely appear on a special election ballot a few weeks later.
“With a decision like this, where the repercussions last decades, if not longer — and it affects everyone in Erie — you really need the backing of the people,” said Emily Brecht, a recent Erie resident who is spearheading the ballot effort. “Many people did not feel heard when the Town Council made the decision ultimately to make a deal with SM Energy.”
Erie Mayor Andrew Moore, who voted in favor of the minerals deal, said there are “activists against the oil and gas industry in and around Erie, (who were) either trying to stop Draco before or (are) just being against oil and gas in general.”
“And there’s emotional commitment to that,” Moore added.
But killing the deal with SM Energy would be tantamount to Erie shooting itself in the foot, he said. The , the regulatory body that decides on drilling and fracking applications statewide, .
That means the project can move forward regardless. Absent a deal with SM, Erie will forfeit millions of dollars that the town could use to fund infrastructure projects and other town services.
“So when we get to the point of, ‘Hey, the state approved this’ — I can’t change that,” Moore said. “But I think we need to work to get as much as we possibly can for Erie.”
SM Energy spokeswoman Maureen O’Shay declined to comment for this story.
Pursuing minerals deal, despite project concerns
The battle over the Draco pad has been swirling for years. Before the ECMC greenlighted the project in March 2025 — after — Erie residents .
The town itself of the ECMC’s decision hours after it was made.
But with the approval behind it, SM Energy’s next step was to establish access to the oil and gas that lies largely beneath hundreds of Erie homes.
The eventual package negotiated with SM reflected the leverage Erie gained under a recent change in state law. Under , which took effect in January 2025, local government-owned mineral rights cannot be force-pooled. Forced pooling allows oil and gas operators, with state approval, to combine mineral interests within a drilling area even when some owners object.
Late last year, the town hired Matt Owens, the founder and CEO of Alameda Mineral Advisors, to help it hammer out a minerals access deal with the company.
Owens is the former an oil and gas company that joined forces with SM as part of a $12.1 billion merger earlier this year.
That was a red flag for Steve Drew, a five-year Erie resident, who wondered why the town would choose a former executive of a company that would, in short order, become part and parcel of the very same operator seeking to develop Draco.
“That’s why conflict of interest laws exist,” he said.
Owens, who wouldn’t comment for this story, told the Boulder Daily Camera in June that his involvement in crafting a deal with SM Energy posed no conflict. He left Civitas in April 2023, according to .
“There is no basis for anyone to complain about a (conflict) because what I am doing benefits Erie,” he said. “And I do not get compensated unless Erie does, so our interests are in lockstep.”
Owens could earn up to $4.5 million for his services if the deal goes forward.
Under the agreement negotiated by Owens, Erie would receive a $4.5 million upfront payment and 3% royalty interest for the life of the project, which the town projected at the time of the council’s vote could range from $19 million to $31 million. The royalties wouldn’t kick in until SM Energy has recovered 200% of its cost to develop Draco.
The agreement would also transfer roughly 160 acres of SM’s land along County Line Road to the town and allow Erie staff to conduct inspections at the Draco well pad, even though it would be located outside town borders.
Drew said the town never properly bid the contract before awarding it to Owens. In June, he hired an attorney to investigate how Erie ended up with Owens as its representative.
The town has acknowledged it violated its purchasing policy in the way it hired Owens.
Town leaders are “investigating what led to these purchasing policy oversights and acknowledge and take responsibility for the errors,” the town
Erie, Drew said, should rip up the contract and start over, not just because of how Owens was hired but because he believes the town didn’t claim all of its underground minerals in its negotiations with SM Energy. The agreement stipulates that Erie will sell 180 acres of municipal mineral rights to SM — roughly 4.9% of the overall Draco drilling area.
According to Erie spokeswoman Gabi Rae, a couple of parcels in the nearly 4,000-acre drilling area have “unclear titles.”
“The final due diligence report should give more information about ownership and sizing,” she said.
That doesn’t allay Drew’s concerns.
“Why would you give away that potential negotiating position?” he said. “This deal could have been done right.”
Aside from the agreement itself, some in Erie are vexed by what they say was an opaque process behind the negotiations with SM Energy, said Brecht, the special election petition organizer.
“When this sale came into the public discussion earlier this year, the mayor framed it to the people of Erie that the town was just exploring whether it was the right option for Erie to sell, versus not sell, its minerals,” she said. “It has become clear that at that point the lawyers were already negotiating the terms of the sale.”
Much of the early discussion took place in executive session, she said, a part of public meetings that are not open to the public. The lack of detail from town leaders “left a lot of residents frustrated,” Brecht said.
Leverage requires discretion, councilman argues
That’s not the way Erie Councilman Brandon Bell sees it.
He voted in favor of the minerals agreement, and he pushed back on the idea that the town’s process was shrouded in secrecy. Executive sessions are a common tool used by elected bodies in Colorado to protect positions and leverage in sensitive negotiations, he said.
“State law allows for executive sessions for negotiation strategies that are held in private so that those are kept from third parties,” Bell said. “Because you don’t want that information getting back to the people you’re negotiating with, and you want to ensure that the town has the strongest position.”
Erie, he said, has had “dozens of other land deals where we’ve had executive sessions.” Killing the deal with SM Energy, Bell said, would still allow drilling to move forward while leaving the town holding a whole lot of nothing in exchange.
“There still is a thought that … if this petition gets brought to a vote, that it’s going to stop Draco,” Bell said. “The petition really just would stop the sale of the mineral rights.”
Councilwoman Emily Baer voted against the agreement with SM Energy in June. There were too many unanswered questions, she said.
The stipulation in the agreement allowing SM to recover twice its cost to develop Draco before Erie receives any royalty payments runs up against the hard reality that oil and gas well yields start to decline precipitously in the first couple of years of operation, she said.
One industry estimate concluded that wells in the Denver-Julesburg basin .
Then there’s the issue of Erie taking energy money in the first place, Baer said.
“It is hard for health and safety to rise to a level of importance when budgets, projects and services rely on oil and gas money,” she said. “I think it is a risk to entangle our budget with oil and gas revenues.”
Baer wants to hear what residents have to say at the ballot box.
“In my opinion,” she said, “having a committed, engaged electorate that is willing to spend the time and effort to ask their fellow neighbors if they’d like to have the opportunity to vote on a matter is an important part of the civic process.”
Oil and gas fights elsewhere
Potential health harms from proximity to oil and gas drilling have long been a major driver of opposition to the practice in Colorado.
Nearly a decade ago, Colorado voters rejected a ballot measure that would have increased the setback required for new oil and gas wells from homes. But that same 2018 election set the stage for a blue wave that ushered in Democratic state lawmakers determined to turn the tables on oil and gas regulation.
The result: a new state law in 2019 that shifted the focus of the state regulators who consider drilling applications from favoring the industry to ensuring that oil and gas development doesn’t harm human health and the environment.
This year, the ECMC assembled a panel to review several health studies that looked at how exposure to oil and gas fracking — and some of its cancer-causing emissions, like benzene — impacted people living nearby.
It spent eight months reviewing the findings and released in June. However, the report did not reach any conclusions as to whether Colorado’s rule requiring oil and gas sites to be at least 2,000 feet from the nearest home is sufficient to protect people’s health.
Randy Willard, who has spent three years fighting drilling proposals near the Aurora Reservoir, isn’t surprised the state hasn’t been stricter about where energy companies can drill. He’s watched both Arapahoe County and the state approve one well pad after another on a state-owned parcel next to the reservoir and close to his Aurora neighborhood.
“Until the ECMC has a backbone and steps up to bad actors, we won’t see any change,” Willard said.
But that doesn’t mean he won’t stop trying to stop drilling efforts.
Just last week, Willard and his neighbors crowded a meeting of the Arapahoe County commissioners, urging them to reverse their earlier approval of a 24-well pad that will be just over half a mile from homes in Aurora’s Southshore neighborhood.
Willard is looking farther afield to other communities facing similar challenges. To the north of Erie, Verdad Resources submitted an application to Weld County in the spring to drill a 22-well pad near Windsor. To the south, oil giant Chevron is proposing a massive 40-well operation, dubbed Cord Federal, near U.S. 85 and East 136th Avenue, north of Commerce City.
That project is being pursued by a Chevron subsidiary, PDC Energy.
Just over a year ago, there was a well blowout in the Weld County town of Galeton — an incident that spewed pollutants over homes and a school for about five days. Willard said a similar accident near more densely populated communities would be exponentially more disastrous.
Chevron owned the blown well in Galeton, for which it was fined $1.5 million.
“We can help them much more quickly to learn the process,” Willard said of other communities being eyed by the industry. “It’s going to take consistent community engagement and outrage.”
More statehouse action?
While Moore, Erie’s mayor, suspects that a vocal minority is behind the effort to crush Erie’s minerals deal with SM Energy and deprive the town of millions of dollars in revenue, he shares the frustration that many town residents feel about not having the power to change the course of things.
It starts with a lack of jurisdiction, he said: The drilling pad is set to be located in unincorporated Weld County, outside Erie’s borders.
“It’s because state laws are such that oil and gas operators can get permission from the state — and one county — to drill,” he said. “And they can cross county lines. (SM) went outside of Erie to go under Erie. Something just feels wrong about that.”
If state lawmakers want to help empower local communities with meaningful input on drilling decisions, he suggested, they could pass a law prohibiting cross-county access to minerals.
“It would seem to me that we should have more say about what happens in and under our town,” Moore said.
As critical as Brecht has been of Moore and his colleagues on council regarding how they went about crafting the minerals access deal with SM Energy, she agrees that local voices deserve a fuller hearing.
That’s what the effort to get a measure on the ballot is all about, she said.
“In getting a voice, in getting a say in the future of our town, the people of Erie win,” Brecht said. “Whichever way the vote goes.”
