In the Sunday Daily Sentinel, dated May 8, 2016, Christian Reece, Executive Director of Club 20, was published as a guest editorial. The title was “Supreme Court ruling a victory for property rights, jobs.”
Today I found an “opinion” editorial by Kelly Brough, President and CEO of Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, published in the “Denver Post Opinion” area on May 6, 2016, titled “Yes, Supreme Court Ruled correctly on local fracking bans.” Subtitled “Private Property rights matter in the state of Colorado.”
These two “independent” editorials, though do not follow each other word for word, they are so similar in their content that it boggles the mind that these two women aren’t telepathically connected somehow. I maybe wrong, and I have no way of really testing my theory, but this appears to me to be a concerted effort to disseminate like messages to give the Colorado Supreme Court kudos? on a ruling that is flawed to its very core. In neither of these “editorials” was the “private property rights” of the surface owner taken into consideration, nor was there any discussion by the Colorado Supreme Court (CSC) in regards to surface private property.
Essentially dismissing surface rights by the CSC, the process of the “split estate” has been the most ludicrously entangled piece of ruling ever perpetrated on “surface” private property owners. Common sense alone would have predicted such an idea that forces access to hidden below-ground resources is NOT COMPATIBLE with surface living organism including humans.
The CSC ruled against the right of citizens to pursue their happiness by planning for and deciding the path of their lives and business priorities by voting in a democratically held vote. The communities determined by their vote, that their communities should support their priorities for a “healthy” and vigorous community set to move on into the future with a population not mired in respiratory illnesses, cancers, and a dead environment. For where the oil and gas companies goes to frack, there too goes all else precious to humanity. Just look to Alberta tar sands…North America’s first rout of Environmental Refugees. Picture that for the future of your kids and grandchildren.
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Very well put, Ms. Phillips. I hope to call you "Sheriff" Phillips in the near future.
I think that the Sentinel editorial and the Denver Post author used the same talking points, probably furnished by COGA. You're right, it is a form of insanity to suggest that the rights of those who extract underground resources are somehow more sacred than the rights of we surface dwelling critters.
I notice that Kelly Brough, writing in the Post, throws around that same old disproven figure of "100,000 oil and gas jobs in Colorado". The actual figure is closer to 30,000, and probably less now. I have students who are going up to North Dakota to work in those oil fields for the summer, because there aren't any jobs in Colorado.
Actually, the notion of rights to both parties in a split estates are well established. Our farm is a split estate, though not in terms of mineral rights. But my sister and I each own50 percent. Each party's right can be enforced with reasonable equity. To claim that mineral rights can be totally abrogated because the surface rights owner just doesn't want to look at a wellhead is , frankly, obscene and something no responsible court would uphold. Likewise, the mineral rights owner can't bulldoze your home away to locate a drill there. There is a reason God invented slant drilling and that reason was to provide reasonable use of both sets of property rights while denying either side the right to totally abrogate the rights of the other.