Lafayette’s City Council approved a yearlong stay on new drilling applications within city limits on Tuesday night.
Merrily Mazza was the sole council member voting against the ordinance.
If officially sanctioned next month — on second reading — the moratorium would preempt new oil and gas development until late 2018, unless officials iron out new regulations before then, they said.
A vote on the issue was tabled earlier this month on the heels of newly announced drilling plans for the region; with drilling apparently headed for Lafayette, the moratorium’s legal ramifications are murky.
The ordinance would halt the “submission, acceptance, processing, and approval … of all land use applications, including all special use review applications” aimed at the “exploration or extraction, and related operations and activities, of oil and gaseous materials.”
It would also include pending applications and applications to “expand the scope of existing special use review approvals.”
Apart from resistance from industry officials — Colorado Oil and Gas Association President Dan Haley urged Lafayette to abandon the moratorium, warning against legislation that could lead to “contentious and expensive litigation funded on the backs of taxpayers” — the proposal’s possibility has sparked backlash among prominent local fractivist groups.
They say the stay would fly in the face of the city’s Climate Bill of Rights and Protections, a measure that effectively preempts drilling in Lafayette in the name of residents’ health, passed earlier this year.
Denver attorney Karen Breslin said earlier this month that the moratorium would conflict with the climate bill; City Attorney David Williamson disagrees with that assessment.
“I would fish with every line in the water you have,” City Administrator Gary Klaphake said Tuesday.
Whether or not the two measures would contradict each other, moratoriums in the past have proved to be provisionary: Longmont voted for a ban on fracking within city limits in 2012, drawing a lawsuit from the industry. The city took the lawsuit to the Colorado Supreme Court, where the judges ruled that Longmont had no right to ban the practice within city limits.
In 2014, Lafayette saw its own voter-approved ban tossed out by a Boulder District Court judge.
Boulder County on Monday announced that, in conjunction with Lafayette, it had filed two protests with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission aimed at plans submitted last month by 8 North LLC, a subsidiary of Extraction Oil and Gas LLC.
The filings call on regulators to deny the application.
Anthony Hahn: 303-473-1422, hahna@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/_anthonyhahn
