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Fracking Bans: A Postmortem

A contentious battle between anti-fracking activists such as Our Broomfield and supporters of the energy gathering method, including the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, will have to wait just a bit longer for the dust to settle in Tuesday’s election.

Broomfield’s Question 300, a 5 year prohibition on the use of hydraulic fracturing and associated activities, will go to an automatic recount some time next week depends on the outcome of settling the remaining outstanding ballots. The measure was defeated by a mere 13 votes in the initial count:

Yet there is a wild card in the recount process — there are still eight days for military and overseas ballots to be returned, and deficiencies in some Broomfield ballots, such as questions about signatures or first-time mail voters who did not include a copy of their ID — need to be addressed. Those ballots could change the final tally and impact a recount, said Andrew Cole, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office.

If such a small margin remains, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office told the Broomfield Enterprise an automatic recount would be triggered, using the “one half of one percent difference” rule.

The proposed fracking bans elsewhere across the state–Fort Collins, Lafayette, and Boulder–amounted to public relations window-dressing for anti-fracking activists in areas where hydraulic fracturing typically has not occurred in the past, or where the possibility of new developments would soon take place.

“Boulder and Lafayette were nothing more than symbolic votes. Lafayette’s last new well permit was in the early 1990’s and Boulder’s last oil and gas well was plugged in 1999,” Colorado Oil and Gas Association president Tisha Schuller told The Colorado Observer.

As for Fort Collins, The Coloradoan blasted the measure there in a pre-election editorial for making the city a “pawn” in a “potentially costly environmental position statement” that “smacks of agenda-based partisanship” in a city that has few natural resources and is already ninety percent off limits to oil and gas development, even before the 5 year moratorium goes into effect.

Following the passage of the three measures, the Denver Post expressed disappointment in what it dubbed an “irresponsible agenda” in the form of the anti-fracking opponents’ real desire for a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, disguised as local grassroots referenda.

“Symbolism needn’t be coherent,” the Post said.

Neither was the reaction to support of hydraulic fracturing when Zev Paiss, part of Frack Free Boulder, equated families who depend on natural resource development to terrorists:

“The scientists and their families who work on weapons of mass destruction depend on that regular paycheck too.”

In addition, that irresponsible symbolism will likely trigger big dollar lawsuits from the state:

Gov. John Hickenlooper told CBS4 Political Specialist Shaun Boyd he will sue any community that bans fracking. He says the state constitution splits surface and mineral rights and bans violate that. State law also gives the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission rule-making authority, not local governments.

That didn’t seem to faze anti-fracking activists like Josh Fox, who tweeted:

That the symbolic fracking war pitted David–grassroots, underfunded fracking opponents–against the Goliath known as the oil and gas industry became part of the campaign narrative in all four measures, something the Wall Street Journal noted:

Colorado, with its long history of energy extraction, would be a bigger test of whether the oil and gas industry and its supporters can surmount growing opposition from some communities and national environmental groups.

As Colorado Peak Politics concluded, the successes emboldened not a rag-tag coalition, but a mightily funded effort to launch “frack wars across Colorado.”

Those big dollars, in a post collected by Peak, point to under-the-table, “dark” money being spent to support the bans. The decentralized attacks on fracking in Colorado can be traced, in part, to smoke-and-mirrors, DC-based outfits like Center for Western Priorities, according to the Washington Examiner.

With both sides claiming victory–and with Broomfield’s results hanging in the balance for a few more weeks and possible lawsuits looming on the horizon–2013’s fracking bans may only be a prelude to more municipal proposals, and possibly a statewide measure in 2014, according to the Denver Business Journal.