Oil drilling Santa Fe, Part Two.

Overflowing crowd demands more restrictions in light of proposed Galisteo Basin drilling. I don’t have the time to spend commenting on this as fully as I’d like, but I must make an attempt to ‘keep up the momentum.’ My previous report is here.

So, once again, organizers significantly underestimated the size of the crowd, and even more significantly underestimated the time needed for Q&A with the citizens.  Wishful thinking?  The next meeting is December 6 at Turquoise Trail Elementary School, and if they don’t have a 1,500 person venue, they’re making a huge mistake.  At least one citizen took them to task for not being properly prepared.  Certainly having the overflow room supplied with speakers and a live video feed helped expose more citizens to the event, but the politicians never saw the complete size of the crowd.  Likewise, very few people got an opportunity to speak because of time constraints. 

I am concerned about the timing of all this.  This issue ambushed us, and now all the important meetings are happening during the holiday season.  One of the tricks of the political trade is to try to push legislation or ordinances through during holiday periods, so less constituents show up.  Declining attendance at meetings (as they get closer to the holidays, and people are busier and can’t attend) is translated into lack of interest in the subject matter ... and bad legislation gets passed.  Don’t fall for the old holiday trick. I hope my fellow residents will be making themselves heard over the holiday period.

The politicians didn’t come without escort.  Three County Sheriff cars were prominently parked directly in front of the entrance, along with a Fire and Rescue vehicle.  “For your safety.” We know whose safety it was for, and frankly I found it insulting.

I was very curious about jurisdiction, hoping the politicians present would present a clear and honest take on what the Federal, State, County and City authorities could actually do. What each layer of jurisdiction actually controls.  We didn’t get that clarification.  The politicians weren’t that organized, or didn’t care to give us further ammunition.  County Commissioner Sullivan didn’t say much other than to reiterate that County Representatives were at other meetings, and to introduce everyone.  Representative Wirth, a good and worthy State Representative (I know him through some non-profit web work, and feel he is an upstanding person), gave us a history of his multi-year odyssey against oil and gas interests in the effort to pass the Surface Owner Protection Act (successful, this year).  Certainly that Act gives us more control than other states, but it is still not enough. Rep. Wirth admitted this, and said “This is just a start.” He also clarified that in ‘property common law’, the mineral right holder is the dominant holder for any given property.  That was bad news. State Energy and Minerals Secretary Joanna Prukop gave an alpha and omega, good and bad speech.  She seemed to embrace the idea that we can ameliorate the drilling, though unlikely to stop it. She bragged about ‘closed loop’ systems, which are better than the alternatives, and need to be stipulated as a minimum - but as we all know, there’s no such thing as a truly closed loop.  These systems do fail, and frequently.  She feared “lawsuits” by the leasees or mineral rights owners, and implied that the State wouldn’t risk the tip of a finger if it might cost them money in litigation.

So, by this point, the overall feel was depressing, to say the least.  Not one politician would go on record as saying they could stop the drilling, at any level of jurisdiction.  Inevitability of drilling, the stultification of expressed bureaucracy settled down around our ears.  The fog of rhetoric was obscuring fact.  Murmurs began in the audience.

Until the last political speech.

Oil and Gas Conservation Division Director Mark Fesmire was a different story.  He took the State and County representatives to task, plainly stating that there *was* significant recourse to impede or completely stop this drilling process at the County level.  The County is responsible to protect our resources, our health and well-being, as well as having a moral imperative to do so. I would have liked to hear more from him.  I’m sure the County politicians attending last night did not appreciate his comments ... it means they have to really work this issue now.

Representative Wirth then played MC, and started the Q&A, 2 minutes per person.  After Mr. Fesmire, the crowd was re-invigorated. That invigoration was somewhat blindsided, however, because the first citizens to speak were members of a new outfit called “Santa Fe Not Oil”, or something similar, and proceeded to read multi-page typed statements, going over the two minute limits.  This was, no doubt, an attempt to educate the crowd of all the particular issues involved ... but came across as preventing individual citizens from exercising their free speech rights.  One individual played a podcast of Ms. Siwula-Brandt (who I commended last time).  They had technical difficulties getting the recording over the loudspeakers, which wasted too much time, and then Ms. Siwula-Brandt’s spoken tone was kindergarten-teacher in quality, boring the audience (at least in the overflow room) to death.  She has good and valuable educational information about the technicalities and risks of oil drilling, but a recording is a pale echo of an emotional personal appearance.

Going off on a bit of a tangent for a second, I mention the drilling issue to everyone I meet in town, and am still surprised how many people do not know anything about it.  I don’t mean that they’ve heard of it and don’t care ... they are completely unaware that drilling is being contemplated in Santa Fe County. Even those whose business is land, sales and building.  If you’re involved in one of the “no drilling’ outfits, your information campaign isn’t working.  You need more angry people relaying their displeasure in their own words, not individuals reading typed statements. You want people whose livelihoods are threatened.  If you want it to go viral, learn from weblogging, for goodness sake. More on this later.

As a result of these ‘statement’ groups, not a lot of questions were asked.  That’s not to say that a lot of good information wasn’t communicated.  Individual citizens seem busy as beavers, doing their own “Scoobying”.  Some highlights:

1. One individual did research and concluded that Tecton may not actually be proving out oil, but fishing around for gas ... based on the strata they’re delving in, and how much acreage they’re leasing.  New Mexico has significantly more gas than oil, which explains even better why an energy company would be looking for oil in a place that has never proved out.  Gas extraction would put even more wells in our area.  A flyer was passed around with Google Maps photos of the wells around Artesia, Farmington and other areas.  The landscape looks like a pincushion. Everyone who drives southern NM knows what Artesia smells like.

2. A few individuals got up to protest split estate.  One politician, I can’t remember which, had confused ‘property common law’ with a Constitutional right.  One individual got up and specifically repudiated that statement, that the ‘property common law’ is merely years of jurisprudence, established case law - not a Constitutional right.  The common law can be overthrown.  In fact, the mineral rights jurisprudence is a form of ‘representation without taxation’, directly counter to the philosophy that built America.  Another individual asked, if the mineral rights are dominant, why aren’t those mineral rights owners helping chip in for property taxes, paying for infrastructure (without which, no mineral rights could be extracted), etc.?  Split estate is a raw deal, and everyone needs to know it.  One more individual got up, and asked why the County feels they have no jurisdiction over mineral rights leaseees to prevent what could be devastating damage to our aquifer by drilling, when they have significant control over surface property owner’s abilities to raise buildings on their property?  Why can you stop me when I want to build a four-story building on my property, but you can’t stop underground drilling, which would be significantly more harmful now and in the future?

3. One citizen stood up with a copy of the current mining ordinance, which is apparently a very strict document that took three years to put into place.  It largely shut down mining around the county.  This citizen asked that the same deliberation be taken over this oil and gas drilling issue, instead of the three or four months currently scheduled, and would the politicians present please defend our (the people who elected them and pay taxes) interests?

4. Bless the last citizen, who brought a bit of humor to the presentation.  He lambasted the confidence in concrete to cap and seal such drilling, reminding everyone that concrete is porous [and I paraphrase] ... “which is why all those concrete ships failed in WWII. Confidence in concrete gets you to the bottom of the ocean.  Ask at any maritime museum.” And he’s right.  Steel rusts, concrete leaches.  Let’s require titanium piping with molten metal as the permanent plug (make it prohibitively expensive).  In an even mildly seismic event, that won’t hold either.  I should mention that the possibility of frac’ing enlivening the fault lines under the Rio Grande Rift was brought up.  How likely that is, only a geologist can tell.  And capped wells leak profusely after a while.  Ask Texas.

The other few questioners all pretty much covered the same ground as the last meeting, except the tempers were not in full shred as they were the last time.  Emotion was merely a percentage of what was on display a couple of weeks ago.  Perhaps the Sheriffs were a preventative, but I blame the statement-makers for killing the immediacy of the meeting.  The last meeting with Tecton was wildfire.  Each individual built the case, and built the defiance.  This was a dull smolder. If you opposition groups want to make educational statements, put this text into flyers and hand them at the door.  I saw no flyers at this meeting, though I was in the overflow room.  Huge missed opportunity.  It is unfortunate, but grass roots starts with killing a few trees worth of paper.

It was not right for the opposition groups to nab the first half-dozen responses.  It ticked off the politicians, and likely colored their perceptions of the issue.  They came to hear individual constituents, their stories, their opposition.  Typed statements from organized opposition, no matter how insightful, did not really forward our cause with the politicians.  We need a lot of pissed-off people, willing to speak their minds, to scour the ears off the politicos in their own style.  Those who got to speak, were electrifying.  Stop trying to control the message.  Let ‘er rip.

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