Denton voted to ban fracking on November 4. We were subsequently served two lawsuits the very next day. In the meantime, the Texas Legislature has been preparing for the start of the 84th Legislature this Spring. On both fronts, the fight in the Courthouse and the fight in the Statehouse, the Denton City Council has vowed to vigorously defend the ordinance to ban fracking passed by nearly 60% of our citizens. In order to be transparent on how we are doing so and to help citizens stay on top of the latest developments on both fronts, the City Council has initiated the creation of two websites:
TRACK THE LEGAL BATTLE OVER THE DENTON FRACK BAN – you will soon be able to go online and find every publicly accessible document related to Denton’s legal engagement on defending the prohibition on hydraulic fracturing in the city. Pay attention to the dates, the players, and the motions of this historic legal battle over the first city in Texas to ban fracking.
TRACK THE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS RELATING TO OIL AND GAS PRODUCATION – similarly, you will be able to go online to our website to find out the latest info on bills filed, their status and progress, committee assignments and makeups, and timelines so that you can quickly get engaged at the state level as this issue is debated in various circles in Austin.
DENTON TO INTRODUCE LEGISLATION TO FIX VESTING ISSUE
In addition to these ways for you to be informed and engaged, the council has decided to take a decidedly more aggressive role in shaping the conversation in Austin around the issues that matter most to cities struggling with urban drilling. If you have been following this issue for some time, you know that the issue of exiting well sites has been a particularly thorny issue for our ability to adequately enforce our current ordinance. Because state law is ambiguous about whether or not vested rights provisions in Chapter 245 of the Texas State Local Government Code apply to oil and gas development and because Denton has nearly 300 existing sites throughout our city, all of which can make a claim that they are vested (or grandfathered) indefinitely under rules in place at the time their “development project” began, there is a need to legislatively “fix” this issue on the side of not including oil and gas development under this chapter of the code.
Instead of waiting for some legislator to introduce such legislation, the council has directed our staff and legislative consultants to proactively draft legislation that fixes these problems. We then intend to shop the legislation around to supportive lawmakers to find a sponsor to introduce such a bill. I am hopeful, given the willingness to help expressed by our own State Representative Myra Crownover and State Senator Craig Estes at our July 15 Council Meeting, that finding a willing sponsor for such a fix will be no problem.
Stay tuned for the language of this draft legislation as well as developments on finding sponsoring legislators to carry the bill.
UPDATING AND IMPROVING OUR GAS WELL ORDINANCE
While we can fight, strategize, and do all we can to defend the ban on fracking and related city interests in the courthouse and the statehouse, we ultimately remain at the whim of decision-makers outside of our complete control. Regardless of the outcome of either of these paths, the city council remains committed to getting the best ordinance in place so that regardless of the outcome of all this, our city is in the best possible position to advance the interests and desires of our citizenry relating to the issue of oil and gas development in the city.
Even before the frack ban went up for a vote, the council moved to extend a moratorium on new oil and gas development projects for the express purpose of continuing to fix our ordinance. I continue to believe that our current ordinance is robust and effective at sufficiently regulating any NEW activity on NEW sites in our city – the provisions adopted in 2012 go a long way to fixing problems that got us working on these issues in the first place.
Our big problem moving forward involves how to effectively and robustly regulate new activity at EXISTING sites in our city. Just look at this map of existing well sites throughout our city:
Regardless of whether or not the Texas Legislature helps us solve the problem of vested rights with these well sites, it is the responsibility of this city council to find a way to fix the problems associated with this massive proliferation of gas well sites in our city in a way that brings certainty and mitigation of impacts on any new development of those sites.
Next week, the council will likely release a working draft of ordinance updates aimed at doing just this. I’m confident we are discovering incredibly creative ways at tackling these very difficult issues and I look forward to hearing from many of you as we work through these ordinance updates.