This news story appeared on CBS 4 Denver on February 28th, 2019.
DENVER (CBS4) – Gov. John Hickenlooper says he won’t tolerate cities and towns that ban oil and gas drilling within their borders and he promises to take them to court.
CBS4 Political Specialist Shaun Boyd sat down with the governor, who was blunt. He told Boyd the state will sue any local government that bans hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the drilling technique that uses high-pressure water and chemicals to extract natural gas.
Nothing makes me less happy then to have to be in a lawsuit with a municipality,” Hickenlooper said.
If that’s true, the governor is an unhappy man these days. Four months after suing the city of Longmont for banning fracking, the state now plans to go after Fort Collins after its city council gave initial approval of a ban on fracking this week.
“The bottom line is, the way we have a split estate in this part of the world – pretty much all of the western United States — someone paid money to buy mineral rights under that land,” Hickenlooper said. “You can’t harvest the mineral rights without doing hydraulic fracturing, which I think we’ve demonstrated again and again can be done safely.”
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