Residents clustered together in a small coffeehouse Wednesday night to hear members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and local leaders speak against oil and gas development ahead of the anti-fracking debate set to unravel in Lafayette over the coming months.
The meeting, which was held in front of more than 60 citizens cramped inside the East Simpson Coffee Company in Lafayette, occurred as two parallel oil and gas narratives play out — both across the country and in the small east Boulder County city.
The Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners building the Dakota Access Pipeline announced Wednesday night it plans to resume work immediately, less than a month after President Donald Trump breathed new life into the project with an executive order. Lafayette’s City Council, meanwhile, is grappling with an almost unprecedented anti-fracking proposal dubbed the ” Climate Bill of Rights and Protections.”
“Our belief is, you have to start at the local level; if you start higher, the (oil and gas) industry can break you in a minute,” Lafayette City Councilwoman Merrily Mazza said. “You must start at the government that is most accountable to you.”
The anti-fracking ordinance, which aims to preempt the state’s authority in oil and gas development through sanctioning of civil disobedience and non-violent protests, will once again go in front of Lafayette’s City Council for a vote later this year.
The provision to legalize non-violent direct action protests — such acts can include sit-ins, strikes, workplace occupations or blockades — would target drilling activity and allow protesters unprecedented immunity from arrest or detainment.
“This industry does not care about you,” Mazza said. “When you get that in your head, you understand what you’re dealing with. They do not want us (spreading the proposal) to other communities. It’s too powerful to hear people stand up in a council meeting and say, ‘This is unjust.’ Unjust laws do not have to be obeyed.”
The bill was tabled last month to an unknown date due to a lack of council members in attendance.
As Lafayette residents and neighboring advocates gear up for a battle with state entities over fracking rights throughout Boulder County, oil and gas development on the national scale has once again reared its head.
Roughly 600 pipeline opponents have been arrested in North Dakota since last year.
Work on the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline had been stalled for months due to opposition by the Standing Rock Sioux, but Trump last month instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to advance construction on the pipeline.
“When change comes,” Doug Good Feather, a member of the Hunkpapa tribe from the Standing Rock Lakota Sioux Nation, said at Wednesday’s event, “sometimes it comes with a mask on to fool you. Sometimes destruction comes with a smile and a tie and a suit.
“I see a land polluted with diseases,” he added, “and erected on that is the drill pads of greed. Now you have to stand up — now you have a challenge in this world, you have a reason to fight for something that brought us all together.”
Attempts to subvert state regulatory interests with oil and gas development have thrust Boulder County cities into expensive lawsuits in the past.
“I think we need to be careful with the oil and gas industry,” Sen. Matt Jones, D-Louisville, said in regards to the proposed climate bill on Tuesday. “They talk a good line about how we all have to get along and work together and if we just do that everything will be fine, but they spent $3 million putting together Amendment 71 (which makes the state constitution harder to amend).”
In late 2013, 60 percent of Lafayette voters voted yes for a home-rule charter amendment to establish a Community Bill of Rights that, among other things, banned fracking and other underground extraction. The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, or COGA, sued the town to overturn the measure a month later.
“There’s a whole lot of eyes on you,” John Olivas, the former chairman of the Mora County Commission in New Mexico, said Wednesday. “People are waiting to see what happens here. Take it to heart and support your elected officials.
“Oil and gas has a playbook for how this works,” he added. “Be careful; these guys are devils in disguise.”
Anthony Hahn: 303-473-1422, hahna@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/_anthonyhahn
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