Erie’s Board of Trustees convened on a host of drilling-related agenda items at its Tuesday night meeting, among them discussions about opening up an application process for a new special oil and gas legal counsel.
That counsel role is currently handled by Denver-based Sullivan Green Seavy LLC, which Mayor Jennifer Carroll on Tuesday encouraged to reapply, suggesting the decision wasn’t a signal that the firm was doing a poor job, but rather a function of the new board’s agenda.
“Given the importance of oil and gas in the community,” Carroll said, “and that new trustees weren’t involved in that process of interviewing (the current) oil and gas counsel, I think it would be a good idea to go through that process again now and have a say in that oil and gas special counsel.”
The discussion marked the first direct oil and gas talks the nascent leadership has undertaken in the months since an election that was focused on fracking reform.
The search for a potential new legal counsel will come amid a number of new high-profile hiring processes for the town; officials are expected to name a new town attorney in the coming days, and they recently have embarked on finding a new town administrator.
If there was any dissention to the idea of looking for a new legal firm among the five-member panel — Trustees Dan Woog and Adam Haid were absent Tuesday — it came from Trustee Scott Charles, who expressed concern about the workload the new hiring process would place on staff. He also wondered aloud if there was a real need for a new counsel team.
“I understand there’s a change in the guard and we want to shake things up a bit,” he said, “but I don’t understand if we have a problem with our current counsel, or a concern with something that they’re not able to provide us with. Is there really a massive harm with waiting to get the ball rolling?”
The current special counsel shepherded the town through some of its more controversial oil and gas regulatory efforts in recent months, including the town’s controversial odor ordinance — currently the subject of litigation with a local drilling firm — and increased setback requirements.
Erie earlier this year also sanctioned a landmark ordinance requiring drillers with local operations to hand over maps of their flow lines and other subsurface facilities to the town — information the industry long has resisted making public.
At the time of its approval, Erie likely was the first municipality in the state with language mandating oil and gas mapping through its land-use code.
Tuesday’s discussion comes as part of the new board’s transparency efforts, Carroll said, a byproduct of the campaign she and other trustees ran on in the spring election.
“This board has expressed a desire to do things more transparently and involve the public to a greater extent,” she said of the unusual “general business” items.
The meeting also included discussions on how to fill the environmental planner position left vacant by Chad Taylor’s resignation earlier this year. Concerns have abounded in the months since Taylor’s hiring that the position had gone wholly underutilized, despite the fulltime paycheck.
Officials on Tuesday suggested that a revamped role could include attending more Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission meetings and public hearings, among others.
As we look forward at the plans that are in progress,” Mayor Pro-Tem Geoff Deakin said, “both from a residential and oil and gas standpoint, we’re going to continue to have to interface between oil and gas and residential. Absent a point person within town hall, we’ll revert to the old situation where it was a shoulder tap to the first person around to resolve some of these issues.”
Anthony Hahn: 303-473-1422, hahna@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/_anthonyhahn