The battle taking shape in Wadley Farms, a neighborhood in unincorporated Adams County just 11 miles north of the State Capitol in Denver, is yet another battle in the Colorado war over suburban oil-and-gas drilling on the Front Range.

And it’s another one being fought on one side by Coloradans motivated, not by strong feelings about the oil and gas industry or the environment or right-left politics, but by strong feelings about the prospect of living alongside 30-foot industrial drill towers, of drinking altered local well water, of standing by watching big rigs haul equipment and chemicals over neighborhood roads and of having to put up with the noise, fumes and nighttime light that comes from 24/7 drilling that runs for months at a time.

The Wadley Farms residents who in August formed Adams County Communities for Drilling Accountability Now, or ACCDAN, are also motivated by the fact that they seem to have no say in what happens in the small city-block-sized field sited slap-dab in the middle of their admittedly unlikely dream-corner of the world.

‘It’s not a discussion’

Synergy Resources plans to drill 19 wells in that field, which it bought a couple of years ago. Synergy seems unafraid of stoking the already high fires of public opposition to drilling by moving into close neighborhood settings.

“The company held meetings here because they’re required to, but really, those meetings are not meetings. It’s not a discussion. They’re telling us what they’re going to do,” said Jerry Nelson, whose home borders the proposed drill site. “Synergy said, ‘We could be good neighbors or we could be bullies.’ And they’re right. The law is on their side. We’re really limited in what we can do to stop any of this from happening.”

The wells would go in 510 feet from Nelson’s house. The current well setback distance in Colorado is 500 feet, hiked from 350 feet in 2013 after a storm of local protests led local governments on the Front Range to pass city bans and moratoriums on drilling, some of which have been falling to court challenges and are now headed to the state Supreme Court.

Nelson has three autistic children and he said there are three other special-needs children who live on the block who will be deeply disturbed by the drilling activity. School buses stop to pickup and drop off students every day in front of his house.

Wadley Farms residents depend for water on backyard wells. It takes millions of gallons of water to fracture the kind of horizontal oil wells Synergy plans to drill. There are no fire hydrants in Wadley Farms. If there’s an explosion, Synergy says it will have fire-fighting foam to use on site.

“This project goes against all common sense,” Nelson said, pointing to the houses ringing the field. “The law for now isn’t on our side, but that doesn’t mean we have to give up.”

Big rigs and bull snakes

Residents scattered all around tiny Wadley Farms feel the same sting of shock.

You can see Synergy’s field through the ranch-style metal and wooden gate that opens at the end of Jacky Kowalsky’s driveway.

“They say they’ll ‘mitigate’ the drilling by putting up 30-foot walls,” she said. “They say there will be some thousands of truck trips for each well, coming and going, day in and day out – and that’s without porting in water. Ugh.”

As we walk down her street to meet another neighbor, a bull snake winds up in the middle of the road. A kitten crouches nearby. The snake hisses and then eventually makes its way into the grass.

“They eat mice,” said Marna Deines. She said she wanted to leave her house to her kids and grandkids. She’s a country girl and this neighborhood is country just minutes from the city.

“They put limits on the number of horses we can have. We have to have permission to build large sheds. You can’t run a dog kennel here. But you can drill 19 oil wells here? You tell me what that’s all about.”

Amandine Velamala lives about a block away from the Synergy field, outside the 1,000-foot “notification zone” within which Synergy had to inform residents of its plans. Originally from Paris, Velamala moved to Wadley Farms with her husband and three kids from nearby Thornton, drawn by the “magic” urban-rural setting.

“I would never have known a thing about this drilling if the neighbors hadn’t organized,” she said. “Of course they can drill better somewhere else close by. It will be heavy industry. It’s not appropriate.”

Hope in yet-to-be-announced rules

Synergy didn’t return calls for comment at press time.

But Wadley Farms residents are hoping new state rules being brought out sometime this month by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission will alter the current lopsided balance of power between the neighborhood and the oil company.

The coming rules center around how to specifically define a “large-scale oil and gas facility” for the purpose of giving local authorities more input on where drilling can occur.

“What is a large facility? Is that a number of wells? Is that a number of acres of a proposed well pad? Is that a number of production pieces of equipment?” asked commission director Matt LePore in conversation with The Colorado Statesman earlier this month, suggesting the kind of questions members of the commission are now weighing.

Synergy’s Wadley Farms project – with its proposed 19 wells and 40 storage tanks – would likely have to be considered large-scale under any viable definition, but the devil is in the details, and the commission is surely right now feeling pressure over how to define those details on all sides, including from the powerful oil-and-gas lobby.

The rules were set to come out last week. They’ll probably come out next week, wrote Department of Natural Resources Spokesman Todd Hartman in an email.

Another rule that might affect the Wadley Farms project would require drillers to register with municipalities well in advance of seeking state approvals. That way well-siting would be subject to longer-term local planning processes, which would involve city authorities and perhaps also county authorities, which is where unincorporated entities like Wadley Farms would have to turn for assistance.

Hartman wrote that the commission expects that rule “to be discussed throughout the stakeholder process.” He means that once the rules are released, they will be open to change based on input from communities, drilling companies and local and state officials through roughly the end of the year. Hartman said the new rules would go into effect within 45 to 60 days after they are approved.

Wadley Farms residents would like to see minimum drilling setbacks set at 1,500 feet. They think any site containing three or more wells should be considered a large facility and set farther away from schools and other public facilities. And they would also like to see drillers submit large-scale alternative site plans to independent assessors for review.

“We’re not fighting oil and gas,” said Wadley Farms resident Velamala. “But this is a neighborhood. It’s for houses and families. This one is also for horses and chickens. But it’s not an industrial zone.”

– with reporting by David O. Williams

– john.tomasic@gmail.com