“This is totally about property rights,” state Rep. Perry Buck, R-Windsor, said about her House Bill 1181. But the bill is also about the right to drill for oil and gas in Colorado’s urban and suburban Front Range or to be financially compensated if you are prevented from drilling.

That’s why the one paragraph bill has drawn heat at the Legislature and was killed in a party line committee vote Wednesday by Democrats who represent residents affected in recent years by boom-time drilling in their neighborhoods.

“It’s amazing how mineral rights are not considered in somebody’s head to be a private property right,” Buck told The Colorado Statesman before the vote. “This has nothing to do with the fracking of it. It has everything to do with the fact that it’s your mineral rights and government shouldn’t have an ability to ever take a person’s property rights without compensation.”

Buck said it doesn’t matter that her bill suffered an early death. She said it is important to her to keep the discussion on property rights in the news.

Buck sponsored a similar bill in 2015, which also failed.

Mineral rights owners and representatives from oil and gas groups and the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry urged committee members to approve the bill. Members from the Colorado Municipal League and several residents in Longmont, where a ban on fracking was approved by voters in 2012, testified against the bill.

“This bill punishes local governments seeking to protect their citizens health, safety and welfare, their homes, those homes property values … and it’s also unconstitutional and impractical,” said Dan Kramer, a Municipal League member and an assistant city attorney for Longmont. “It would create an unfunded mandate requiring transfers from taxpayers funds into private hands. This would violate several sections of the Colorado Constitution.”

Voters in Longmont and several other Front Range cities, towns and counties over the last few years have banned hydraulic fracturing or passed moratoria on the practice. They have expressed concerns about dropping home values, potential noise, air and water pollution, the wear and tear on neighborhood roads, and the risk of explosions and fire and wastewater injection earthquakes.

Buck’s bill notably does not propose a formula by which the state would calculate compensation for the royalties that might have been gained from minerals left in the ground due to local drilling bans. She said she envisioned a system whereby a mineral-rights owner would submit an analysis to local governments that includes estimates of potential fair-market royalties.

The rights holder “would have to go to an outside group and they can do some quick studies to see what’s in there,” Buck said. “It’s no different than if they want to put a highway in your front lawn. They need to pay you for your front yard… Nobody should take your property rights away. I don’t look at it as a Republican or a Democratic issue as much as a property rights issue.”

Democratic members of the committee, led by Rep. Mike Foote, D-Lafayette, asked Buck why, on the one hand, mineral rights owners should be compensated by a municipality that bans fracking but, on the other, homeowners who see the value of their property decline due to fracking would not be compensated.

“(Property value) is not what this bill is about, she said. “This bill is about property access. If a government entity for whatever reason must take control of a person’s property, it owes the owner just compensation. Ask yourself, are you comfortable with the government denying you access to your home or your car? Of course not. A mineral right should be looked at in the same way.”

Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, no longer sits on the House State Affairs Committee, but he has been an outspoken critic of the drilling industry’s encroachment into neighborhoods, and he scoffed at Buck’s bill. Salazar’s Adams County district is home to a high-profile ongoing grassroots battle over a drilling project proposed by Platteville-based Synergy Resources Corp. The company’s wells would be sited in the heart of a bucolic neighborhood called Wadley Farms.

“I don’t think (Buck) knows what she’s arguing,” Salazar told The Statesman. “No. 1 is that local governments are property owners too, just like individuals are property owners. Even surface property owners have rights to their property and to make sure their property is not contaminated.”

— ramsey@coloradostatesman.com