The battle over oil and gas drilling setbacks is growing hot again in Colorado’s northern Front Range gas patch.

Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of environmental and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit (pdf) in a Denver district court challenging the approval by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission of a drilling project sited near the Bella Romero Middle School just outside of Greeley.

The Extraction Oil and Gas plan to drill 24 new wells some 1,350 feet from the walls of the school has been a target of activist concerns for some time.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday argues the commission failed to adequately assess whether the site was as far away as possible from the school and nearby houses and so violated its duty to protect public health.

Groups signed onto the suit include Weld Air and Water, the Sierra Club, and the NAACP Colorado State Conference.

The complaint cites commission rules that require drillers to “evaluate alternative locations for the Production Facilities that are farther from the Building Unit, and determine whether those alternative locations were technically feasible and economically practicable for the same proposed development.”

“As [people] who live in the neighborhood near where this drilling would happen, we are concerned for our quality of life,” said Shirley Smithson, an activist with of Wall of Women, another of the groups who joined the coalition. “Fracking operations involve huge noisy drills and vibration at all hours, plus heavy traffic that has no place in any community.”

The court filing comes as lawmakers prepare for a Wednesday state Senate committee hearing for Lafayette Democratic Rep. Mike Foote’s high-profile House Bill 1256, which would require any new wells drilled in Colorado be set back 1,000 feet from school property lines, not just from school building walls. Foote has argued that many school outbuildings and playgrounds are much closer to wells than 1,000 feet.

Representatives of the oil and gas industry have dismissed Foote’s bill as overreach, pointing out that Colorado has passed some of the strictest regulations in the nation on drilling and has reworked setback rules in recent years as well.

Greeley lies in the heart of the northern Front Range gas patch. Over the last decade, the industry has moved into the city center from grasslands and farm fields. Industry trucks ply the roads at a regular clip. Extraction Oil and Gas specializes in drilling the Wattenberg Field in the greater Greeley-region or Weld County. Its projects often land in suburban and exurban settings.

— john@coloradostatesman.com