“It’s just the right thing to do,” said Sen. Matt Jones, D-Louisville, who’s drafting a bill to give local government control over oil and gas exploration and production.

“Local governments plan, zone and deny requests all the time,” Jones said. “It should be the same for oil and gas and fracking, especially following the tragic explosion and deaths of innocent people in Firestone.”

The Frederick-Firestone Fire Protection District responded to a house explosion that killed two men and critically injured a woman in May. A records search by The Denver Post shows there have been 12 explosions, two of them fatal, in Colorado since the devastating accident in Firestone.

“There’s no other industry not overlooked by local control except oil and gas,” Jones said. “The Colorado Oil and Gas (Conservation Commission) director put out a statement about how safe the industry is, I often wonder, ‘If it’s so safe, why don’t you live there too?'”

No city or county should be forced to allow drilling and fracking operations to set up shop across the street from homes and schools, he said. The oil and gas industry should not entitled to special treatment.

This isn’t the first time Jones has tried to pass such a measure in the state legislature, and he hopes Republicans will come to the table this year to keep families safe.

“Democrats and Republicas always talk about local control and how we’re a local control state,” he said. “Home builders deal with this every day of the week, so why not gas and oil?”

The notion that local control would somehow devastate one of the most lucratively profitable industries in the state is absurd when countless other industries are subject to local land use decisions and still manage to turn a healthy profit, Jones said.

He plans to introduce the legislation on the first day of session, Jan. 10.