As the Senate wrangled over the nearly 1000-page reconciliation bill in Washington, the conservation group Citizens for a Healthy Community took a small group of citizens and media members on flights over the North Fork Valley watershed to illustrate what’s at stake here at home.
CHC is a 16-year-old Paonia-based organization with a mission to protect the air, water, and food sheds of the North Fork Valley. The organization focuses on the impacts of oil and gas extraction. Executive Director Natasha Leger narrated as we took off from the North Fork Airport in a vintage six-passenger Cessna piloted by Whitton Feer from EcoFlight.
“There are provisions in the reconciliation bill that are designed to really cut community voices out of their say for the future,” said Leger. “Communities like ours really rely on these provisions so that we can have a say in our destiny. The budget reconciliation bill now calls for mandatory quarterly leasing without any discretion to the Bureau of Land Management. It also has a pay-for-play permitting and environmental review provision. There is also a provision to charge individuals for protesting an agency decision.”
The lack of snowpack and streamflow this year draws attention to our continuing drought and raises concerns about the millions of gallons of water used in fracking.
“The North Fork Valley has the highest concentration of organic farms in the state,” said Leger, adding that the North Fork Valley is also warming disproportionately compared to the state. Leger says that Delta County has warmed 2.1 degrees Celsius in the past 125 years, an increase of close to 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The Forest Service lands and the Bureau of Land Management lands around us have already warmed 1.9 degrees Celsius. Our watershed that feeds into the Gunnison River Basin and the Gunnison River is the second largest tributary to the Colorado River. And for those of you who don't know, for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the Colorado River declines 10 percent. And we've seen the Colorado River decline 19 percent over the last 20 years,” said Leger.
We flew near the proposed Bull Mountain project, approved by the BLM for the third time just last month, giving a green light to developing 171 federal wells in the Muddy Creek watershed. There are still legal challenges pending.
“So we're now in Gunnison County, and we're now starting to go into high developmental potential for oil and gas,” Leger continued. “In Gunnison County, there are about 40 to 50 active wells, 40 to 55 active wells at any point in time. In Delta County there are about 4 to 6 or 8 active wells at any point in time. So we actually don't have a lot of oil and gas activity in our area right now. However, if all of the high developmental potential were to be fully developed, the Bureau of Land Management estimates that there could be up to 958 wells.
“We have a moratorium on new leasing in the North Fork until the Resource Management Plan amendment for our area is completed and a decision is issued. There is also currently a moratorium on leasing over the Forest Service until they complete their oil and gas leasing plan.”
Pilot Feer broke in, “We’ve got Paonia Reservoir just off to our right.”
“So the Paonia Reservoir is reserved for Fire Mountain Canal. This is the irrigation water for that water company and that feeds about 500 water users downstream.
“We're coming up on the Hotchkiss water facility. This is on private land. You'll see two evaporation ponds or wastewater pits. You can see how close they actually are to Highway 133, but it's just not obvious to people the activity that is happening right now. And then look at how close the wastewater ponds are actually to the slope and to the river. So this is why we're particularly concerned about landslides and any sort of destabilizing impact.
“Delta County actually doesn't regulate oil and gas. Interestingly enough, they've repealed their oil and gas regulations in 2019 because CHC sued them for failure to adhere to their own regulations and they repealed those regulations saying that they wouldn't need to be accountable to communities and also to potential litigation if they didn't have any regulations. And why that's so important is that as the federal government starts to step back from environmental protection and regulation of oil and gas, the state will need to step up if we want to protect all of these treasured landscapes.”
