Energy, Utilities & Water  February 4, 2021

Boulder couple, with backing from conservative-leaning group, sues to overturn city O&G moratorium

BOULDER — Two Boulder residents with backing from a Republican-aligned legal group are suing the city in an attempt to overturn its yearslong moratorium on oil and gas drilling on city-owned public space.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of Colorado this week, John and Valerie Wells claimed that the city’s ongoing halt on new drilling within its borders has restricted their ability to extract mineral rights that John Wells secured in 1981. That property lies just northwest of the Boulder Reservoir, an area that is now designated as open space.

The property in question was leased to a driller in 1990 but never had a well installed. 

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Since 2013, the city has made multiple ongoing bans of new drilling on open space. The Wells claim that the purpose of the moratorium was to allow the city to reassess its policies on new drilling but effectively the moratorium acts as a total ban and an unconstitutional restriction of their property rights.

The Wells are asking the court to force the city to not enforce the drilling ban and to pay an estimated $19,300 in royalties that would have been earned if that property was allowed to be leased to a producer.

The lead attorney for the Wells is Dan Burrows, the director of the Denver-based Public Trust Institute. The group claims to be pushing back on “extremist policies” that it believes is harming the state’s economic future and tenets of personal responsibility.

The group filed several ethics complaints against former governor and now Sen. John Hickenlooper last year as he was campaigning for that office. A state ethics panel found that Hickenlooper did violate rules against accepting gifts as a public official twice in 2018 but dismissed four other charges.

The Boulder City Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

BOULDER — Two Boulder residents with backing from a Republican-aligned legal group are suing the city in an attempt to overturn its yearslong moratorium on oil and gas drilling on city-owned public space.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of Colorado this week, John and Valerie Wells claimed that the city’s ongoing halt on new drilling within its borders has restricted their ability to extract mineral rights that John Wells secured in 1981. That property lies just northwest of the Boulder Reservoir, an area that is now designated as open space.

The property…

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