Lafayette is eyeing a citywide policy that would codify residents’ right to a healthy climate — and to defend that right with civil disobedience.
Part of a larger effort to keep oil and gas development out of Lafayette and Boulder County, the city’s proposed Climate Bill of Rights and Protections introduced this week would protect community members’ ability to take nonviolent direct action against extracting coal, oil and natural gas and other activities they deem as threats to a healthy climate.
The U.S. Constitution protects the rights of free speech and assembly, but acts of civil disobedience can lead to fines and jail time on charges such as trespassing, disorderly conduct or rioting. East Boulder County United, a citizen-led group in support of the measure, has begun holding nonviolent direct-action training seminars across the Front Range.
“Lafayette is the first foothold in the fight against this stuff. It can’t be the last,” Cliff Willmeng, a longtime activist in the fight for control over oil and gas development, said at Lafayette’s city council meeting Tuesday.
Boulder County recently extended its temporary moratorium over fracking to May 1, a timeframe that, as Willmeng sees it, promises “better weather for protesting.”
In the face of ever-narrowing ways to limit or ban drilling activities in residential areas – especially the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling last year that cities do not have local control over fracking – activists say civil disobedience has become one of their last remaining options.
The measure was introduced at a city council meeting Tuesday by two council members. More than a dozen residents testified, with all but one — an energy company employee — voicing support for the idea. Several in attendance said experiences protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016 inspired them to stand up for clean air and water closer to home.
Jud Greenwood, an engineer with Noble Energy, worried that the wording of the proposed ordinance isn’t specific enough about what kinds of activities could be considered harmful to the climate. He suggested that the measure could lead to neighbors protesting neighbors for having propane grills or gas-powered lawnmowers. Proponents, who worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund to write the Bill of Rights, argued that such an interpretation was unlikely.
Council members were largely supportive of the measure, but some agreed that the language could benefit from some small tweaks. In 2013, when the residents of Lafayette passed a citizen’s bill of rights that sought to offer similar control over oil and gas development, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association quickly filed a lawsuit against the city. Council members are less concerned about facing another lawsuit than about ensuring that the proposed Climate Bill of Rights would offer enforceable protections that would be worth defending in such a suit.
Mayor Pro Tem Gustavo Reyna acknowledged that the council was in “uncharted waters” in considering the proposal, but recalled that civil rights victories of the past were also unprecedented. “This is a historic moment where people are being pinned against their will to accept the denigration of their environment in order to serve someone else’s profits,” he said. “We are finding a way to create a hopeful place.”
The 5-member council, from which two members were absent, voted 4 to 1 to have the city attorney draw up the ordinance for a formal first reading on Jan. 17. That meeting will allow time for public comment as well as discussion of potential amendments to the measure.
If the law passes, Lafayette would become only the third city in the nation to implement such a measure. Two townships in Pennsylvania did so last year over concerns of proposed fracking waste injection wells. Chad Nicholson, a Pennsylvania organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, says that in those townships, as in Lafayette, “resistance is ongoing.”
Lafayette: Please go back and read Thoreau “On Civil Disobedience”. He argued for the use of CD when conscience conflicts with law. OK, so state law protects private property but some Lafayette residents don’t like the way this one property owner exercises his/her rights, so we disobey. All well and good. Thoreau spoke elegantly and forcefully that CD requires the willingness to accept the civil consequences (he spent time in jail for his actions). Lafayette’s fractivists want their cake and to eat it too. If their conscience demands direct action to prevent fracking, they must be willing to accept the consequences, thus elevating their issue and, if there is a majority agreement, changing state laws through normal channels.
Lafayette City Council and citizens need to guard against backroom industry influence to water down the wording of the proposal. This is standard good ‘ole boy tactic that they have used elsewhere to dilute any significant democratic measures.
I cannot agree with Mr. Samsa on this. The particularly damaging costs of fracking in particular and the unfortunate condition of state laws on this subject and their interpretation by the Colorado Supreme Court means that every means available must be used to safeguard the environment in our cities.
While I, like Mr. Thoreau, am of independent means and prepared to accept the consequences of civil disobedience up to and including incarceration, many concerned and passionate citizens simply cannot afford to take that risk because if they did they would lose their livelihood. We should not be forced to make this terrible choice on matters that may literally be life and death to our families.
My guess is that most of the fracktivists will drive from there natural gas heated homes in there gas powered cars–talk about hipocracy. They have a legal way to stop oil and gas–just purchase the mineral rights from the big bad corporations
Mr. Mannix- Just because we spend 5 minutes a few times per month, putting gas in a car, does not mean we want to live next door to a gas station or oil and gas wells. We eat, but may not want a grocery store in our back yard either. Your argument does not hold water. The US is selling gas to other countries because we are extracting more than we need. Taking every last bit of gas from the earth is wasteful & unnecessary and only being done to line pockets of the oil and gas industry. We should save it for when we may really need it, if ever (like a savings account). We do not need to drill next to homes now. You can’t purchase mineral rights if they aren’t for sale. If they were for sale we might buy them. And even those who own them are sometimes forced to let non owners drill under their homes. Research “forced pooling”.