Time for a Frack Free Denton

The Denton Drilling Awareness Group is launching a campaign – Frack Free Denton – to ban hydraulic fracturing in the city limits. This campaign is a ray of hope for our community. It promises not only to protect us from a uniquely invasive and toxic industry, but also to provide us with an occasion for a civic conversation about who we are and who we aspire to be. In the spirit of that conversation, let me briefly explain why I will be signing the petition.

 

When it comes to fracking, all of the most powerful players are focused on a narrow set of intended outcomes: profits, economic growth, and energy security. The oil and gas industry seeks to exploit minerals. The Texas Railroad Commission fosters and promotes this development. State and federal lawmakers are increasingly captured by corporate interests.

It is at the local level where most of the broader unintended harms from fracking occur, namely, air and water pollution, property devaluation and damage, and noises and other nuisances. Working within this context, the City of Denton has pursued what we might call the compatibility strategy: it has sought to make the production of minerals compatible with health, safety, welfare, community integrity, and surface property rights.

After years of effort, I have come to realize that the compatibility strategy is a failure. We can either have fracking or a safe, healthy, and vibrant city. We cannot have both. In calling for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, we are choosing our safety over their profits. We are choosing our community over their reckless pursuit of commodities. We are choosing the health of our children over a shortsighted, poisonous, and unsustainable fossil fuel addiction.

This is a choice I have made with a great deal of deliberation. Indeed, for five years the committed citizens of Denton tried to make the compatibility strategy a success. We tried despite a Task Force stacked with oil and gas industry representatives. We tried despite closed-door meetings and behind-the-scenes legalese. We tried even as our ideas for bolstering safety and health – ideas that had been implemented by other cities on the Barnett Shale – were repeatedly denied. And we tried even as we learned that the new rules that did actually pass – including the 1,200 foot setback distance – would not apply to the hundreds of gas well pad sites within City limits grandfathered under older regulations.

But we could no longer stomach the failures of this strategy when three gas wells were drilled, fracked, and flared in one of our neighborhoods – and we saw that this would be the ugly future of Denton under status quo policies. We could no longer simply work through the bureaucratic system – with all its hoops, loopholes, and systematic biases – when people were getting sick and parents had to keep their kids indoors in desperate attempts to protect them from the fumes. We could no longer ignore the fact that most of the people exposed to the harms were not informed and were not receiving any of the financial benefits. And we cannot watch our City grow over the coming years into the heart of the gas patch and let thousands of new Denton families suffer in this way.

As natural gas prices rise in the future, things will only get worse. Unless we act.  Enough is enough. It is time for a frack free Denton.