Is everyone on the Bailey side of the pass....

....Ready to pay the taxes for the entire county when there is no value left on the Fairplay side due to gas drilling?

Just curious. Seems like people think this is only a Fairplay thing, when I move and sell my house for pennies on the dollar and the new owners pay 1/4 the taxes (if they even can), but still have kids and want plowed roads, are you guys ready to pay for it because you still have value in your homes? Remember, we are building new buildings like crazy. Since we seem to borrow for all the stuff we "need" and you guys will be paying back most or all of it, how does that feel?

This is being ignored, and there are pages and pages about theoretical vehicle usage that if true is still 1/1,000 the issue that these gas wells are. Park county spends give or take $30mil a year. In the last year or two, partly due to heavy regulation and LURS keeping values low and expenses up during the down period (look it up, less LURs meant less of a bubble, almost everywhere - YES YOUR LURS LOWERED YOUR PROPERTY VALUES SIGNIFICANTLY), we as citizens have lost a lot of money. I as one minor player in this county lost give or take $50,000 in land value recently here. That is only 1/600th of the county budget. But I am way less than 1/600th of the county in land value, population or any attribute. That means that we have lost far more than the county's full budget (justified and unjustified expenses) each year we let our land values go down.

Now since the gas wells could lower values much more than the recent downturn. Should they not be a bigger issue than 2 or 4 year old vehicles? Especially when 99% of the crime in this county seems to occur on the Bailey side by driving fast on 285?

Keep ignoring this people. It is all over the news everywhere else it is happening, why not here? I literally get the impression that the Flume gets a % of the gas, why are they not doing their job? CNN is doing it, NYT is doing it, they can do it, but then a few folks in local govt might not be happy, they would have to settle with homeowner taxes with a voice in stead of gas taxes without one. This is like a slow burning wildfire that no one is fighting, only thing is, it will be and is a much bigger deal than any fire.

I guess we can hope that the gas taxes make up for it and our local government does it's job....looking out for the money and not the people. I guess one way to keep South Park rural is to literally empty the houses of people.

I don't understand where you are going with this. Ritter and most Dems supported the push to natural gas as a cleaner (?) energy source. The gas drilling should bring jobs to the region and so more money. Are you opposed to all energy, or just natural gas drilling? If it will decrease home and property value, is it due to being an eyesore or what?

Gas wells didn't seem to hurt property values in LaPlata County......

In fact - I suspect they keep the county pretty darn well funded.

I wish they would fix some roads on the Bailey side of the pass.

HEARTLESS wrote: I don't understand where you are going with this. Ritter and most Dems supported the push to natural gas as a cleaner (?) energy source. The gas drilling should bring jobs to the region and so more money. Are you opposed to all energy, or just natural gas drilling? If it will decrease home and property value, is it due to being an eyesore or what?

Republicans deregulated the industry- and thats literally ruining our countries water supply

http://video.pbs.org/video/1452296560/

HEARTLESS wrote: I don't understand where you are going with this. Ritter and most Dems supported the push to natural gas as a cleaner (?) energy source. The gas drilling should bring jobs to the region and so more money. Are you opposed to all energy, or just natural gas drilling? If it will decrease home and property value, is it due to being an eyesore or what?

I don't understand why you are going with what Ritter or any official has told you, this has been reported on to death, just not locally (we like to deny such things). Gas drilling screws local residents, it can be done, just needs to be done with more care. Please anyone willing to argue this, just make the commitment to get your water from a house in Garfield county right next to a gas well. I will give you $100 if you commit to drinking only that water for one year. $1000 if you actually do it. Please come get my $. Please enjoy your cancer.

I also don't understand how drilling for natural gas is cleaner than my solar panels and minimal use of my vehicle, if at all these days.

I am a great supporter of energy and its proper use....I just ask all of you to do what I have done and lower your consumption by 80-90%+ vs the average American who spends everything to over educate their kids but doesn't care what kind of world there is to live in.

I am PRO GAS DRILLING FOR ENERGY, I would just put the same kind of restrictions we have on most common citizen activities. In most places a leak out of your home oil tank could wind you up with a $1,000,000 fine if it leaks into a local water body. Why not say no regs, but they have to put up some real money just in case. Say $1,000,000 per well, we will collect interest on it (just like a security deposit) and if property values do not go down and the environment is not ruined in 50-100 years, EVEN THOUGH JUST ABOUT EVERY OTHER PLACE THEY DRILL THE CITIZENS ARE ULTIMATELY SCREWED, then we can return the money. No big deal, it is called insurance, geez most of you are behind mandated health insurance, why not mandated local environment insurance....you know it does not always go the same way.

But yes the biggest problem is too many Americans using way too much fuel and then being willing to ruin their neighbor's house for just a little more so that Johnny does not have to learn to use an more realistic amount of energy.

Here is your prosperous La Plata county, are you looking forward to watching your neighbors die of cancer?

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/gas-industry-se ... rses-story

Just google a little bit, safe?, no effect? why would there be literally 1000's of people making this stuff up and only a dozen gas execs and a few politicians and a few naive Coloradians saying it is safe. It seems that in most places, even if the landowner has the mineral rights...that they heavily regret leasing their land, it was not worth getting rich over to watch your wife die and have all your neighbors hate you.

I just think it would be easier to stop wasting so much energy than to deny your neighbors and countrymen dieing and having their lives ruined. For each energycouncil webpage on how everything is just fine and there is no proof, there are 1000s of pages of people actual accounts of having their lives wasted. It is starting to look like if you want to live in a clean place that NJ might be a better choice than CO. The standard story is that someone moved from somewhere far off to CO for Nature and to avoid regulation and the rat race. They get here and within years are racing out, back to where they were from, because it was more natural, less regulated and moving might slow the spread of the wife's cancer...then then there is a follow up and it does. And then the wife goes back to the house just to get some belongings (the house obviously didn't sell, it is being used as gas company housing now, quite standard after property values are ruined and the people are afraid to live there) and ends up in bed for 3 weeks sick, just from another 5 minutes of exposure.

Keep kidding yourself and thinking that your fossil fuels are expensive at $3/gallon, safe and worth it. By the time you die, I bet you pay $300/gallon with sickness, loss of value and the centuries of cleanup.

Really what is wrong with some harsh penalties to keep people honest, if there are no issues, then we have not penalties.

Why not say the the current BOCC is personally responsible for all the environmental damage that this may cause and if there is none we have no issues. I am curious how they would vote when their lives are on the line?

Still without such a law and the current state of knowledge on the risks, they could still be quite liable for $100,000,000's of damage as in their capacity the information was there warning of the risks (more so than the risk of noise pollution which they are concerned about regulating) and they choose to barely regulate this stuff and risk all of our existences with very low odds. This could come back to haunt them, even personally, someone's with a ruined life or a lost relative could really feel the need for non legal revenge. These legal and illegal consequences keep most of us in line in society. The BOCC and the people pushing this, ignoring the risks are not immune. THIS IS NOT A THREAT, but an observation that when people's lives are ruined that 99% of them react legally and 1% do not. But no one's life has been ruined here yet from gas. Just seems we can put rules in place just in case and then proceed. I do not feel the current rules protect enough or lay out the consequences.

Keep ignoring this, a family trip to king soopers in the cop cruiser is Soooo much more important, gee the average citizen could loose $30 a year, oh my. I don't want waste, but let's focus effort where real damage is likely.

On average, property values do not go up and people are not happy after this has happened. On average, the communities that have these issues are not protected by a traditional source of reasonable questioning, the local paper, because as research has shown, small local papers are no longer critical of the local government or their activities. They are often just a marketing arm of that same local government. Why do you think the most common thing reported on locally is the Bailey Hundo? (sorry, who cares) when the message boards are full of controversy, this stuff should be in the paper. But it is not.

They should at least be reporting that there are 5 major issues in park county that people cannot stop talking about but real data is not being presented. They don't have to take a side, but should at least report how much people are freaking out. Even 285bound railroaded all this discussion into 2 threads because it was taking over their board. Is that not newsworthy?

Please go drink some water taken from 100's of feet within a gas well as is the only option for many of your fellow Coloradians. But I guess we don't really have to worry, if they find stuff in your well, they will bring you great truck water for a few years till they are done drilling and then you can figure something else out or move. What a great sustainable rural lifestyle, apparently by design from your great Ritter, Dowalby and others.

So has someone forced drilling on your property? If not, why do you think you should limit what your neighbors can do? As far as water issues, the future is bleak nearly everywhere. Over pumping of aquifers, pesticides, mining (some over 100 years ago), overuse (lawns, golf courses, row farming, etc.). And by the way, my household energy use is about $1.00/square foot annually on a 100% electric home.