This post is about how local activism works, with an excellent recent example of it. I hope it inspires others to do the same.
Ms. Christina Swope is whom I’m talking about, and she is determined to make an impact in local environmental policies adopted by the Fort Collins city council. If you would like to contribute to the mighty task of dealing with climate change, and assisting in changing the energy basis of our economy to clean, renewable energy, this is where the rubber meets the road. She deserves more support, and I hope some of you reading this will find ways of doing just that.
I have included a recent post by her below, which she widely circulated last week, but to which I did have time to respond to until now. She describes her recent experience of serving on a city citizen board about local air quality.
For those not aware, FoCo’s city government seeks citizen input on a wide variety of topics (see ‘City Seeks Volunteers to Serve on Boards and Commissions’, 12/3/25). I have not served on any of them myself, but have observed several others’ experience with them. Such boards can be frustrating, because while the city offers them as an opportunity for citizen input, the boards have no power over changing actual council policy; and I have observed concerned citizens get frustrated with these boards, and with council, by making decisions that run contrary to what sound science and good judgement would recommend.
The only solution to this is to keep trying — and to seek the help of others in the community to voice their concerns to their council members. Find out which city council district you live in (see here), and then contact your council representative (see here).
It ain’t rocket science….
And like John Lewis said, don’t be afraid to cause “good trouble”….I applaud Christina’s efforts on the Air Quality Board and “asking a lot of annoying questions”. Good job at causing good trouble, Christina!
June 18, 2026
Hey guys,
So I am on the Air Quality Advisory Board for the City of Fort Collins and on Monday we had a presentation from folks from both the city and the county about a new project they’re working on. I learned a lot from having industry experts in air quality and regulation in front of me and the ability to question them. For some of you on this list, this might be old news, but I figure there’s enough of us fracking newbies in this effort that it might be helpful to you as it was to me.
The project they were presenting about was this: there’s only about 50 fracking wellheads left in Larimer County. We’re mostly on the edge of what’s worth drilling in our basin anyway. Ten are within city limits. The company who used to own many of them, Prospect Energy, was a chronic rule breaker and shoddy fixer. Eventually, there was a leak of fracking water, almost 8000 gallons of brackish, benzene riddled water in a snooty neighborhood (they’re a suburb by the country club) and they got shut down. [Editor’s note: This was in the Hearthfire neighborhood, just north, but outside of, city land, which had a long, sordid history with Prospect Energy.]
The city and the county actually argued for and WANTED those wells to be placed into an orphaned status by the state. This surprised me. I actually have been very confused by the verbiage of the industry for a long time. We, as anti-fracking activists, want wells to be “capped and abandoned.” Abandoned sounds like a bad word but in industry speak it seems to mean “properly closed because it was no longer considered worth the money,” NOT just a dangerous thing nobody is taking accountability for. Contrarily, orphaned wells are “turned off” but NOT properly capped and sealed. So they can keep leaking for ages.
So why would the county regulators WANT the wells in Larimer to be “orphaned”? Apparently, its some kind of formal designation that prevents those wells from being sold to other companies who would try to continue to drill and profit off of them. Our city has made it clear we don’t want drilling in our back yard, so we were happy to prevent that and finally shut these suckers down.
However, we all know that this state is drowning in orphaned wells with leaky heads that are on a never ending list of things to be fixed some day by a team of 2 people, maybe 10 years from they day they were turned off. [Editor’s note: the cost of shutting in low producing, likely-to-be-abandoned O&G wells in Colorado is around $8 billion; the entire state budget is around $40 billion, just to give you some idea of how much the O&G industry is shunting off onto the public the mess that it has created over the decades. –Rick]
That’s where this grant comes in! They are going to be asking city council next month to approve some ticky tacky verbiage/redundancies in local statute so that the state/ECMC can grant the money they would normally spend fixing these now orphaned wells (ten years from now when they get to it) to the city and county. The city and county can hire a 3rd party service to do almost everything the state would normally do: plug the wells and remove the service equipment and minor site remediation. Now the people in this hoighty toighty neighborhood don’t have to wait on the ECMC’s overburdened staff to get around to properly sealing these leaky wells ten years from now.
If this works well, it could be a model for other communities and developers to actually get orphaned wells taken care of without the chokehold of an understaffed ECMC.
During this presentation I annoyingly asked a LOT of questions and learned some more.
1) I asked about zoning. Why is it with other industries, we have “industrial zoning” and “business zoning” and “housing zoning” but with fracking its fine that we have people living literrally on top of mining sites? The answer seemed to be “money and lack of planning”
2) I learned that “capping” a well isn’t just sawing the top off and putting a lid on it. They tend to do at least 2 concrete tubes of at least 40 ft length that are strength/seal tested, and those concrete fills are often separated by a few hundred feet for the redundancy, and there is extra consideration near water tables (i was not satisfied with their answers as to the safety of the water in those water tables but they at least have rules about it
3) I also learned that when a site is being closed by the state, well-heads/equipment areas often have had “small leaks” and soil contamination so it is a rule they remove a certain squarefootage of soil from around the wellsite (i think it was like 5 ft deep and 3 feet arround?). For this grant to work, if there are any big spills, the state still has to take care of removing the contaminated soil, replacing it and testing it, over and over again until it’s “clean.” I have no idea where they take the contaminated soil.
Anyway. It was a sliver of hope for me that my county/city might be just about fracking-free soon, AND that we have a new tactic for orphan wells and community recovery.
see you soon
Christina