The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on Wednesday deferred 20,000 acres in Colorado’s North Fork Valley from an oil/natural gas lease sale set for later this month. Another 88,000 acres elsewhere in the state will be part of the sale.

Despite industry insistence that drilling and farming in the disputed area already coexist, BLM bowed to stepped-up pressure from residents as outlined in a report in last Sunday’s New York Times (see Daily GPI, Feb. 5).

Earlier, BLM had agreed to defer nearly 10,000 acres in the North Fork area, leaving 20 parcels totaling 20,555 acres for oil and gas development in an auction scheduled for Feb. 14. The pullback by BLM comes after its Colorado officials met last month with city government officials from three towns: Hotchkiss, Crawford and Paonia.

“We’ve listened to concerns raised in numerous comments and public meetings, and we are responding by deferring the North Fork Valley parcels at this time,” said Helen Hankins, BLM Colorado director. “We are addressing the deferred parcels through continued dialogue with the local community and with ongoing planning efforts in the [BLM] Uncompahgre field office.”

However, representatives of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA), said the deferrals are evidence that the Obama administration leasing reforms are not working. COGA Western Slope Executive Director David Ludlam told the Denver Post that the current BLM administration “took a system that was broken and broke it some more.”

In a Jan. 30 letter to the local Uncompahgre BLM office manager, Ludlam criticized leasing opposition efforts as painting a broad brush over all parcels within the designated 20,000 acres, using a “zero compromise approach” even after the BLM had earlier deferred 10,000 acres.

“Opposition to the entire 20,000 acres demonstrates that paid opposition fueling community fears results in an exercise of political theater when what is needed is a thoughtful examination of what leases might really make sense,” Ludlam wrote to BLM Manager Barbara Sharrow.

BLM weighed the strong local opposition against supporters of the lease sale who pointed to economic benefits, including the creation of nearly 21,000 jobs directly and nearly 45,000 indirectly since 2011. However, residents said they feared tourism and farming would be damaged by oil and natural gas drilling.

Many of the 20 lease parcels are near the three towns, and activists have voiced concern that drilling would threaten air quality, drinking water, irrigation water, and more broadly, “the sustainable organic food and wine economy” that has flourished along the North Fork of the Gunnison River.

Like other BLM parcels throughout the state, the North Fork land was nominated anonymously by oil/gas operators in the region. In this case, the two closest operators — Bill Koch’s Gunnison Energy Corp. and SG Interests — have publicly said they did not nominate the North Fork parcels.

Local residents are pushing for permanent deferral of the North Fork parcels, but that has not happened. Following Wednesday’s deferral, a state BLM spokesperson told news media the North Fork parcels could still be considered for future sales.

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