This week's headlines
The county will abandon its call for BLM to consider blanket deferral of all parcels in the scheduled August North Fork gas lease auction.
Consideration of the blanket deferral option was tops on the county's list of recommendations in the first round of public comments on the lease sale.
Now that BLM has issued its Environmental Assessment (EA) on the lease sale, the county's comments will focus on specific issues with individual parcels.
"The reason we did that (abandon the deferral) is that the BLM responded in their EA to the other comments that we made," explained county local government designee Bruce Bertram on Monday.
The commissioners met to discuss their comments on the EA at a March 26 work session, "They (BLM) addressed several things that we had pointed out," Bertram said during that meeting.
At the March work session Bertram also said that recent community meetings on the North Fork sale have given people good information about the BLM process, but comments are being groomed to play a role in planned litigation. A small minority of the more than 3,000 comments received by BLM in the first round of public comment were from Delta County residents, he added.
The BoCC was putting final touches on its comments for the EA at their regular meeting on Monday in order to make the Friday, April 6, deadline for submissions.
In a separate report, oil and gas exploration in Delta County were said to be subdued at this time. Bertram reported to the BoCC on March 19 that Gunnison Energy Corporation's testing at its Spaulding Peak Well north of Cedaredge is about the only in-county work going on at present.
A third item on recent oil and gas agendas was a new rule making initiative being finalized for the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC).
The state level-effort to establish a more clearly defined role for local governments in the COGCC's permitting, regulatory, and enforcement processes is currently under way by a governor-appointed task force.
The governor's task force recommendations would include a more active role for local governments and local government designees to participate in the drilling permit process. "They are looking at how to make that contact better. This is good," Bertram said.
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