1. Punishing Democracy
Ben Price, National Organizing Director, CELDF
Less than 24 hours after a voter landslide enacted a ban on hydraulic fracturing in
the city of Denton Texas, the Texas General Land Office and the Texas Oil and Gas
Association sued to nullify the election.
Let’s break that down. By a 59-41 percent margin, voters chose to adopt the ban on
fracking despite being outspent ten-to-one by an industry-funded local front-group
opposing the measure. On the day following the election, not satisfied with having lost
to the will of the people, the State of Texas, through its state agency, teamed up with a
corporate industry group, the Texas Oil and Gas Association, to challenge the people’s
right to decide whether or not fracking poses a threat to the rights of the community.
Even before the first vote was cast, corporations and the state, knowing the people had
lost patience with state-permitted corporate rights violations, planned to gang up on
citizens, adding insult to injury by asking the courts to strip them of the power to
govern what harm corporations can do under color of law.
It’s a farce being performed across the country.
In November 2012 the people of the City of Broadview Heights, Ohio went to the
polls and by a 67 percent margin enacted a Community Bill of Rights (BoR) charter
amendment codifying the right to clean air, pure water, a sustainable energy future,
the right of local self-government, of natural communities and ecosystems, the
peaceful enjoyment of home, and a ban on any new extraction of oil and gas within the
City as a protection of these rights. Here’s a residential suburb of Cleveland that has
already endured the siting of at least ninety drill rigs in back yards, on church land
and next to playgrounds, and they decided enough was enough.
The managers of Bass Energy and Ohio Valley Energy Systems et al. decided the
people who have to live with their disruptive and harmful profit-taking had no right to
make this decision. In June of 2014 they sued to reverse the election and overturn the
citizen-initiated law. They called on the court to defend the power of the state to
preempt local authority to protect community rights. And they went further, asking
the court to judge the Community Bill of Rights to be a violation of the corporations’
civil rights under the 5th amendment.
In April 2013 the Mora County, New Mexico Board of Supervisors enacted the
Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance. Like the
Broadview Heights charter amendment, Mora County’s ordinance enumerated certain
rights belonging to the community, focusing on the right to water, and in that same
ordinance banned the extraction of hydrocarbons within the County to protect those
rights.
Two lawsuits were soon brought against the County. In November 2013, the
Independent Petroleum Institute – a corporate front group – along with an individual

2. owning .75 acres in the County filed a civil rights complaint, claiming the Mora Bill of
Rights violates the rights guaranteed corporations and people under the first, fifth and
fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Then in January 2014 SWEPI
Delaware Limited Partnership, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell with principle
business offices in Houston, Texas, sued Mora, asking the court for declaratory and
injunctive relief, as well as damages, claiming the County had violated the
corporation’s first, fifth and fourteenth amendment civil rights protections as well as
the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In November, 2013, the people of the City of Lafayette, Colorado voted by a 57%
majority to amend their city charter to include a Community Bill of Rights and to
protect those rights by banning fracking and related activities. Adoption of the
measure succeeded despite the City Council’s public opposition, a legal challenge to
the petitions to place the measure on the ballot and a pot of opposition money thrown
at its defeat by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA). It didn’t take long – on
December 3, 2013 the COGA, a corporate “non-profit,” sued the City of Lafayette on
behalf its corporate members, claiming the State of Colorado had forbidden
municipalities from enacting local laws that conflict with the intent of the General
Assembly, which “has declared it to be in the public interest to permit each oil and gas
pool in Colorado to produce up to its maximum efficient rate of production, subject to the
prevention of waste and consistent with the protection of public health, safety, and
welfare,” among other claims.
This case was decided by the Boulder County District Court on August 24, 2014, in
favor of the corporations and against the citizens who enacted the measure. The court
refused to allow the citizens’ group, East Boulder County United, to intervene in the
case, ruling that the municipal corporation of Lafayette had the same interests as the
people of the City. The City Council voted not to appeal the court’s decision to nullify
the election. The people were left out of the democratic process by the courts as well as
by their local “representatives.”
The list of similar cases is growing longer every day.
We congratulate the people of Denton, Texas and every community that has
prohibited fracking. That said, the Denton ban, and a growing number of simple bans
enacted elsewhere, have not specifically taken a stand against corporate violations of
community rights “permitted” by state and federal governments.
We hope that future efforts by communities to protect themselves against state-
enabled corporate assaults will frame the problem more precisely as a denial of
democratic rights - as have Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Mountain Lake Park, Maryland;
Mora County, New Mexico; Mendocino County, California; Athens, Ohio; Lafayette,
Colorado; Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania; Broadview Heights, Ohio, Grant Township,
Pennsylvania, and dozens of other municipalities and Counties that have enacted
Community Bills of Rights. Until many more communities refuse to accept the
systemic denial of fundamental rights, state and federal law makers and the courts
that enforce their mischief will continue to uphold the privileges of corporate wealth
over the inalienable rights of people.