Colorado
Neighbors make a final stand against massive oil and gas drilling plan near Aurora Reservoir
A contentious plan to drill up to 166 oil and gas wells on the southeastern fringe of metro Denver, near hundreds of homes and the Aurora Reservoir — a drinking water source for nearly 400,000 people — will finally land before state energy regulators this week for a key decision on its fate.
Neighbors worried about potential health and ecological impacts from the project want the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission to say no to the plan after an extensive hearing that’s set to begin Tuesday. The oil and gas producer behind it hopes to install hydraulic fracturing operations at eight sites across Lowry Ranch in Arapahoe County over the next four years.
“The main problem is the effect on public welfare, safety and health,” said Marsha Kamin, who moved to Aurora’s Southshore neighborhood 18 months ago from Michigan. “We’re talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people.”
As Colorado’s population has ballooned in recent decades, especially in Denver’s northern and eastern suburbs that overlay the mineral-rich Denver-Julesburg Basin, friction has grown between new and expanding neighborhoods and the oil and gas operations set up nearby. Six years ago, the evolving standoff led to an attempt by a citizen group to appreciably increase the required distance between wells and homes through a statewide ballot initiative. Voters shot it down.
Less than a year later, the legislature passed Senate Bill 19-181 and Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law. The law prioritized public health, safety and the environment when state officials consider oil and gas development — a profound change from the industry-focused approach Colorado had taken for decades with energy extraction.
Kamin and her neighbors, hundreds of whom are part of the Save the Aurora Reservoir advocacy group, are putting their hopes in Colorado’s five-year-old oil and gas reform law to halt the project. The group has been working to derail Crestone Peak Resources’ proposed fracking plan for the better part of two years.
“It’s disheartening that an industry can have this much power over people,” Kamin said.
But Lowry Ranch opponents may face a bumpy road this week, following a recommendation by the Energy and Carbon Management Commission’s director, Julie Murphy, that the board of commissioners approve the comprehensive area plan for the project.
In her final determination this month, Murphy wrote that Crestone’s plan “complies with all applicable requirements” in the ECMC’s rules.
The commission’s Tuesday hearing is scheduled to go all day, with a second meeting set for Friday if more time is needed. A decision to deny, approve or stay the plan is expected by week’s end, agency spokesman Chris Arend told The Denver Post.
If the overall plan wins approval, more hearings would be needed to consider individual well pads and wells, at both the state and county levels. Though the opponents largely live nearby in Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest city, the pads would be on state-owned land in an unincorporated part of the county just over Aurora’s city line.
While the ECMC approved more than 800 oil and gas wells in 2022 and more than 700 last year, it has denied applications to drill in recent years. In 2022, it said no to a plan from Kerr-McGee to drill 33 wells near a Firestone neighborhood. The commissioners’ main objection centered on 62 houses that would have been too close to a well pad, violating the state’s minimum 2,000-foot setback from homes and schools.
In January, the commission denied permits for 18 wells at Coyote Trails near the border of Erie and Broomfield.
Ann Hussain, who lives in Southshore with a sweeping backyard view of the Aurora Reservoir, said she learned about Crestone’s plans only in the spring. She worries that drilling under the reservoir could result in contaminants leaking into the body of water or into aquifers.
She also worries about air pollution generated at the well pads, one of which would lie less than a mile from a school. One of the eight pads, dubbed State Sunlight-Long, would be just 3,200 feet from her back fence. Thirty-two wells are planned for Sunlight-Long.
“I can’t believe you can take a community and set up an industry right outside these backyards,” Hussain said. “How is it that this can be done so close to people’s homes?”
Plan meets more expansive county buffer
The answer to that question lies in the state’s oil and gas rules, which permit drilling outside a 2,000-foot buffer from schools and neighborhoods. Last fall, Arapahoe County commissioners imposed even wider setbacks than what the state requires, mandating a 3,000-foot buffer between wells and occupied structures, landfills and reservoirs — both existing and planned.
That rule-making followed an attempt by project opponents in April 2023 to get Arapahoe County to impose a six-month halt on issuing new permits to energy companies to drill. The county commissioners voted 3-2 to reject a moratorium.
Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for Crestone parent company Civitas Resources, said not only does the Lowry Ranch plan comply with state rules, it also hews to Arapahoe County’s oil and gas regulations.
“The redundant safeguards and subsequent monitoring have shown that oil and natural gas development can safely occur without impacting groundwater and surface water sources,” Coolidge wrote in an email. “In fact, multiple layers of steel casing and cement underneath more than a mile of rock separate the wellbore from our state’s aquifers and surface water like the Aurora Reservoir.”
Crestone plans to drill 7,500 feet below the surface before running its wells horizontally. Coolidge said wells have “been drilled over a mile below tens of thousands of homes in the Front Range, with no impacts.”
Crestone will implement measures to mitigate impacts at its well sites, he said, including soundwalls, electric-powered drilling rigs, low-emission engines and low-odor mud during the drilling phase. Oil, gas and water will travel off-site by pipe, he said, “to reduce truck traffic during the production phase.”
Dan Haley, the president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said the state’s 2019 oil and gas law was meant to “create the most environmentally protective rules in the country … without banning the production of this vital resource.”
“Arapahoe County, and others, have passed regulations that exceed the state’s already stringent protections,” he said, “and our members are meeting those high expectations and producing this resource cleaner and better than most anywhere in the world.”
Congressman focuses on Superfund site
But such assurances haven’t quieted concerns about the unique features at Lowry Ranch, a 26,500-acre sweep of prairie owned by the Colorado State Land Board.
The property encompasses the 480-acre Lowry Landfill, a Superfund site at the northeast corner of Quincy Avenue and Gun Club Road, where an estimated 138 million gallons of liquid industrial waste are buried. An underground plume of contaminated water has migrated several miles from what is considered one of the country’s most contaminated toxic waste sites.
Some of the proposed well pads’ proximity prompted U.S. Rep. Jason Crow to send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on July 15. He asked whether it had studied the potential for extractive seismic activity at the landfill and how that might impact “the safety of the Aurora Reservoir Dam and the reservoir itself.”
The Democratic congressman asked how the agency could “be certain the drilling will not cause fractures and instability that threaten the mitigation strategies EPA has in place at (the landfill).” He also inquired if the agency has considered expanding the boundaries of the Superfund site to include the underground plume.
Coolidge, from Civitas, said the company this year agreed not to drill underneath the Lowry Landfill.
“On claims around seismicity, there has been no reportable seismic activity caused by hydraulic fracturing in Colorado,” he wrote.
But Mike Foote, an environmental attorney representing Save the Aurora Reservoir — and a prime sponsor of SB19-181 when he was a state senator — said “drilling can cause earthquakes.”
The United States Geological Service says that while most induced earthquakes are not directly the result of fracking, they can be triggered by the “disposal of waste fluids that are a byproduct of oil production.”
“You don’t want to cause earthquakes, and Crestone hasn’t studied or addressed the issue anywhere close to adequately enough to allow them to drill,” Foote said.
Drilling could begin next year
Matt Sura, an oil and gas attorney who represents local governments and conservation organizations, said the five-year-old law was a critical step in more effectively regulating the energy industry and giving local governments a bigger voice in the process. Sura is not involved in the Lowry Ranch proposal.
“Senate Bill 181 required that there be public hearings on locations (of wells and equipment) and allowed the public to speak to the decision-makers, rather than those decisions (being) made administratively,” he said. “That was a huge sea change.”
Where there is still room for improvement, Sura said, is in state regulators addressing the cumulative impacts of oil and gas development, specifically when it comes to air pollution. The ECMC will start hearings on rules for that in mid-September.
“I’m hopeful the commission is going to be willing to set limits on oil and gas development and drilling — and the amount of pollution that can be emitted from the oil and gas industry,” he said.
But those rules won’t be in place this week when the ECMC meets to consider the Lowry Ranch comprehensive area plan.
The Front Range for years has been out of compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. In 2022, the EPA designated the nine-county northern Front Range region — including metro Denver — as being in “severe nonattainment,” triggering more federal regulations to clean the air.
That frustrates Kamin, the Southshore resident who watches wildlife move through the neighborhood on their way to and from the rolling hills of Lowry Ranch to the east.
“We’ve been a nonattainment area for years and they want to add more pollution to the area,” she said. “It makes no sense.”
If Crestone’s plan receives the blessing of the ECMC this week, drilling could begin as early as 2025.
Denver Post reporter Judith Kohler contributed to this story
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Colorado
Colorado’s unaffiliated voters, who make up half the electorate, hold dim view of both parties, poll finds
Madison Osberger-Low/The Aspen Times
An overwhelming majority of Colorado’s unaffiliated voters say they reject both major parties and want to see Democrats and Republicans become more moderate, according to the findings of a new statewide poll.
Let Colorado Vote, a nonprofit founded by Kent Thiry, a multimillionaire and the former CEO of the Denver-based dialysis company DaVita, commissioned a survey of 1,210 active voters last month to gauge the sentiments of unaffiliated voters.
The poll was conducted by Keating Research from Nov. 10-17, and included 600 unaffiliated voters, 300 Democrats, 300 Republicans, and 10 others. The poll had an overall margin of error of 2.8 percentage points, and a 4 percentage point margin of error for unaffiliated voters. It had a 3.2 percentage point margin of error for likely 2026 voters.
Currently, 49.7% of all active Colorado voters are unaffiliated, a figure that has grown in recent years as political party registration shrinks. By comparison, just 25% of active registered voters are Democrats, and 23% are Republicans. Unaffiliated voters make up the majority of active voters in 21 Colorado counties, including Summit, Grand, Eagle, Garfield, Routt and Pitkin.
Thiry has been heavily involved in efforts to reshape Colorado’s political system in ways that give unaffiliated voters more voice. He was at the forefront of a successful 2016 ballot initiative that opened party primary elections to unaffiliated voters, and a 2018 measure that put redistricting in the hands of independent redistricting commissions, rather than state lawmakers.
Thiry said the results of last month’s poll dispel the theory that the state’s growing unaffiliated electorate is due to the state’s automatic voter registration. The poll found that more than 8 in 10 unaffiliated voters said they chose their status intentionally, rejecting both major parties. Most unaffiliated voters, 54%, also chose to refer to themselves as “independent.”
“Some partisans like to say, ‘Oh, independents are just too lazy, and they like to default to being an independent,” Thiry said during a virtual briefing last week on the poll results. “Not true. Look at the data — 85% of people chose to be an independent. It was a conscious decision.”
Unaffiliated voters who were surveyed said they want Democrats and Republicans to move away from the extreme flanks of their parties. Sixty-four percent said they want Democrats to become more moderate, compared to 65% who want the Republican Party to become more moderate.
When asked which party has become the most extreme, a plurality of unaffiliated voters, 45%, said Republicans, while 36% said Democrats and 14% said both. Despite their dim view of the two political parties, unaffiliated voters still tend to vote for a Democratic or Republican candidate during elections, and usually lean toward Democrats.
Thirty-five percent said they usually or always vote for the Democratic candidate, while 35% said they sometimes vote for a Democrat and sometimes a Republican. Twenty-six percent said they always or usually vote for the Republican.
Thiry is critical of Colorado’s current primary system, in which candidates from the same party compete to be their party’s nominee in a general election, arguing that it gives unaffiliated voters fewer choices, since they must choose to vote in one party’s primary.
In heavily partisan districts, the primary is often the election of consequence, with the winning candidate usually cruising to victory in the general election.
“The current system tends to drive an excessive percentage of candidates who are far-left or far-right, and it is much more difficult for an independent to pick someone who hangs around center-left or center-right,” Thiry said, adding that unaffiliated voters tend to vote for the “person, not the party.”
More than 7 in 10 unaffiliated voters said Congress is dysfunctional, not representative, and their vote doesn’t really matter. A similar number said they are frustrated with how often only a single candidate runs in primary elections.
Unaffiliated voters’ negative view of the political establishment extends from federal offices to the state level. Sixty-two percent view President Donald Trump unfavorably compared to 37% in favor, while 57% view the Colorado Republican Party unfavorably compared to 37% in favor.
They have a 56% unfavorable-to-39 % favorable view of the Colorado Democratic Party and a 48% unfavorable-to-36 % favorable view of the state legislature, which Democrats control.
Chris Keating, who runs the polling firm that conducted the survey, said the “largest defining characteristic of Colorado’s registered independent voters is that they are younger.”
Sixty-six percent of voters aged 18-34 are registered as unaffiliated. Keating’s poll found that the median age of an unaffiliated voter is 42, compared to 49 for Democrats and 54 for Republicans. Keating added that Hispanic active voters and men are slightly more likely to be unaffiliated.
Other findings from the poll include:
- The top three issues for unaffiliated voters in Colorado are housing affordability and the cost of living, taxes, spending and budget issues, and political leadership and polarization
- Fifty-two percent of unaffiliated voters say Colorado is on the wrong track, compared to 41% who say it is heading in the right direction
- Unaffiliated voters trust Republicans significantly more than Democrats when it comes to crime, and slightly more on immigration. They trust Democrats significantly more on issues of education, democracy and voting, the environment and conservation, and slightly more when it comes to inflation and the cost of living
- Sixty percent of unaffiliated voters favor keeping the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in place as a way of keeping government spending in check and giving voters the final say on tax increases, compared to 26% who say TABOR should be repealed because it prevents the state from adequately funding schools, roads and health care
- In a generic matchup of congressional candidates, 44% of unaffiliated voters said they would vote for the Democratic candidate, compared to 38% who said they would vote for the Republican candidate if the election were held today
- Of 916 likely 2026 voters surveyed, Democrats hold a 14-percentage-point lead in the generic congressional matchup, and Trump’s favorability is minus 27 percentage points
To remedy some voter dissatisfaction and give Coloradans more choice in elections, Thiry advocated for moving to an “open” primary system, in which candidates of all political backgrounds can compete on a single ballot that is open to all voters, regardless of their party affiliation.
“I get accused all the time of wanting to destroy the two-party system — I think they’re doing a great job of destroying it themselves,” Thiry said. “What we’re proposing is to save that, to get them back to where they’re representing the core Americans who are center-left, center-right and center-center.”
Thiry pushed for open primaries in 2024 as part of Proposition 131, which sought to abolish party primaries for congressional races and state elections in favor of an open ballot. The measure would also have instituted ranked-choice voting in general elections for those same races. Unite America, a national nonprofit that Thiry co-chairs, has led similar election reform measures in more than a dozen other states. Still, Proposition 131 was ultimately rejected by voters in Colorado last year.
Curtis Hubbard, a Colorado political strategist who served as a spokesperson for the Proposition 131 campaign, said a post-election assessment found that most voters supported open primaries but were confused by ranked-choice voting.
“When voters are confused, they default to ‘No,’” Hubbard said. “The open primary is something that voters actually like. They like the idea of being able to support candidates, the best candidates, on the ballot regardless of party.”
Proposition 131 was defeated by just over 7 percentage points, with 53.5% of Colorado voters against the measure and 46.5% in favor. Thiry signaled there will be future attempts to revive the effort.
“We got awfully close, despite the complexity of our proposal,” Thiry said. “The reservoir of support was very strong, and going forward, we’re probably going to pay more attention to the fully open primary than ranked choice voting, in the short term.”
The offseason in MLS is in full swing and The Athletic has you covered on all the latest breaking news.
Here’s the latest I’m hearing around the league…
Colorado Rapids to acquire Sealy
The Rapids are finalizing a deal to acquire Trinidad and Tobago international winger Dante Sealy from CF Montréal, sources briefed on the situation tell The Athletic. Montréal will receive around $2 million GAM from the Rapids, sources add.
Sealy, 22, was a highly rated graduate of FC Dallas’ academy and moved to Montréal ahead of the 2025 season, enjoying a breakout campaign with nine goals and two assists.
Colorado is among the most aggressive teams in the trade market, seeking young, domestic-based talent, and Sealy is the latest example. He previously spent two seasons with PSV’s second team as well, where he made 54 appearances.
It’s a busy winter of change for the Rapids, who will name Tottenham assistant Matt Wells their next head coach, The Athletic reported last week. He has been involved in player acquisition decisions.
CF Monterrey bid for Orellano
Liga MX’s Monterrey has submitted a bid to sign Luca Orellano from FC Cincinnati, sources briefed on the situation tell The Athletic. Orellano was the subject of bids from Cruz Azul last winter, but ultimately signed a new contract to stay.
Orellano, 25, is a natural winger who has excelled in a wingback role for Cincy. He had a strong debut season with 10 goals and seven assists in 2024 but didn’t match that output this past year as he struggled with injury. He had two goals and six assists in just under 2,000 minutes.
Monterrey is one of the highest-spending Liga MX clubs and has acquired talent from MLS clubs before – including from Cincinnati, when Los Rayados signed forward Brandon Vazquez in 2024.
READ MORE
Orlando City to sign Coronel
Orlando City is finalizing a deal to sign Paraguay international goalkeeper Carlos Coronel, sources briefed on the deal tell The Athletic.
Coronel is a free agent after departing the Red Bulls this winter. He was one of the best players in this free agency class.
Orlando was looking to sign a new starting goalkeeper after longtime backstop Pedro Gallese departed this winter when his contract expired.
Coronel, 28, made 180 appearances for the Red Bulls, an anchor for their playoff run to reach MLS Cup in 2024, where they fell to the LA Galaxy. He made 31 MLS appearances in 2025.
Coronel has nine caps for Paraguay, starting the first six matches in World Cup qualifying. Paraguay, which will open the 2026 World Cup as the co-host U.S.’s first opponent, secured qualification in September.
Orlando has been busy to kick off its offseason, with The Athletic previously reporting the club is finalizing deals for a pair of highly-rated young Brazilian talents via the U-22 initiative: Tiago from Bahia and Luis Otávio from Internacional.
Red Bulls sign Che
The Red Bulls have signed American defender Justin Che from Brøndby, sources briefed on the deal tell The Athletic.
Che, 22, is a graduate of Dallas’ academy and a former U.S. youth international. He has bounced around in recent years, including stints in Germany with the youth setups at Bayern Munich and Hoffenheim.
The versatile defender, who can play right back or right centerback, gives the Red Bulls – and new manager Michael Bradley – options in defense.
Che made 15 MLS appearances for Dallas before heading to Europe. He made 24 appearances for Hoffenheim’s second team.
It’s a busy winter for the Red Bulls, with The Athletic previously reporting the club is finalizing deals to send Peter Stroud to Minnesota United and Lewis Morgan to San Diego FC.
Bartlett asks D.C. to speak about future
D.C. United center back Lucas Bartlett is attracting interest on the trade market and has asked the club to discuss his future, sources briefed on the situation tell The Athletic.
Teams around MLS have called D.C. about a potential deal, as well as a club in Europe, sources say. Bartlett, 28, joined D.C. United ahead of the 2024 season and has been a key starter the last two years, making 67 appearances.
The aerially dominant center back spent time with FC Dallas and St. Louis City in his career as well.
The United States Postal Service is offering a reward for information on the person who robbed a Denver mail carrier this weekend.
According to the USPS Inspection Service, a man approached the letter carrier around 9:45 am.n. on Friday near Roslyn Street and 8th Place. Officials said he was around 5’5″ and was wearing a black mast, black jacket, blue jeans and black shoes. The USPS says a possible firearm was tucked in his belt.
They are offering a $150,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the robbery.
The USPS encouraged anyone with information on the case to contact their inspection service at 1-877-876-2455 or make a report online.
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