Kudos to the Sentinel’s award-winning Le Roy Standish for chronicling the six county commissioner candidates’ positions on energy-related matters in Mesa County (”Energy funds enter commission race; Meis, Rowland opponents question sincerity in push for state impact aid,” April 4) — thereby clearly illustrating how contested elections serve to educate the electorate on serious policy issues about which the competing candidates differ.

In fact, in light of remarks attributed to Janet Rowland, we now have even more reason to question the sincerity of hers and Craig Meis’ commitment to fulfilling their public trust and fiduciary duty to protect the public health and environment of Mesa County from the impending impacts associated with unregulated oil and gas development.

According to Rowland, Meis “first suggested an energy master plan in 2005.” But it is now 2008, and we have nothing to show for Meis’ vaunted energy “expertise,” other than a consultant’s proposal to complete an energy master plan by early 2009 for $170,000.

In the meantime, following the process described in Colorado’s county master planning statute, at least four other Western Slope counties (Gunnison, San Miguel, La Plata, and Ouray) — acting on the recommendations of their respective planning commissions — have adopted comprehensive county oil and gas regulations, taking less than one year from start to finish to do so.

Meis first publicly touted his Energy Master Plan as being 75 percent complete on April 16, 2007, at a combined meeting with (and to the shock and surprise of) the city councils of Grand Junction and Palisade — both of which had been striving to protect the Grand Mesa watershed, but with no assistance whatsoever from incumbents Rowland and Meis.

Rather, Meis and Rowland insisted on avoiding any involvement by the Mesa County Planning Commission in energy master planning (its statutory duty), while Meis invited some three dozen energy companies (but no members of the public) to participate in converting Mesa County’s GIS system into a prospecting tool for the energy industry — the Energy Policy Opportunity Map. Today, Meis continues to conflate the EPOM with the still-nonexistent Energy Master Plan and to exaggerate the EPOM’s practical usefulness in processing drilling applications impacting Mesa County.

In other words, and contrary to Meis’ self-serving assertion, some voters have been paying close attention to what he and Rowland are not doing. Republicans Jim Doody and Dave Kearsley and Democrats Dan Robinson and Dickie Lewis are entirely correct in pointing out the adverse effects of Meis’ conflict of interest and Rowland’s mindless obeisance to his vaunted “expertise” on Mesa County’s pro-industry non-policies.

BILL HUGENBERG
Grand Junction

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