Kevin Roden for Denton City Council

City Council Preview – September 11, 2012

September 10th, 2012Uncategorized1 comment

Given that my email box has received approximately 108 emails over the past few days regarding gas well variance requests, I imagine many of you are reading this in order to read my thoughts on that topic. I’ll get to that in a minute. Meanwhile, check out what else we’ll be discussing this Tuesday. City Council will begin with a Work Session at 3pm followed by a Regular Session at 6:30pm, both at Denton City Hall on McKinney Street. Click here to check out the agenda and back-up material for the meeting.  Some items of interest…

URBAN CHICKENS
Believe it or not, this is a question that comes up frequently – “are we allowed to have backyard chickens?” Until now, the answer has been “maybe.”  If you had a property that enabled you to keep the chickens 150 feet way from any residence, business, school, or hospital (meaning your own house and that of your neighbors), you could do it.  Most people do not have properties that large. But because urban chickens are becoming more and more popular today and because our own recently adopted Sustainability Plan has as one of its goals the increased access and availability of locally produced food, it is time for a change.  We’ll be hearing a proposed ordinance and discussing it in preparation of bringing it back for a council vote at a future meeting. Here are some of the requirements of the proposed ordinance:

• A minimum distance of 50 feet to other residential structures, churches, and businesses (down from 150 feet).
• A maximum limit of 8 hens on any single parcel of property in a residential neighborhood.
• No roosters allowed.
• A requirement that hens be kept in an enclosure or fenced area at all times.
• A requirement that the owner registers and obtains an annual, renewable permit.

Please let me know if you have thoughts or suggestions about this proposed ordinance.

COUNCIL COMMITTEE ON CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
When I ran for council in the Spring of 2011, my campaign tag line (which still exists on this website) was “bringing citizen involvement back to Denton City Hall.” I was convinced then and am still convinced now that the citizens are our city’s best asset. We are a creative, educated, ambitious, wordly, and hard-working bunch of people. In order to have a formal avenue for continued reflection and initiatives toward this end, I recommended the creation of a new Council Committee.  We will be voting on a resolution to create this committee and assigning members to it on Tuesday night.

COMING UP… CITIZEN COMMITTEE TO LOOK INTO SMOKING BAN FOR DENTON
This has been a long-time coming, but we are now prepared to take a serious look at the possibility of a comprehensive smoking ban for the city of Denton. Our goal is to develop an ordinance to be voted up or down by January 2013. Before we get there, we will be creating a citizen committee tasked with examining all angles of this issue.  We will be putting this committee together at our next meeting on September 18. If you have an interest in getting involved with this discussion, please let me know.

EXTENSION OF GAS DRILLING MORATORIUM AND STATUS OF VARIANCE REQUESTS
As you probably know, the City Council unanimously passed a 120 day moratorium on natural gas drilling and production activities on February 7 of this year in order to give us enough time to complete the current ordinance. Near the end of that time period, we passed a 120 day extension to that moratorium.  The moratorium, as it is right now, is set to expire on October 4 – less than a month away.  Because that is far too short of time to adequately review, amend, involve the public, and pass a new ordinance (given that a draft of it has yet to be completed), it continues to be the will of council to extend the moratorium until a new ordinance can be put in place. As such, we have set the goal of December 18, the final council meeting of 2012, to complete the ordinance. See the tentative timeline below:

Therefore, part of what we will be doing during our deliberation of Agenda Item 6E is extending the moratorium to December 18.  That should be good news for those of you concerned about gas drilling in Denton. That means we will have had a moratorium in place for close to a year while we take the time necessary to complete the rewrite of our ordinance.

This is important context for those of you who are probably going to be frustrated with the other part of this agenda item. This moratorium has potentially held back hundreds of new gas drilling and production applications from being considered since it was put in place in February.

Another amendment to the moratorium, in addition to extending it, involves a clarification and specification of what sort of natural gas activities are not stopped by the moratorium. You might note that the original moratorium from February included a provision, found in Section 2, that read, “Applications for oil and gas well permits for Mineral Activities filed before the effective date of this moratorium are not affected by the moratorium and shall be processed pursuant to the Denton Development Code.” In layman’s terms, this is akin to a grandfathering clause, the intent of which was to allow existing gas drilling projects to move forward.  Imagine you were in the process of building a house after receiving the necessary permits to do so from the city only to have that same city declare a moratorium on house building after the fact.  You would expect that your current project could continue and not be subject to the new moratorium. This was, in very lay terms, the spirit behind that provision in the original ordinance.

Also in that original ordinance was a provision that allowed property owners, drilling operators, or other relevant parties the right to request a variance, based on a “unique and undue hardship.”  You may have heard that EagleRidge, a gas drilling operator, had submitted four variances for four separate well sites. While technically variance requests, it is important to understand their position: EagleRidge maintains in their supporting paperwork that the moratorium ordinance does not actually apply to their specific application (it might be helpful to read the link provided a few words back). With projects and certain permits preexisting the moratorium, yet not specifically defined by the clause in Section 2 I alluded to above, reasonable questions arose as to whether such projects are exempt or not from the moratorium.

The EagleRidge variance requests came to our attention around the same time we were considering a possible timeline for the ordinance and a possible extension of the moratorium.  Now that we are pursuing an extension of the moratorium, it seemed prudent to reexamine the exemption clauses from Section 2 to bring clarity to this issue. As such, we are considering the addition of a clause that states (now in Section 2b of the proposed moratorium extension): “Applications for gas well permits that are in sequence with an approved specific use permit, site plan, development plan or gas well plat approval, under the terms of the City’s existing ordinances relating to gas well drilling and production activities.”

If passed with that language, the requests put forward by EagleRidge are rendered moot.  That is why, as you may have heard, EagleRidge has removed their variance requests from Tuesday’s agenda. Should we not pass the moratorium with that additional clause, EagleRidge has indicated they will bring the variance requests back to the council.

BECAUSE MANY CITIZENS WERE EXPECTING THE VARIANCE REQUESTS TO BE ON THE AGENDA AND BECAUSE THE DECISION ON THE MORATORIUM DIRECTLY IMPACTS WHETHER THESE PROJECTS CAN MOVE FORWARD, ANYONE WISHING TO SPEAK TO THIS ISSUE SHOULD COME TO THE MEETING AND FILL OUT A BLUE CARD TO SPEAK ON AGENDA ITEM 6E.

What do I think about all this? I remain committed to working hard to finish an ordinance that protects the health and safety of our citizens and our environment and one that protects both present and future land uses in our rapidly growing city.  We need to keep our focus on that long-term goal and recognize that it is that goal that set the context for the passing of the moratorium in the first place.

I’d love it if every gas drilling company stopped what they were doing, willingly subjected themselves to new regulations (designed to protect the health and safety of the community), and worked to do what is best for the common good and not just their own financial interest.  But despite all those days in Sunday School and all those episodes of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, some among us are intent on pursuing their legal rights above their community responsibilities.  And this continuing divide between what is legal and what is best for the common good is not unique to corporate culture and is certainly not new to American society. A couple hundred years ago, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville said this:

Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.”

I look forward to hearing your comments, but I’m convinced that our moratorium, which will be in place for nearly a year by the time we finish our new ordinance, has kept several gas drilling projects on the sidelines while we work to better our regulations. We need to focus on getting a tough new ordinance in place and look ahead to the more important and strategic legal issues relating to a city’s ability to effectively regulate this activity, not spending our energies fighting a challenge to a moratorium that will be gone anyway in just a few months.

It’s about the greater good, after all.