College students at center of fracking ban debate

DENTON -- Sound filled the air Friday night on UNT's campus, as band members prepared for a night of music. The cacophony was not unlike the earfuls band members say they'd been getting leading up to Denton's historic fracking ban vote earlier this week.

"I felt very pressured, I guess, from students and professors to vote for the ban," says UNT junior Chris Serrano.

Friday afternoon, a pro-fracking group called "Denton Taxpayers for a Strong Economy" announced the ban would have failed were it not for Denton's college students. A press release claims students voted overwhelmingly for the ban, leaving so-called "permanent" residents to cope with the financial consequences. The group says those permanent residents mainly voted against the ban.

Denton City Councilman Kevin Roden says there is no truth to those claims.

"I knew in the aftermath of this election, there's going to be a bunch of people who just spent nearly $1 million trying to fight this ban," he says, "they're going to have to have a narrative to justify why they lost."

According to his own analysis of early voting data, the average voting age was 51 and "just over 1,000 folks between ages of 18-22 voted, that's out of about 15,000 early voters," he says, about 7 percent.

In total, 59 percent of voters in Denton approved the unprecedented fracking ban Tuesday; the majority of voters cast their ballots in early voting.

News 8 reached out to the pro-fracking group to find out where their information came from, but nobody ever got back with us. We do, however, know one place the information didn't come from: Denton County's elections administrator Lannie Noble.

"It's not any data that's available to the elections office," Noble says.

Still, UNT Serrano says he doesn't doubt students had a heavy hand in passing the ban, though he was not one of them. He voted against it.

"A lot of my friends voted against it too, but we were definitely outnumbered," he says.

Those numbers continue to be discussed and analyzed long after the polls have closed.