What the Frack: Task Force Isn't Done, But City Moves
Closer to Issuing First Drilling Permit
By Leslie Minora Wed., Oct. 12 2011 at 8:32 AM
 |
| North Lake map with Valley Ranch to the East and Irving to the West |
XTO and Trinity East, two of the companies that have paid
the city big money and signed leases to drill for gas within the city limits, have agreed to wait 30 months
while the city rewrites its gas drilling ordinance. But one company has no such
deal with the city: Chief Oil & Gas, which, we discovered at yesterday's
meeting of the gas drilling task force, is moving ahead with its longstanding plans to drill on a
site owned by Luminant at North Lake, near Coppell but within the
Dallas city limits. "Luminant is providing the minerals and the land.
Chief is providing the know-how and the drilling," said Dallas Cothrum of Masterplan, the land-use consulting company
representing Chief.
In order to drill, companies must
obtain site-specific zoning permission from city council -- a specific use
permit (SUP) -- as well as a city permit, which is issued according to
technical standards, providing that the company submits materials demonstrating
that they are in accordance with the city's current drilling ordinance.
Meanwhile, the Dallas drilling task force is crafting updated ordinance
recommendations, which they will vote on next month before submitting to the
city council.
But before it began revising its
drilling ordinance, the city approved five SUPs for drilling sites, and Chief
is the only one currently moving forward in the permitting process, as
documented in the letter below from Masterplan, which ends with the line,
"Finally, I cannot remember an occurrence when it took the city so long to
issue a permit for an allowed use."
Theresa
O'Donnell, the city's director of Sustainable Development and Construction,
said her office has requested additional information from Chief. And if the
company complies with the current ordinance, she said, the city must grant a
permit allowing fracking on the site. Currently, she said during her zoning
presentation to the drilling task force yesterday, the application is
"substantially complete."
"We want to see if there's gas
there," Cothrum said. "We wouldn't have gone through the process if
we weren't serious about finding out if there's gas at North Lake."
The North Lake location is
relatively secluded from residential neighborhoods, O'Donnell told the task
force. "We could see the activity," she said, and "watch the
process without having any immediately adjacent neighbors that are affected by
it."
Potential fracking sites for which
the city has granted SUPs will be held to the city's current ordinance rather
than being forced to comply with the revisions currently under consideration.
"They'd be perfectly within their rights to say no [to complying with a
revised ordinance], but we could ask," O'Donnell said, addressing this
issue yesterday during her zoning and permitting presentation to the drilling
task force. She told Unfair Park that, generally, "You get to play by the
set of rules that are in place at the time of your application."
O'Donnell made it clear that Dallas
does not have a moratorium on fracking, but reiterated that until now, gas
drilling companies that have paid the city millions for leases have voluntarily
stalled their applications.
"We've asked them to hold
off," she said. "They're just voluntarily keeping their application
suspended."
But with Chief's pursuance of a
drilling permit, the promise is disintegrating. She told the task force that
companies holding those leases "could come in and submit all their
documentation for a permit this afternoon if they would like." In other
words: Dallas could be fracked.
