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Land owners meet with Secretary of State to file Ballot Initiative to protect their private property rights
Cheyenne, WY – April 26, 2004 – Land owners from across the State met today with Secretary of State Joe Meyer to file an application for a Ballot Initiative regarding protection of their private property rights during oil and gas development activities. If approved, they hope to begin gathering signatures at their first public meeting on Thursday at the Holiday Inn in Riverton from 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Wyoming has approximately 13 million acres which are owned in a fashion called “split estate” – where one entity owns the property rights to the surface and another entity owns the property rights to the minerals. The vast majority of these “split estate lands” were created at the time the lands were originally homesteaded back in the early 1900’s. The federal government reserved the minerals and sold the surface to a homesteader. “Although there was always a risk that these lands would be developed for their mineral rights rather than solely as an agricultural operation, no landowner ever took the risk that he/she would have to bear the economic loss caused to their lands by oil and gas development. If Wyoming expects split estate surface landowners to bear that loss – who will ever own those lands and take care of them?” asks Laurie Goodman, a landowner in Sublette County.
“I am from a long-time oil and gas family in Wyoming and I and support the oil industry in our state, but I don’t believe they should be able to operate on my land without fully compensating me for all the damages they cause”, said John Andrikopoulos, a rancher from Daniel, Wyoming in Sublette County.
Oil and gas companies in Wyoming are exempt from the laws and regulations that affect the coal and trona industries regarding negotiations with the owners of the surface land that lie over the mineral resources. Other mining industries are legally required to provide notice to the landowners and to negotiate and compensate for the full amount of damages caused by their operations. In Wyoming, the oil and gas industry is only legally required to compensate a landowner for “loss to growing crops”, and only if the underlying minerals are owned by the federal government. If the underlying minerals are owned by the state or another individual, that surface landowner has no legal rights in Wyoming to negotiate compensation for the losses caused by the oil and gas development activity.
A bill to protect the private property rights of surface owners was drafted and unanimously supported by the Joint Judiciary Committee, but failed to be heard by the 2004 Legislature – in spite of the support of 44 legislators. The language approved by the Judiciary Committee is the language contained in the landowner ballot initiative. The Petroleum Association of Wyoming opposed that bill, favoring voluntary measures instead which encourage neighborly behavior between landowners and oil and gas companies. “Voluntary measures worked for a long time – they worked for me. But the industry in Wyoming has changed: the top 3 producers are all foreign-owned, none of the top 10 producers have headquarters here in Wyoming anymore, and most of them just have a field office. They’re mostly publicly-held, so their first responsibility is to their share-holders – not the Wyoming landowners. That’s different from how it used to be, and now we realize the laws must be different also”, said Bill Garland, an affected landowner in Pavillion, Wyoming in Fremont County.
Shaun Andrikopoulos, who ranches with his father in Sublette County, recalls a conversation with a landman from a large multi-national oil and gas corporation that refused to negotiate a credible Surface Use Agreement. That landman told Shaun and his family, “We (the oil company) are following the law.” “That’s when I knew we had to change the law,” said Shaun.
According to the U.S. Geologic Service, Wyoming basins hold 55% of the natural gas “priority reserves” in the nation. The Bureau of Land Management states that they are preparing to permit 76,000 new wells in fields all across Wyoming, including 51,000 wells in the Powder River Basin in Sheridan, Johnson and Campbell Counties, 10,000 wells in the Green River Basin in Sublette County, 5,000 wells in the Atlantic Rim and Seminoe Road areas in Carbon County, and hundreds in smaller fields in Fremont, Sweetwater, Uinta, and Natrona Counties. According to Eric Barlow, from Gillette, Wyoming, those numbers are staggering. “Especially when you consider that the entire number of wells drilled in Wyoming since the early 1900’s is approximately 71,000 – this new prediction by the BLM doubles, in ten years, the total wells we’ve had in Wyoming for 100 years. That can have an overwhelming impact on the character and quality of our surface lands and aquifers. It’s critical that landowners be given the strongest legal ability to protect the impact on these lands, for their families and generations to come.”
If the application is approved by the Secretary of State, landowners will be required to obtain 33,000 signatures from registered voters in Wyoming by January, 2006 in order to put the issue before the voters in the 2006 general election. For information, contact Laurie Goodman @ LDgoodman1@aol.com