County gains good guide for drilling-rules quest

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6/15/2008 - 6/15/08

When Santa Fe County leaders announced a couple of weeks ago that they'd hired a team of land-use attorneys and planning experts to help write gas- and oil-drilling rules, it must have seemed anti-climactic to the environmentalists and other activists scurrying to fend off the Texas company eyeing the Galisteo Basin:

Drilling opponents had shown up in droves at public meetings toward the end of last year and the beginning of 2008. They took heart from Gov. Bill Richardson's January announcement of a six-month drilling suspension — and from the county commissioners' February declaration of a year-long moratorium.

Could the county, by next February, come up with ordinances and regulations tough enough to keep the countryside from being littered with Oil Patch detritus, yet reasonable enough to keep Tecton from taking the county to court — and to the cleaners — for daring to stand in the way of a petroleum industry favored by federal giveaway laws?

It wasn't looking good — and the picture got worse when another oil company sued Río Arriba County over its moratorium.

But last week, the guys consulting with Santa Fe County came to town to get acquainted with their client.

It appears we're in very good hands.

Among the consultants is Robert Freilich, a pre-eminent authority on land-use law — and one of America's most effective and feared advocates of local control over development.

Forty years ago, the young lawyer Freilich rode to the rescue of Ramapo, a small town on the New York-New Jersey border being overrun by suburbanization. Local governments put together a set of land-development ordinances that the state's highest court found reasonable. The rules were upheld — and from the Ramapo case came a nationwide trend toward managed growth.

Freilich hasn't missed a beat since then, taking his energy and expertise all over the country and advising communities on rational approaches to sustainable growth and on ways of coping with corporate predators.

County Attorney Steven Ross, while serving in that position in Farmington, had sat in on some of Freilich's seminars. He knew just where to go when Santa Fe's growth-management planning was forced to focus on the Galisteo area.

At the same time, our commissioners realized that they'd have to pay plenty in professional fees to get the high-caliber help the county would need. They've come up with $600,000 for consulting of various kinds — legal, geological and oil-specialized. Chances are, they'll have to fork over lots more before the oil saga is told.

But already, we're guessing that Tecton is treading lighter with its lawsuit threats, veiled or otherwise. And might Freilich's advice be helpful if our county were to file a friend-of-the-court brief in Río Arriba?

Mainly, though, Freilich and his Los Angeles firm, Miller Barondess, will be guiding what he says will be a thoroughly open process of community meetings, and rules-drafting by the county's Development Review Committee, before adoption by the board of commissioners. The firm's advice might prove valuable beyond the drilling assault: Ranchettes and who knows what other land-planning challenges are sure to follow.

Could evidence emerge to the effect that the Galisteo Basin doesn't hold great gas or oil prospects, even at today's petroleum prices?

Or if this is indeed today's hydrocarbon country, how much of the proposed drilling can be regulated — and how can it be done in a way that won't amount to a recompensible "taking" under the Constitution?

That's what our officials must figure out. Robert Freilich's presence should buck them up during the difficult months to come.