Aurora community fights against oil and gas drilling near their homes

This article and the accompanying video were published by Denver7.

AURORA, Colo. — Southshore, a neighborhood with spacious homes along the banks of the Aurora Reservoir, seemed like the perfect place to live when Tisha and Bill Foard moved there with their son, Aiden, 9.

“It’s our forever home,” Tisha said. “Our block is our family.”

Now, across their block, yard signs show the community is coming together for a new reason: shared concerns about oil and gas wells planned nearby.

“You don’t expect to buy a house in a nice community, and then have [oil] wells put in your backyards,” Bill said.

But when your backyard sits atop a wealth of oil and gas, it’s fair game for Colorado’s oil and gas producers.

In the next few years, one of the state’s biggest producers, Civitas, plans to drill at least 600 wells along the Front Range. More than a quarter of those, about 170 wells, are planned for just east of Southshore.

“We were just shocked, just in awe, that this could even happen so close to communities with families and homes and children and school buildings,” said Tisha.

The Foards and their neighbors are worried about potential health risks and environmental harm if the drilling plans move forward. So, they created a group called Save the Aurora Reservoir to push back. Almost 1,500 people have joined their group on Facebook.

Just east of their neighborhood is where Civitas hopes to drill the wells on sprawling prairie lands known as the Lowry Ranch. The Foards thought that land — home to pronghorn and other wildlife — would stay undeveloped.

“We were told by our builder, no one would build on that side of the lake. And I always called it the wild side,” Tisha said.

But the Lowry Ranch is far more open to development than Tisha thought. Colorado’s State Land Board owns the land and minerals, and rents it out to companies, including oil and gas producers.

“It’s been leased here for oil and gas development for almost 100 years already,” said Kristin Kemp, a spokesperson for the land board.

“Our job is to lease out trust land located all around the state,” Kemp said. “The rent we collect helps fund public schools.”

Most of those funds, about 80%, come from oil and gas production.

“In the last 10 years, leasing from oil and gas operations out here has generated more than $200 million,” Kemp said.

Some of that money came from Civitas, which already operates on the Lowry Ranch. In 2020, Civitas acquired an existing lease for several wells from the energy giant ConocoPhillips. Civitas included those operating wells in its proposal to drill more wells on the property.

Families like the Foards worry expanded oil and gas operations could contaminate their homes and the water they rely on.

Read the rest of this article and watch the video at Denver7.com