It sounds fairly innocent: Why shouldn’t oil and gas companies “be treated just like any other industry,” as one state lawmaker insisted recently, when it comes to local land-use regulation?

Well, that might be fine in a world in which every jurisdiction operated in good faith in seeking to protect citizens from the impacts of an industrial process while preserving the ownership rights of private companies. Except that we don’t live in that world.

While officials in most Colorado cities and towns would seek responsible accommodation with the energy industry if they had final say in all siting decisions — indeed, most already do this — a few clearly would not choose such a course.

They would instead either ban energy extraction outright or impose so many conditions and rules on permits as to make them impossible to obtain.

They would effectively seize mineral property rights, in other words, with no intention of providing a cent in return.

And never mind the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on taking private property without just compensation.

It’s those mineral property rights, it turns out, that distinguish oil and gas development from most other industries.

We’re not imagining this prospect, since a few jurisdictions have taken such action even in the face of case law that fails to support their cause.

That’s among the reasons House Bill 1355 is a bad idea, whatever its intent. In giving such crucial authority over oil and gas facilities to local governments, it turns on a green light to regulation driven not only by legitimate concern over local impacts — noise, transportation and a variety of other above-ground issues — but also a fervent anti-drilling ideology. In effect, the bill would displace the state as the ultimate authority on oil and gas drilling and undermine Colorado’s clear interest in the orderly and safe production of energy.

Moreover, the legislation, which is up for a vote in the full House early next month, comes at a time when the Colorado Supreme Court is poised to rule on Longmont’s ban on hydraulic fracturing and Fort Collins’ five-year moratorium on the technology, for which the justices heard oral arguments in December.

The court could simply declare the actions of those cities illegal in light of its previous rulings, and leave it at that. But it is also possible the court could elaborate on what aspects of land-use authority home-rule cities retain, or even reverse course and support Longmont and Fort Collins.

We’ll be very surprised and disappointed if the court took the latter course. But at the very least lawmakers ought to wait to see what the limits of the present law truly are before they seek to rewrite it.

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