AP Photo/Craig Ruttle 2016 Politico Journalism Institute California counties push for all-out fracking ban

This story was published as part of the POLITICO Journalism Institute special section. PJI is a journalism training program that allows student participants to report and produce news stories.

California is known for some of the strictest fracking regulations in the country, but some activist groups now seek an all-out ban.


Those groups had a victory this week in Butte County, where a ballot ban on fracking passed with more than 70 percent of the vote.

“It’s been really a community organizing triumph as much as anything else,” Ken Fleming said, an organizer with Frack-Free Butte County. “The message was pretty clear: Do you wanna trust the oil companies, or do you wanna make sure to continue to have clean water? I think that question was a pretty clear result.”

This November, Monterey County, one of the state’s top 10 oil-producing counties, will consider a similar ballot initiative to end fracking.

Protect Monterey County, an anti-fracking group, wants to keep the current wells in the county and prohibit the fracking of new wells and waste water injection. It is optimistic after the Butte County vote. Monterey County has even received attention from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who traveled there recently to speak against fracking.

Mary Hsia-Coron is an organizer with Protect Monterey County, a group behind the no-frack initiative. She is concerned about the contamination of water not only in her county, but in surrounding counties, as well.

“The aquifers are at risk in Monterey County,” Hsia-Coron said. “There are 35 wastewater injection wells that are illegally injecting waste from the oil industry in Monterey County to protected aquifers. That’s a big problem right now.”

Still, not all residents in Monterey County are thrilled with the campaign to eliminate fracking. Monterey County for Energy Independence released a statement in response to anti-fracking rhetoric pushed by activist groups like the one Hsia-Coron belongs to.

“The so-called fracking ban initiative is a deceitful ploy that would bring an end to all oil production in Monterey County within five years,” said Karen Hanretty, a representative of Monterey County for Energy Independence.

“The intent of anti-oil activists is to bring an end to nearly 70 years of safe oil production in Monterey County, endanger thousands of local jobs and dry up millions of dollars in local tax revenue that pays for schools and public safety,” she said.

In his speech there last month, Sanders called fracking “a danger to the air we breathe.”

“California is in a midst of a five-year drought. Cities and towns around the state have been required to reduce their consumption of water by 25 percent,” Sanders said. “In my view, it makes zero sense to talk about the urgent need to conserve water on one hand and then give big gas companies a green light to use huge amounts of water through hydraulic fracking on the other hand.”

“I hope very much that Monterey County continue[s] the momentum and makes it clear that fracking is not safe and not what we need for our people,” Sanders said.

California has a rich history of oil and gas extraction dating to the late 1800s. Although oil extraction declined in the 1980s, new techniques like fracking came to light in the past decade, making unrecoverable oil easier to extract. Since then, new regulations were established in 2015, but some residents in California simply want to eliminate fracking.

Monterey County isn’t the only county in California with a movement to ban fracking. Butte County, California, has had a two-year battle with its anti-fracking ballot initiative, which was supposed to be on the 2014 ballot, but was moved to the June 7 ballot.

Fleming of Frack-Free Butte County said that although the county isn’t terribly friendly to fracking, geologically speaking, there are areas that have the potential to be sought out by certain oil and gas companies.

“We looked around and realized we had over 200-plus orphaned or abandoned wells in Butte County,” Fleming said. “These were the type of wells that were identified as the best wells for fracking. And they all reside in the heart of our agricultural activity.”

Fleming said the ban on fracking could be overturned if there is proof that the practice doesn’t harm the people and their resources.

“It can be changed later on by the people if, in fact, the oil companies can prove, without a doubt that there are no dangers involved in the process being used here,” Fleming said.

Butte County public information officer Casey Hatcher said the passing of the initiative would be a victory for some, but seeing the true implications of the ban on fracking might not happen right away.

“Things like this, I think, can take a little bit of time to understand the true implications,” Hatcher said. “It might not be that significant because geologically, that activity — we don’t have the geology for it.”

Dave Quast, a spokesman for Energy in Depth said the ballot initiatives in counties like Monterey and Butte are “symbolic measures at best,” and said the state already has fracking regulations stemming from SB4, which was formally adopted in 2015 as a new set of fracking rules in California.

“Hydraulic fracturing [fracking] has been always regulated at state level,” Quast said. “They [the regulations] were generated specifically out of concern that the activist group raised.” It’s gone further “than any other state has gone.”

So what is next for these counties? In Butte County, Fleming said some rest after the long fight is needed, then decisions for future initiatives in other counties will be made.

“We’re probably going to give ourselves a couple weeks off and then come together and look at the issue,” Fleming said. “Certainly, the counties around us need to look at this issue, but it has to come from within them, I think.”

Hsia-Coron said the campaign has been a big commitment, but she hopes other counties will step up on their own and listen to the issues that impact the environment.

“I think what people do in their local communities inspires other communities,” she said.



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