Colorado sues county over oil and gas moratorium

‘Colorado has sued Boulder County for defying state law that preempts local efforts to ban oil and gas drilling. Meanwhile, Colorado researchers have found possible connections between oil and gas development and a type of cancer.
Attorney General Cynthia Coffman sued Boulder County and its board of commissioners in district court this week, in order to challenge the county’s five-year-old moratorium on oil and gas development.
Boulder County’s “open defiance of state law has made legal action the final recourse available,” Coffman said in a statement.
The county’s moratorium on new applications for oil and gas development was first initiated in February 2012. Since then, the county commission has renewed or extended the moratorium eight times, Coffman said. Two of those updates or extensions were imposed after the May 2016 ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that localities could not prohibit oil or gas development if those efforts “conflict with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Act.”‘
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