Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Helen Slottje, an attorney who helped communities in New York state enact local fracking bans, will speak Saturday during the annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council.
Six years ago, Helen Slottje was a corporate attorney working for a big law firm in Boston.
Moving to Upstate New York in 2009 turned her into an environmental activist, and this summer she was awarded a prestigious environmental prize for her work in helping communities in New York ban fracking.
At 11:30 a.m. Saturday, she will be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council at the Crowne Plaza in downtown Billings.
Her speech will be timely. Residents near Belfry are in the process of trying to lessen the impacts of oil production through the use of citizen-initiated zoning. Though Slottje based her work on provisions of the New York Constitution, she sees no reason Montanans couldn’t push for outright bans on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The Montana Constitution has some of the strongest environmental language in the country, she said, giving people here “a constitutional right to be free of the environmental impacts” of fracking.
Slottje’s activism began when she and her husband, David, left Boston for Danby, near Ithaca, N.Y., so David could work for a family business. That part of New York is full of rolling hills, gorges, extensive farmland and the Finger Lakes, Slottje said. Beneath it is Marcellus shale, full of natural gas.
Soon after their arrival, Slottje said, she attended a town forum about proposed fracking development, where she heard stories and saw photos detailing the effects of fracking on landscapes and waterways. Slottje was horrified. And four people on a panel at the forum all delivered variations of the same message, she said: “All anyone could do was brace for the coming impacts.”
She and her husband got involved, thinking it would be for just a little while. They tried various approaches to dealing with fracking but found them all unsatisfactory. Along the way, though, they learned of the power of zoning.
So, she said, they asked a simple question: “What is ‘regulation’?” They concluded that while local governments could not regulate oil and gas development, they could simply ban it by treating it as a land-use issue.
All those impacts they had looked at mitigating, Slottje said—“these are all things that land-use law is specifically designed to address.”
Based on their conclusions, people in the nearby town of Ulysses started circulating petitions urging their town council to use zoning law to ban fracking in their community. The movement quickly spread to five or six other towns. At that point Slottje and her husband started drafting proposed zoning laws.
“Every lawyer that had an opinion said we were wrong,” Slottje said, including lawyers for the oil and gas industry, state regulators and even environmental groups. But they persevered, and in February 2011, five towns passed similar fracking bans.
The remarkable thing, Slottje said, was that these little towns were hardly hotbeds of environmental extremism.
“These are town boards,” she said. “People who run for town boards tend to be very conservative.”
The oil industry reacted by threatening to sue the towns and the town councilors individually, and by characterizing the bans as not merely wrongheaded but actually criminal. The town of Dryden became the test case when its ban was challenged in court.
The ban was upheld by a Supreme Court judge—the equivalent of a District Court judge in Montana. A board of appeals upheld that decision, which then went to the New York Appeals Court, equivalent to the Montana Supreme Court. The Appeals Court upheld the ban in June, and last month a petition for a rehearing of the case was denied.
Slottje says that means the towns have won. There are no federal issues involved, meaning there is nothing to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, she said, nearly 200 towns across New York have passed their own fracking bans or moratoriums, and towns in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, Ohio and California have followed suit.
“The real message is, this is an existential fight for the fossil-fuel industry,” Slottje said, and it is an existential fight for local communities, too.
“This is not the time to be moderate. …The power is in the grassroots. We need to say ‘no,’” she said.
This summer, Slottje was one of six people around the world to receive the Goldman Environmental Prize, billed as “the world’s largest prize honoring grassroots environmentalists.”
In the Clarks Fork Valley, Belfry-area residents asked the Carbon County Commission last summer to create a special zoning district to protect their land from the effects of oil and gas development. The Energy Corporation of America has a well near Belfry and is exploring other sites in Carbon and Stillwater counties.
Susann Beug, of Red Lodge, a member of the Carbon County Resource Council, an affiliate of Northern Plains, said the citizen-initiated zoning proposal is being revised in response to concerns raised by Carbon County Attorney Alex Nixon and will soon be resubmitted to the county commission.
Details: The annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council started today. For a schedule of Saturday’s events, go here.
To watch a video about Slottje’s work in Upstate New York, go here. And here’s a longer video about Dryden, N.Y., the town whose fracking ban was upheld by New York’s highest court.
