Broomfield Concerned Citizens Watch Municipal Elections for Oil and Gas Issues

Voters in Broomfield are deciding on the mayors race as well as all 5 open Ward seats in this year’s municipal elections. Like other Front Range communities, oil and gas is playing a huge role in the elections. Mackenzie Carignan with the group Broomfield Concerned, a grass roots community group that was formed 3 years ago in response to increased fracking in the area, says the city council has a major role in oil and gas regulation in the city.

“The shift of power so to speak really has come to local municipalities. And so now all local municipalities have a lot more stake in what happens in our community. And so we just have to really make sure that we’re electing officials and people to our positions of power to represent us in ways that is cohesive and kind of could go hand-in-hand with what the people want and instead of having people in our city council who are needy owned by the oil and gas industry or heavily funded by the oil and gas industry and I think making sure that we find those representatives who really represent the people and what the people want is the really important part of this local election practitioners who aren’t familiar with what’s been happening in Broomfield and the role that City Council and the local authorities play particularly when it comes to oil and gas.”

Broomfield Concerned surveyed all city council and mayoral candidates to get a sense of their positions on oil and gas regulation. The group came up with seven questions they thought the voting public of Broomfield would like to know about the City Council candidates’ views on Oil and Gas development. They emailed the questionnaire to all candidates and collected their responses which you can find here.

“Generally people who have already shown a proclivity to representing our are community members people who have already shown a proclivity to listening to impacted citizens. I think that trend really was that the people who already have shown that they’re engaged in these community discussions are the ones who showed up to answer the questions on that questionnaire.”