Democratic Fundraisers and the Oil and Gas Industry

“What that’s really about is stopping ballot initiatives like the ones related to fracking that are being pushed now.”

Millions of dollars already being raised to defeat ballot measures around local control of oil and gas activity in Colorado. In her latest article in the Intercept, Alleen Brown says that much of it is being raised by CRED (Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development.)

“It’s really a group that was founded and is funded by Anadarko Petroleum and Noble Energy, so they are dedicated to communicating how great fracking is essentially.”

Brown says that a heavily funded associated group, Protect Colorado, along with CRED have raised about $6.3 million to defeat the ballot , by contrast CREED(Coloradans Resisting Extreme Energy Development) has raised about $56,000 “so you can see that there’s a huge inequity in the amount of money that is being pumped into killing the initiatives.”

One of the advisory committee members of CRED is a Democratic strategist and lobbyist for Noble Energy and Encana, Ted Trimpa, “so his interests lie both with the Democratic Party and with these Oil and Gas companies. Brown says that Trimpa was heavily involved in state politics in the early 2000s “when politics were really controlled by Republicans, they flipped over to Democrats, Ted Trimpa was behind that. He orchestrated donations from 4 wealthy donors that aimed their money at particular campaigns that they thought could turn the state blue.”

One of those donors was Tim Gill who sits on the board of Colorado Concern, an organization that represents the business community in Colorado. One of their areas of focus is strengthening the state’s constitution. “What that’s really about is stopping ballot initiatives like the ones related to fracking that are being pushed now. So they’ve also donated money to CRED and Protect Colorado and Tim Gill, again an important figure in funding state Democratic politics is on their board.”