On October 30, 2015, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell recommending that BLM cancel 18 long-held oil and gas leases located on Forest Service managed surface in an area of Northwestern Montana called the Badger-Two Medicine. These leases, originally issued in 1982, have been the focus […]
Dated and effective July 17, 2015, the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) issued Instruction Memorandum 2015-124 (“IM-2015-124”). This BLM guidance significantly changes the way federal Communization Agreements (“CAs”) are administered and, for the most part, eliminates some of the cumbersome issues for operators applying for CAs. CAs are used to combine isolated or small federal […]
For the past several years Congressman Rob Bishop (R), representing Utah’s 1st Congressional District, has been promising to reveal a bill encapsulating what he calls the “Utah Public Lands Initiative.” His ambitious plan involves bringing together key state and national stakeholder groups, the Utah Congressional Delegation, Utah Governor Gary Herbert and state and local leaders […]
The Conservation Basics A primary objective of the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Act (the “Act”) has always been conservation through prevention of waste and enforcement of efficient drilling and production practices. In other words, traditionally the Act served one important god – the resource conservation god. Since 1994, however, the Act and those who […]
Like presidents before him, President Obama is using the 1906 Antiquities Act, 16 U.S.C. § 431-433, as part of his presidential legacy. In September, 2014, Obama exercised this authority for the 12th time and expanded a national monument, created by his predecessor George W. Bush, from 87,000 square miles to more than 490,000 square miles […]
In condemnation actions in Colorado, the condemning party must take great care to satisfy legal prerequisites prior to initiating suit and, in most cases, moving for immediate possession of the subject property. By statute, immediate possession will only be granted upon a showing that: 1) a public agency with condemnation power has properly determined that […]
The KISS principle that systems perform best with simple rather than complex designscan apply in the world of legal drafting. This lesson was recently learned by lawyers who drafted a complex “work-around” to avoid a judicial interpretation of standard oil and gas lease royalty language on whether post-production costs should be included in the royalty […]
On September 21, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), an independent federal agency with a key advisory role in National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) § 106 “effects” determinations, recommended that long-ago issued federal oil and gas leases should be cancelled and that future mineral development should not occur within the Badger-Two Medicine area, located […]
For Colorado employers with a zero-tolerance drug policy, employment termination for marijuana use during off-hours has been an unsettled question ever since medical marijuana first became legal in 2000. While all marijuana use—medical and recreational—is now legal in Colorado, the drug remains classified as an illegal substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act. The quandary […]
On August 3, 2015, the Obama Administration through the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) announced the implementation of the Clean Power Plan (“CPP”) which has the stated purpose of “establishing guidelines for states to follow in developing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric generating units,” or, in layman’s terms, to cut carbon […]