Once again Texas Republicans show that in a showdown between citizens and corporations, they will always go with the big money and side with the corporations. The Republican-dominated Railroad Commission has turned a 1965 law on its head and misused it to allow natural gas drillers to drill in urban areas, even when the property owners do not want the drilling on or under their property.
The 43 year-old law was originally passed to protect property owners. It said a drilling company couldn't just sign a few leases and then drill in an area, but had to include all the property owners in the affected area. But instead of using the law to protect property owners, the Railroad Commission has used it to allow drillers to force property owners to let them drill, even when they oppose the drilling.
The practice is called "force pooling" and a few gas companies banded together (Finley Resources, Chesapeake Energy, Dale Resources) to convince the Railroad Commission to use the law in a new way -- a way that would allow them to force property owners to cooperate with them.
Finley Resources had signed leases with about 300 property owners in Fort Worth's Eastside. But there remained about 6% of the area where owners had refused to lease their property or where the owners couldn't be found. These properties were scattered throughout the drilling area.
Since the companies could not drill on or under unleased property, and that would have made drilling around them very expensive, the companies asked the Railroad Commission to use the 1965 law to force the unsigned property owners to comply. And the Republican Commission gave them that right.
This is just so wrong! Private property rights have always been sacrosanct in the state of Texas. No neighbor or corporation could force a Texan to do anything with his property that he didn't want to do. This new misuse of the "force pooling" law destroys much of that concept.
Now that it's been done once, you can expect this to become a common practice for the corporate drillers. If an owner doesn't want drilling on or under his property, they have this ruling to use as precedent and they will force that owner to comply.
This is anti-property rights and anti-Texan. Isn't it time we got rid of the Republican corporate sell-outs in our state government, before they sell the whole state to their rich corporate buddies?
Well, actually a lot of those unsigned interests were ones where the owner couldn't be found--abandoned property and the like. Not only that, the unsigned lessors actually got ridiculously better terms than the people who did sign.
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