Talk Radio: Beauprez comes down hard on local control

Bob Beauprez, extolling the importance of oil and gas drilling in the final days of his GOP gubernatorial bid, isn’t willing to give an inch for local control.

Speaking with Mandy Connell today on KHOW, Beauprez was adamant that a draft bill about local control of the industry “will be disastrous” for Colorado.  The proposal — a compromise between Gov. John Hickenlooper, two oil and gas companies, and Congressman Jared Polis — attempts to give individual counties some, albeit limited regulatory power over energy production in their communities. Under the deal, state lawmakers would have to approve the bill in a special summer session in order for Polis to abandon his efforts to let voters decide the local control issue through the ballot initiative process in November. 

Likening Polis, a Boulder Democrat, to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Beauprez said, “We need to beat him back.”

“We need to defeat these bills, we need to defeat them soundly, because they would be so anti-opportunity in Colorado, anti-common sense Colorado. They are not based on good science.”

Beauprez emphasized the economic importance of oil and gas drilling in Colorado. He pshawed concerns about the environmental impact of hydraulic fracking.

“The science is overwhelming here,” “there’s no evidence that fracking contaminates groundwater,” he said, adding that, “We ought to be celebrating (drilling), not punishing it.”

Because no pre-GOP primary election talk radio interview would be complete without a good old-fashioned jab at Hickenlooper, Beauprez took his best shot:

“This governor likes to pretend that he’s pro-energy, but out of the other side of his mouth he brags about having implemented the most restrictive regulations in the entire nation on that one industry…,” he said.

Check out the interview for yourself, right here. 

Our thanks to Jason Salzman at bigmedia.org.

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