Interviewer: Leonia Harrison interviewing Kevin Roden
on October 29 2015 bought his experience
with fracking in Denton, Texas.
When did you first hear about fracking?
Interviewee: The idea of oil gas development
was pretty progressive for anyone living in Texas
you see it, you don't necessarily understand the process.
But I think it was when the wells went in,
across the street from mechanic park (mumbles)
that really activated the whole city.
Before I was on Council, but at the time I was writing
for a blog in town that I created called think Denton.
And so we covered that whole process extensively,
and spent some time acquainting myself with that issue.
Interviewer: When did you first become aware
of the fracking debate in Denton
Interviewee: You heard the concerns
from the neighbor hood, and I think for the first time,
I think Texans are generally comfortable
with the idea of oil and gas development.
And like I said, they see it on the horizon.
You see it when you're driving out in the country,
but to the extent that all of a sudden it comes up
besides parks to hide besides neighborhoods
besides hospitals, schools, I think that was the first time
Texans started saying, perhaps this is fine
in another context, but now that it's here,
I'm going to look into it a bit more.
So I want to know what's coming in my neighborhood.
So I think for any of us, that was the first time
we started kind of looking into this particular process.
Interviewer: Was the fracking debate divisive
among you and your colleagues?
Interviewee: Well, I mean, this has been
since I've been on council clearly
the most polarizing issue that we've seen
in Den there's always polarizing issues
anytime you have a development project
come into a neighborhood people get angry about it.
But yeah, it's because the state of the nature of
political discourse in our culture,
which is unfortunate is we tend to get weird
as we think about politics by watching
what's on the national stage.
Well, when you watch that, there's enemies,
there's good, there's bad, there's black, there's white,
there's suspicion, there's conspiracy
there is all these things.
So when we first start getting engaged in local politics,
which most people don't do by the way,
about 5% of registered voters vote in a city election.
But when people first start doing,
they draw from what they know, which is federal politics.
So they import all the way of acting and thinking
and speaking to one another, that we learn
from watching MSNBC, CNN, Fox News into the local level,
and it becomes very toxic very quickly.
Interviewer: What influenced your decision
to vote for the ban on fracking?
Interviewee: That's a long and winding road.
When I came into office in 2011,
it was one of the issues that I put forward
was that we need to get tighter regulations
on this industry that to the extent that
they're gonna come in the neighborhoods, or close to it,
we need to have tighter controls in what we did.
So one of the first things I did when I came into office
knowing that we were about to rewrite our ordinance
on oil and gas development was worked with folks like
Adam Pringle, UNT, and others to say,
"How can we get additional citizen expert input
"into this process, so that we can kind of
"bring all the players to the table
"and really kind of think through this in a deeper way?"
So I kind of tracked it essentially,
that's what grew out of that was
the Denton Drilling Awareness Group.
All 20 kind of spun off into the frack free Denton.
The whole goal upfront wasn't to ban fracking.
It was to say, how do we create tougher regulations.
And when we passed new regulations in 2012,
everyone across the board was kind of I mean,
not everyone got what they wanted,
including the industry, but everyone felt pretty comfortable
that we're doing something of value.
It wasn't until about a year later,
when a particular operator was claiming rights
on existing wells, that were terribly close to homes,
that everyone started saying, wait,
we just pass these tough ordinances, oh,
but they don't apply to these existing wells.
Oh, by the way, dedan has 300 plus existing wells.
That means that all of those are gonna
perhaps be ambiguous as to what regulations apply to them,
and we're gonna have 300 more of what we're seeing here
in this one particular neighborhood.
So, that's when I started becoming concerned
that perhaps we didn't have the right tools
that the state had given us.
The state obviously wasn't really regulating.
So I was very skeptical upfront of the whole approach
to ban fracking and I told the organizers there upfront,
I said, this is going too far.
But, at the end of the day, I think in context of
what was happening at the time,
the state needed to get a clear message
from city saying, "guys, you're not addressing the problem."
And I think I came to this particular issue saying
this is gonna start a statewide conversation.
Well it did at the end of the day, strategically,
anyone can argue whether that was good or bad,
'cause now they took away rights we previously had,
so if your goal is to kind of get us to a point of having
more regulations, the ban of fracking arguably backfired.
Now, but who knows?
This is part of a longer conversation,
but, I think our citizens were pretty united in that clearly
as a result of the vote, and I was happy to be on that side
because I think it was in a stork step.
I think we understood kind of the strength of
I hate to put in an adversarial terms
but the strength of the adversary was much stronger.
So the current battle has been won by the industry
in the state legislators but I think this is a long game.