News: Audit finds COGCC let oil and gas operators off the hook for millions

Words: ‘Irreconcilable Differences,’ by Cassie Hottenstein

certified trainer, bringing peer support education and information to communities around the state.

“It takes a certain tenacity to go through those (mental health and recovery) experiences and come out shining. But it also takes a certain tenacity to say, ‘Hey, I want to work as a peer,” he says. “I want to be a peer support, where I can share my experience, where I can work with people and support them in a clinical setting, but in a nonclinical way.” Through his work with the Colorado Providers Association (COPA), which administers the certification, King estimates there are less than 100 certified peers in the state. MHP employs 14 peer support specialists throughout the county, and there are a few job openings listed on its website.

King says when he first started, his salary was $10, hardly enough to make it as a single father. Luckily for him, he was able to join Boulder County’s Family Self-Sufficiency Program, and his father reentered his life after more than 30 years, providing some financial help. But he knows most people aren’t as fortunate and wants to see more opportunities available to his clients.

The training and certification process can be a barrier for many people with the qualifications to be a peer but lack the resources. Matched with a starting average salary of $13 an hour, it can be difficult for those coming out of recovery and mental health situations to see peer support as a viable career choice.

“How are you going to attract talent if you’re paying 13 bucks an hour and McDonald’s is paying $14, literally,” King says. “It hasn’t been made a viable career choice yet. It’s still this entry-level [position].” And that’s if someone is certified.

There are only two or three training sessions a year, King says, which cost between $300 and $600. Certification costs an additional $295 and requires six months of employment, 500 work hours, 25 hours of supervision, a high school diploma and passing a 75-question exam. “That’s a barrier for someone who doesn’t even have a job and wants to pursue a career,” King says. Once someone does become a certified peer support specialist, there also isn’t much room for upward mobility within the field, King says. Most of the time, people are encouraged to get more advanced degrees and move out of the peer support role.

“It’s generally an entry-level position,” adds Amanda Bushek, a clinician with MHP and manager of its Boulder Adult Behavioral Health Home. “The future of peer support services, [needs] to have some ways for people to stay at those kinds of roles but have opportunities. There’s not a lot of room for advancement.” Regardless of what happens with this specific piece of legislation, peer support professionals are becoming an integral part of health care teams in Colorado, and it’s a field that could benefit from additional resources.

“From a clinical perspective [peer support] can help our operations,”

Bushek says. “It really helps us design things to truly be centered on who we’re trying to help. … It’s very effective to not just know what helps people from what our textbooks tell us.”

Plus, peers are more available than clinicians and counselors, King says. They work as “resource brokers,” he adds, noting they easily connect people to services they themselves once used. They can drive people to appointments, visit them at home, get to know their family and friends. So much of the work is just being present with people wherever they are on their journey.

“No matter how great my story is, it’s not about me, it’s about this person and their experiences and if they’re ready to get help. So sometimes I can show them those ropes and sometimes they have to find it on their own,” King says. “Part of the work is watching people struggle sometimes until they find that path and just being there as a support for them when they are ready.”

Oil and gas operators in Colorado failed to submit 50,000 required monthly well reports between 2016 and 2018. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) failed to collect over $300 million in penalties from the operators for missing those and other reports. And as a result of those and other reporting issues, the state of Colorado — which already has one of the lowest severance tax rates in the country — failed to collect much of the severance tax it was owed by the oil and gas industry operating in the state. (Severance taxes are a fee imposed on industries that make money from extracting natural resources.)

Those were the key takeaways from a state audit released last week that looked into why Colorado is not collecting enough severance tax from oil and gas operators and mining companies.

Over the last four years, the severance tax collected — once tax credits for flaring, capitol costs, transportation, and “stripper wells” that produce less than 15 barrels a day are factored in — has dropped 66%. In fact, the state actually had to pay operators a $14.3 million refund in 2017 while collecting no severance tax at all. Colorado’s .54% rate is the lowest in the West, and abysmal compared to North Dakota’s 9.81% and Montana’s 9.55% rates.

What the audit found is that the COGCC does not adequately follow up and penalize operators that do not produce monthly well reports, even though it has the resources — and responsibility — to do so. In response, the COGCC claimed in the audit that it only has two staff members who can Audit finds COGCC let oil and gas operators off the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars by Matt Cortina

BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE I review 15 operators per year. There are 420 operators in the state.

“I don’t find it hard to believe that that Commission does not have the resources they need to properly ensure public health and safety, much less make sure that the industry is paying their fair share given the incredibly low rate for the industry compared to other states,” says Kelly Nordini, executive director of Conservation Colorado.

The audit suggested the COGCC automatically follow up with oil and gas companies that don’t file reports and routinely run delinquency checks — a suggestion the COGCC accepted.

The COGCC also notified the auditors that it often negotiates with delinquent oil and gas companies, frequently reducing fines up to 90%. If the COGCC had actually fined just the three largest offenders between 2016-18, the state could’ve gathered $120 million from them.

The audit also found there was a five-fold increase in flaring from 2018 to 2019 — a technique that earns a tax exemption and allows drillers to continue operations when there is a surplus of natural gas. The audit also found eliminating the stripper well exemption would boost severance tax revenue by $55 million per year, and that by taxing the roughly 500 operators, and not the 13,000 groups that own interest in the operations, the Department of Revenue would be able to more efficiently govern severance tax collection.

Megan Castle with the COGCC told Boulder Weekly that the agency is “committed to being transparent, operating efficiently, and to being good stewards of taxpayer’s dollars” and has already implemented some of the recommendatios from the audit.

But the question of how effective the state will be at ensuring oil and gas operators pay their fair share remains. “Every single time that I’ve seen in the last 15 years or so that there has been an issue with raising the bar for the industry to do better, they have said it was going to be the end of everything. And it has not,” Nordini says. “I think we need to write rules that prioritize communities and Coloradans and workers and stop buying into the industry hyperbole.”

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