Former Rep. B.J. Nikkel (R-49) was originally appointed by a vacancy committee and was sworn into the Colorado General Assembly on January 13, 2009, and ran for election in 2010. Nikkel ran for election in 2010 served a 2-year term. In early 2012, she announced she would not seek re-election and thus avoided a primary battle against fellow Republican Rep. Brian DelGrosso.
Nikkel’s Campaign Finance disclosure may be found by clicking HERE.
As of 2011, Nikkel was the Colorado State Chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wish lists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills.
Taking a spin through the revolving door, Nikkel been hired as a “consultant” by iKue Strategies. Ikue Strategies likes to tell stories. And by hiring Nikkel, they found a story teller for the oil & gas industry. Her position is funded via the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA).
NIKKEL’S TELLS US A STORY
The Frackingtale told to us by Nikkel’s is about the poor oil and gas industry money-spending public relation and lobbying woes.
The fracking tale begins in Colorado, which is being heavily fracked by the fossil fuel industry’s hunt for natural gas and oil.
People along the Front Range region became concerned about the serious impact fracking has on the air, water, land and their health and decided to do something about it. They gathered together and formed real grassroots groups and proposed bans and moratoriums to stop their communities from being fracked to death.
Alarmed at the audacity of real people standing up to the “paper people” (corporations), the paper people poured money into Colorado to prevent bans and moratoriums from being passed. For all their money being spent, the real people just refused to believe the paper people. Real people saw that lots of paper money was being spent by paper people to tell stories not worth the paper it was printed on. (See: Spend, Baby, Spend – How Oil and Gas Controls Colorado)
Nikkel’s Frackingtale continues with how the real people’s grassroots organizations spend the same amount of money as do the poor Oil & Gas corporations, front groups, and lobbying organizations.
Nikkel’s explains:
“I think that’s really disingenuous for that perspective to be said by these local groups,” Nikkel says, noting that the “radical” Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund helped Lafayette’s activists with the language of Question 300 in that city. “Let’s look at these other organizations, these national organizations that came in and wrote these initiatives for them. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Frack Free Colorado, Clean Water Action, do you really think they aren’t spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on all of these efforts, beginning more than a year ago?”
But when it was pointed out that municipal campaign finance disclosure reports show that, in Boulder for instance, COGA has donated $110,237 to Boulder Citizens for Rational Energy Decisions, compared to the $3,802 raised by the Yes on 2H committee, Nikkel claimed she was unclear on the specifics of the discrepancy.
“I don’t have the monetary, all that stuff, right here in front of me, I’m just an advisor to these organizations, so I don’t really get involved in the campaign finance end of it,” she said.
Just an advisor? Doesn’t have the monetary, all that stuff, right there in front of her? Yet, she does have the talking points for the frackingtale memorized.
Let’s take a look at the monetary and all that kind of stuff for her.
Nationwide, the Oil & Gas lobby spent $140,919,996 in 2012, and as last reporting date in 2013, they had spent $71,458,299.
In Colorado alone, $1.06 million was spent by the Oil & Gas industry to defend Colorado’s Governor Hickenlooper’s Oil agenda. A 2013 Chesapeake Energy lobbying memo praises Hickenlooper’s stance against the real people fighting them.
Colorado Ethics Watch report released in May 2013 found that oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered oil and gas inspectors by a 28-to-17 margin during Fiscal Year 2012-2013.
Gov. Hickenlooper has had a team of oil and gas lobbyists supporting his administration’s work to gut or kill legislation at the state capitol. In fact, a Colorado Ethics Watch report released this week found that oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered oil and gas inspectors by a 28-to-17 margin during Fiscal Year 2012-2013.
That investment has paid off big for Gov. Hickenlooper and the oil and gas industry during the 2013 legislative session.
Gov. Hickenlooper gutted a bill that would have set mandatory minimum fines for oil and gas companies that pollute rivers and water. After the bill died, his administration announced it would not fine Williams Company for polluting Parachute Creek, a tributary of the Colorado River, with cancer-causing benzene so long as it adhered to a consent order.
His administration actually opposed an effort to add more oil and gas inspectors out in the field and opposed a bill which would have brought more balance to the commission that oversees oil and gas drilling and fracking operations in the state.
EVEN STEVEN?
Nikkel’s continues her Frackingtale by saying this is not a David and Goliath battle. “It’s not the little guy against the big guy, it’s pretty even-steven out there”.
Chesapeake spent $130k on lobbying efforts over the last four years in Colorado. Other top oil and gas lobbying spenders since 2009 include Pioneer Natural Resources at $640k, Shell at $571k, Encana at $415k, Bill Barrett Corporation at $376k, Marathon at $293k, Williams Energy at $285k, ExxonMobil at $272k, Anadarko at $260k, Black Hills at $224k, and, of course, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association at $402k. This is a grand total of $3,868,000 over the past 3 ½ years, averaging $1.9 million per year.
Area fractivists say they find Nikkel’s claims ludicrous.
“An obviously ridiculous claim,” Phil Doe, environmental issues director for Be the Change, said via email when asked to respond to Nikkel’s assertions. “It must come from the same nonsense factory where the oil boys coined the whopper that there has never been any groundwater contamination from fracking. Seems like the greater the lie, the higher the volume with which it is delivered. The resistance to fracking is from citizens, spending their own time and money to protect themselves, their property and their families from drilling in their neighborhoods. If now and then other citizens and citizen groups rise to their defense, that hardly constitutes a gusher of money. The gushers have always been on the other side.”
East Boulder County United (EBCU) Treasurer Merrily Mazza agreed, noting that all of her group’s signature-gatherers were local volunteers.
“The assertion that these groups are heavily funding local anti-fracking campaigns is laughable, but typical of oil and gas talking points,” she told BW, noting that of the $7,500 her group plans to spend on the campaign, they received $1,000 from MoveOn.org, $2,500 from the Sierra Club and about $150 worth of consulting from Food & Water Watch.
“That’s it — the sum total of what EBCU has received from environmental or other national groups,” Mazza said. “We’ve never received a contribution from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Clean Water Action or anyone else. All other contributions to EBCU have been local, individual donors. Oil and gas is indeed pouring money into the local anti-fracking campaigns — $67,000 in Lafayette alone, much more in Fort Collins and Broomfield. EBCU pales in comparison. We’ve been almost totally funded by local donors giving small amounts. That’s an ‘even playing field’?
“It’s also funny that the local group members — who actually live in the communities — bust their butts to organize speakers; walk turfs with community volunteers; get mailers and yard signs designed, printed and distributed; communicate via websites and email, and COGA outsources its efforts to a consulting firm in Denver,” she continues.
Compare $7,500 in funds as stated by East Boulder County United (EBCU) to the $1.9 million being spent by the paper people of the oil & gas industry. Nikkel’s salary as a ‘consultant’ is probably much more than $7,500.
Is it as even-steven as Nikkel’s talking points say? As with all stories, there is some truth and some exaggerations to make the point, but with Nikkel’s frackingtale it’s …. ummmm…. let’s use a polite term and call it mostly exaggerations derived from the Oil & Gas well funded talking points.
Related: COLORADO OIL & GAS ASSOCIATION (COGA) UNDER INVESTIGATION
©2013 by Dory Hippauf
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