In Montana, Gas Drilling Hits a Rare Roadblock

"After exhausting all other avenues in an effort to find an amicable solution," the company said, it has been given no choice but to "take legal action to preserve its property rights."

The energy company had the bad luck of trying to drill its first test well in one of the few rural parts of Montana that is part of a zoning district. That gave county officials the right, under state law, to impose drilling conditions to protect property values, wildlife and the county's rural character, according to Marty Lambert, the county attorney.

"Huber has to prove that the county imposed conditions that were arbitrary and capricious," Lambert said. "Clearly, what they propose doing is going to depress high property values here. I don't think Huber understood the kind of people it would be dealing with."

Those people, on average, are twice as likely as the typical Montanan to have a graduate degree, according to Census figures. They are also richer, more likely to have been born in another state and far more likely to be living off investment income than typical residents of Montana, according to Ray Rasker, an economist at the Sonoran Institute, a conservation foundation based in Tucson.

As such, these residents are a substantially different constituency than the ranchers and farmers who inhabit most of the Rocky Mountain regions where energy companies have succeeded in extracting coal-bed methane.

In those communities, lawsuits have tended to come well after the drilling began -- not before.

When Huber first rolled into Gallatin County, it quickly annoyed many of the upscale residents, according to a number of Gallatin County officials. At one early public meeting, a Huber official seemed to condescend to his audience, suggesting that because many in the crowd may have graduated from high school, they might be able to follow his presentation.

One of the very annoyed residents (even though he wasn't in the audience that day) was Dick Clotfelter. He is a Stanford University graduate and wealthy real estate developer from Seattle who moved to this county seven years ago. He lives in a large stone house he built on 100 spectacular acres not far from where Huber wanted to sink its first test well.

"People here are smart, and they are willing to put their money where their mouth is," Clotfelter said.

After Huber annoyed him, Clotfelter got on the phone and asked his neighbors, most of whom also own large houses, to donate money for a legal challenge. "We raised $50,000 in a weekend, from about 10 people, and $50,000 in the next few weeks," he said.

Local legislators were also quick to jump on board. They introduced bills in the state legislature intended to curtail the power of energy companies to drill over local opposition. (In the legislature, where oil and gas interests have considerable sway, the bills died in committee.) Winning over county officials -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- was especially easy, because many of them are also newcomers who moved to Montana to hike, fish and ski.

There is, however, a major breach in the unified front that residents have thrown up against coal-bed methane. In parts of the county without zoning, residents are squabbling over passage of new zoning laws to stop Huber.

In this dispute, the Old West suspicion of government infringing on property rights is pitted against the New West obsession with protecting one's new patch of paradise from ticky-tacky development.

Some new residents want to limit density to one house per 80 acres, which would raise the value of existing housing. Old-timers want to subdivide their large tracts of land in pieces as small as 10 acres, which would raise the value of their property.

"There are people in this county who are using coal-bed methane as an excuse to shut the gate on development now that they are here," said Phil Olson, a former county commissioner. Olson, too, has a financial stake in the squabble. He wants 10-acre development, which would maximize his profit as he sells off inherited land.

The fight has halted the creation of a new permanent zoning district to regulate land leased by Huber. A temporary zoning law, which had held off the company for the past two years, runs out in August.

When it lapses, county officials say they won't have a legal way to stop Huber. "I'm not sure there is a darn thing we can do," said one county official, who asked not to be identified for fear of angering his constituents.