In Colorado, Drilling Some Holes in the Republican Base

Not all of the swing toward the Democrats is the result of anger over the Bush administration's stance on drilling. Other factors, such as candidate appeal and the Iraq war, weigh heavily. But politicians on the western slope say drilling is a major local issue.

"We're seeing a lot more liberal voting in this area, and I think a lot of it has to do with energy development," said Tr?si Houpt, a Garfield County commissioner who was reelected last year.

"I had 61 percent of the vote. I'm a Democrat. People want people in office who are willing to fight to protect their health, their property values and the lifestyle they moved to Colorado to enjoy."

Residents in deeply Republican Mesa County say the gas is needed, especially with output from offshore reserves falling. But there is also apprehension about the approach of the rigs that transformed Garfield. The Bureau of Land Management recently authorized gas drilling -- a process that uses hydraulic pressures to fracture underground formations -- in the area that supplies Grand Junction with its drinking water.

"You do not drill on your freaking watershed!" said Frank Lamm, 62, who squared off against energy companies after sulfurous odors from the nearby Black Mountain oil field fluids disposal site began drifting into his trailer home. Evenings now find him watching TV from behind a dust mask, his front door sealed with duct tape. Rainwater from his roof runs clear into plastic buckets, then turns a disquieting red.

Lamm, a registered Republican who voted for President Bush, found himself the spokesman for Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. Group discussions stick to plotting against the energy companies that the attending liberals and conservatives have united against.

"We didn't dare talk about anything else, because we'd argue about anything else," Lamm said.

The same unified front prompted the state legislature this year to change Colorado's traditionally pro-industry oil and gas commission along new lines championed by a coalition of environmentalists, hunters and ranchers.

"Part of what we're seeing on the western slope is the breakup of the old Sagebrush Rebellion of the Reagan years," said Bill Grant, president of the Western Colorado Congress, an alliance of citizen groups. "People who were conservative, as they begin to be impacted by drilling, they're moving into an environmental posture."

Driving the shift are the stark realities of drilling, often aggravated by a haste that residents say is fueled by the approaching expiration of Bush's term.

"One day we counted 32 semis bumper-to-bumper coming by our house," said Carol Bell, 59, whose hilltop home outside Silt commands views in every direction. "It's drilling everywhere I look."

Like most Colorado property owners, Bell and her husband control only "surface rights." They had scant leverage with the firm that drilled four wells behind their house, frightening off the 300 elk who wintered there and accidentally spraying paraffin over five acres of hay. A retired pharmaceutical chemist, Bell said she worries about "the stuff you can't smell, you can't see."

"It seems like it's changed almost everything," she said. "It's not the same place. In fact, we're moving. There are people coming to see the place Saturday."

Aesthetics drove much of Colorado's striking growth over the past generation. No other Western state with significant gas reserves has so many people living in the countryside, where real estate agents refer to a property's "view shed." In portions of the Piceance Basin, which stretches to the Utah border, gas firms have laid out plans to drill at intervals of just 10 acres, with a separate road leading to each well.

Already, gas wells along Interstate 70 have altered the Colorado experience for motorists, especially after dark, when glare from distant derricks illuminates the landscape.

"When this is 30 or 40 years along, this is not going to be a scenic area. It's not going to be a place I'd pay to bring my family," said Elderkin, of the hunting lobby. "The magnitude of the area that's going to be disturbed, it's going to change things a bunch."