A position doesn’t make a person, a person makes the position. We ask that you not wear labels other politicians give you. Rather that you label yourself as our representative. Bound by your position to protect and serve your constituents. Not big money.

What is one specific issue that needs addressing?

Regulations and business development. Also, “I’m passionate about the Constitution. I believe the United States has driven so far from its Constitutional roots that the only solution to that problem is to try to correct that. The only method of that is through state government. As states, we have to start resisting the intrusion of federal government.”

What historical or other figures have influenced your politics? The Constitution’s authors. “We have a very ingenious document called the Constitution. But what we’re doing is seeing it being whittled away. We’re misinterpreting the very worlds they used because the meanings have changed.”

Forced pooling flies in the face of the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment, which is understood to require that property acquired via eminent domain must be put to a “public use.” In deciding whether the proposed project constituted a “public use,” the court pointed to the Preamble’s reference to “promot[ing] the general Welfare” as evidence that “[t]he health of the people was in the minds of our forefathers”.[19]

“[T]he concerted effort for renewal and expansion of hospital and medical care centers, as a part of our nation’s system of hospitals, is as a public service and use within the highest meaning of such terms. Surely this is in accord with an objective of the United States Constitution: ‘* * * promote the general Welfare.’”[20]

The problem of “forced pooling” or “compulsory pooling,” which can refer to either of two situations – two leased properties, side by side, and the state wants to two producers to share one well for efficiency’s sake; or one leased property, and the producer wants to force an unleased neighbor into a drilling unit and frack beneath the neighbors land, compensating them with a share of the profits. This may take some thinking on his part, but the second situation (compulsory pooling of unleased properties) is deeply incompatible with his support for Constitutional private property rights. For comparison, imagine I’m a farmer, or even a land speculator, and I own a surface lot. Say a developer owns the lot next to me but it’s small, and his project won’t be economically viable unless he can force my lot in with his. Nobody would say he should be able to petition the state to make my property available to him (even if he offers to pay me a share of the profits). But this is what forced pooling does – it lets the producer force development of my gas resource now, even if I think I could make more money waiting 10 or 20 years, or don’t want to tap it at all. To be clear, S820 last year told the Mining and Energy Commission to go study forced pooling, but it’s not yet clear what the outcome of that study will be, and right now forced pooling is on the books and legal in North Carolina with very few constraints.

In the Walden study by Dr. Mike Walden, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics makes these main points: the estimates of economic activity are too large, and the estimates of the costs to the local economy are too low because they only consider appraised property values. If he comes back with a generic, “we have high unemployment, and need to do something, anything, to create jobs,” local/sustainable farming is the fastest-growing part of agriculture, and is bringing jobs to rural communities across the state. Travel and tourism around the Uwharries doesn’t create high paying jobs, but it does create jobs. Fracking, both through direct impacts and through the bitterness it creates in communities, has the potential to keep these other job creators out of the area – that’s true even if the potential for fracking is just a rumor and never actually materializes, which seems quite likely for Anson and Montgomery counties. In other words, it’s just not worth it.

Fracking takes rural communities and turns them into industrial zones — and citizens have little recourse. Thanks to the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, fracking is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and there are exemptions also in the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

Operations can go on around the clock, with constant noise, light and air pollution. A cornerstone of the industrialization that comes with fracking is all the truck traffic — hundreds of trucks a day travel on country roads never built for large trucks or the amount of wear and tear

Water is a big and multifaceted issue when it comes to fracking. Horizontal wells in the Marcellus can take upward of 5 million gallons of water during fracking. The wells can be fracked multiple times and there can be as many as 10 wells drilled on a single well pad.

Environment and Natural Resources is understaffed and will be inadequate at enforcing any regulations.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Corporations are not people.

Denise Lee

Pee Dee WALL