02/16/2009 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting Minutes 2-16-09 Page 5 We don't want you to take our word for it. We want you to read this and do this as a lot of other residents have done. What you will find at the end of the day, it really is individual and collective wells. We know of one neighborhood where the neighbors simply got together and they all agreed they would not sign any leases. They have depended on their neighbors to be true to that. To Mayor Rinker's knowledge, that has worked out for that particular neighborhood. We have encouraged homeowner's associations to look at these things. The fact that yours is now looking at it, we can sit back and say, where have you been? Well, we know where you have been, but the issue has been out there. If we can facilitate your decisionmaking on this, we would be happy to do it. But you have to understand that there is a limitation to how much we can really control. We have talked about this almost until we are blue in the face. We are trying to make sure that we don't ignore anyone's rights. We just don't want people to think that there is more that we can do that we have not tried to do. We have tried to take a bad situation and make it better. We think that about the only feasible way we can do it would be to enter into some kind of lease contract. Interestingly enough, one of the newspapers pointed out on their New Year's issue, they were praising the fact that we were actually looking at the Bonnieview site because it was the way for the Village to re-site at least one location away from some neighbors and there would be enough distance from other neighbors. It's a 10-acre site. We would like to think that we could locate something on there that would have nominal, if any impact on any adjacent property. That would be something we would negotiate in. As far as the legislation goes, it was only recently that we actually looked at a drilling lease because we know how sensitive it is. That was either November or December. We may even have competition for the companies that would do it. We have not negotiated anything. We have put in very basic form what we would see as a lease, but Council has to do two votes. The first vote would simply be to authorize the Mayor and the Law Department to negotiate a lease. Council would then have a second vote. That would be to ratify it. Mayor Rinker can only stress that one of the key points in this would be apart from limiting any nuisance aspect of it, it would be whether we could site it in such a way that it would be strategically advantageous. Just so you understand, we are not even there yet, but that would have been the consideration, to go ahead and negotiate this and if you can do it where people have enough comfort level, fine. The only reason we are doing it is because we have been told it's coming in. We know one site for sure. We know there is another site where they have signed the drilling lease, but we don't think they have assembled all of the parcels necessary. We have tried to stay out of the gaming that goes on in this because candidly we get calls on a weekly basis from residents that feel like they are being pestered by land agents that want to come and say, well look, we are ready to go, do you want to be part of the deal? There's a certain amount of paranoia that is justified in this. Again this is probably an unintended consequence of the legislation that Columbus passed a few