A friend of West and Clear in Berkeley — yes, our spies are everywhere — provided us with a recap from last night’s meeting with Chesapeake and the Fort Worth & Western Railroad.
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If you were planning to be in Council chambers on the July 8 for the high-impact hearing on the Eighth Avenue drilling site, your evening just opened up. A source close to the process confirmed this evening that Chesapeake contacted the city and asked for a postponement.

What this means remains unclear right now, however this doesn’t seem to be a sudden Road to Damascus moment on the part of Chesapeake, this is just RealPolitik. The word going around was that the votes weren’t there for Chesapeake, and we aren’t talking a 5-4 vote. It was going to be a clear majority, if not a unanimous vote, against the permit.

This issue has gotten too hot for the Council and no one, not even Chesapeake’s BFF Mayor Mikey, was willing to stick his neck out when Council chambers would be overflowing with hundred of pissed off residents of Ryan Place, Fairmount, Mistletoe Heights and Berkeley neighborhoods. They were already setting up shuttle bus service to take people to the meeting — not a good sign for Chesapeake.

However, what will happen next is complicated and convoluted.
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On Thursday, Chesapeake Energy submitted a high-impact waiver request with the City for the proposed drilling site at Eighth Avenue, according to an email from local attorney and concerned citizen Liane Janovsky. The site is called the ‘Railroad Lease,’ and the hearing is preliminarily set for July 8. Fort Worth & Western Railroad has submitted a letter of support for the waiver application. For an idea of how this might play out, I refer you to my previous post on Bill Davis.

Liane has two recommendations that I also agree with:

So, who’s the bad guy in this whole Eighth Avenue debacle?

Is it Chesapeake Energy? Sure, they’re easy targets. They’ve been blamed for every bad thing that’s happened in Fort Worth since 1846. And why not? These Oklahoma carpetbaggers come in here and brainwash our children, shoot poison into the earth with their injection wells, pollute our television screens with bad infomercials and build a hellish zombie-beast to run for City Council to advance their devious pro-drilling agenda.

OK, just kidding about the hellish pro-drilling zombie-beast on the city council. Although … a question for all of you … if that did happen, how could we tell the difference between said hell-beast and Carter Burdette? Maybe tie a pink ribbon around the left arm of one of them? Can we go ahead and clear this up by city ordinance just in case?

But would it rock your world if I told you that maybe Chesapeake wasn’t to blame for this bit of gas drilling brinksmanship on the South Side? Well, get ready to hang on to your top hats.
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