Lennard Zinn Addresses the Boulder County Commissioners

On Tuesday May 6th, Lennard Zinn addressed the Boulder County Commissioners about issues regarding the planned fracking in Boulder County. You can view his transcript below: My name is Lennard Zinn. For the past 32 years, I've run a custom bicycle manufacturing company in Boulder County. I'm also the author of the world's two best-selling bike maintenance books, and for 27 years I've been writing articles for a bike magazine in Boulder called VeloNews. I moved to Boulder when I was on the national cycling team from the resident program at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Like so many athletes before and after me, I moved here because it's one of the best places in the world to live and train. It's beautiful and has clean air, high altitude, good weather, good roads, and a mix of terrain from flat to mountainous. It has a great infrastructure for athletes: healthy food, lots of athletic events, great coaches and other athletes of all levels to train with, and you can buy whatever sports equipment you need here. It also has the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, where anybody can have their injuries treated like top-tier professional athletes get. I moved here partly to have its founder, orthopedic guru Andy Pruitt, treat a long-term injury of mine. I really appreciate that you as commissioners imposed this moratorium on fracking to study this problem. I've read the county oil and gas roadway impact study that you had the foresight to have done, and it is sobering. It says that in the two months it takes to drill and fracture each well, 2,200 semi-truck trips are required, and there could be as many as 120 wells drilled in the county per year. Anybody who has been passed by a semi while riding a bicycle on a narrow road, particularly in a crosswind, knows how scary and dangerous it can be. And the diesel exhaust and dust, along with methane and other toxic gases released from the wells and the pipelines, is the last thing you want to be breathing while exercising. Not only will athletes no longer come here, but people will not want to vacation here if the air quality gets bad and the roads are jammed with big trucks. There is a vibrant infrastructure here catering to Boulder's athletic lifestyle. These are good, clean, sustainable jobs like my own, not short-term extractive jobs that leave our environment the worse for it. Boulder doesn't have the sprawl of many communities on the Front Range because past leaders enacted laws to prevent it. The county has consequently remained largely rural, and most of the riding in the county is still as good as it was in 1981 when I moved here. But the rural parts of the east county will become a lot less pleasant and healthy if fracking comes. I know that you'd like to keep Boulder County a healthy place to live and that as commissioners of a statute county you are powerless to prevent what the state has permitted. We would like to give you that power via the ballot box.