Comment: People of Virginia look at your state goals when it comes to the proposed uranium mining and they treat their citizens when it comes to mineral rights for gas: "The state of Virginia is forcing landowners in its poorest region to lease their mineral rights to private, multibillion-dollar energy conglomerates"! Will Virginia do this to Pittsylvania County the same way, will they after our mineral rights when it comes to uranium. Uranium mining will not stop at Coles Hills; uranium mining is located all over Virginia. People of Virginia, wake up and help us fight uranium mining and milling! Virginia will not protect us and they will steal your mineral rights for greedy Uranium Corporations! Also, the next governor is bragging about Virginia Energy Independence, he will continue to blow up our mountains for coal, fracturing the rocks for gas wells, blow up our hills for uranium and drill offshore for oil and heck with the whales and dolphins!
Herald Courier Investigation Shows Value of Enterprise Work at a Small Paper
Posted by Mallary Jean Tenore at 8:04 AM on Dec. 22, 2009
When Bristol Herald Courier court reporter Daniel Gilbert wrote last year about a major gas corporation that had been making conspicuous gifts in Buchanan County, Va., he suspected there was more to the story.
So he set out to research a complicated subject he knew very little about -- a David versus Goliath legal conflict that pits landowners against private energy corporations. During 13 months of reporting on a story that had been largely left untold, he found that lingering conflicts over the ownership of coal-bed methane gas meant thousands of owners weren't getting paid for the use of their property. Instead, Virginia had funneled millions of dollars in royalty payments into an escrow fund that owners couldn't access without first clearing significant legal hurdles.
"This is one of those stories that's down in the weeds and has stayed that way for about 20 years," Gilbert said. "I don't think anyone has taken a real in-depth look at the history of the law."
Gilbert's reporting came together earlier this month in an eight-part series that led to the first audit of a $24 million escrow fund in 10 years.
The series is accompanied by a database that mineral owners can use to find out about escrow accounts. They must have a Virginia gas and oil board docket number to access the account information.
Both the series and the database serve as an example of the kind of investigative work that a small news outlet can produce, even with limited resources.
Gilbert, who carved out time for the project while covering daily stories and taking 15 furlough days throughout the past year, said it helps that his editor advocates for enterprise stories.
"We're the last bastion between an enlightened public and corruption," said Bristol Herald Courier editor J. Todd Foster, a former investigative reporter at the Oregonian. "It's the most important function we have as a newspaper, and that is to hold the powerful accountable."
I talked with Gilbert about how he held the powerful accountable, reported on a subject he knew little about and balanced the project with his daily work in a newsroom that has only seven reporters. Our edited interview is below.
Mallary Tenore: How did you find out about this story, and why did you decide to pursue it?
Daniel Gilbert: In November 2008 I attended a hearing of the Virginia Gas and Oil Board -- an obscure, low-flying state panel with enormous power.
I watched as angry, plain-spoken landowners appeared before the board and railed against the gas companies that had drilled wells on their land.
Many of them had this in common: they weren't getting paid for the use of their gas. But few of them received answers that satisfied them.
The landowners left, the gas company representatives and their lawyers appeared before the board and blitzed through applications that the board almost invariably granted (sometimes a petition would be continued).
It didn't take long to figure out that the companies were asking the board to force owners to lease their mineral rights. This process generally takes about three minutes (I've timed it).
Very quickly, I was able to feel out some of the dimensions of this story:
About $25 million in royalties from natural gas production belonging to landowners was idling in an escrow fund none of them seemed to know anything about.
This escrow fund was managed by Wachovia Bank, which a month or two before was on the verge of failing.
The escrow fund had not been audited for as long as anyone could remember.
All of these things, I believed, merited reporting. The problem was figuring out where to start. The deeper I looked, the more difficult and complicated the reporting became.
I understood why there had been such little reporting on the subject, and this hardened my determination to pursue it.
You mentioned that your editor encourages enterprise reporting. How did you convince him that this was a story worth telling?
Gilbert: My pitch late last year was probably along these lines: The state of Virginia is forcing landowners in its poorest region to lease their mineral rights to private, multibillion-dollar energy conglomerates. And thousands of these landowners aren't receiving any compensation for the production of their natural gas.
That money is going into an escrow fund that is now $25 million -- belonging to landowners who can't monitor it and are rarely able to collect their money. I wanted to explore this escrow account to see what it holds, what is being paid into it and why it is so difficult to retrieve money from it.
I might have ended my pitch: This story has languished for 20 years because of the complexity of the subject matter. It affects our readers and people across the country. We are the best positioned to report on it, and if we don't, the issue will languish for another 20 years and people are going to die without ever receiving compensation for the use of their property.
You mentioned that, prior to the reporting process, you knew very little about the energy issues you wrote about. Tell us how you went about educating yourself on the topic.
Gilbert: I printed out the 1990 Gas and Oil Act in the Virginia Code, dissected whatever I didn't understand, and started looking for answers. I read lots of legal opinions and a law school text book on mineral rights. I consulted attorneys, energy analysts and other experts in Southwest Virginia and across the country. Most of this happened very gradually, and it took me a long time to wrap my mind around the key issues.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in reporting this story, and how did you deal with them?
Gilbert: The story behind the escrow fund is 20 years old, ungodly complicated and physically hard to unravel. I found myself hunting for answers 50-100 miles away in far-flung courthouses, where the legal cases I was after often consisted of several accordion files. It required a lot of legwork. About every week, it seemed, I came across something I didn't understand.
As a journalist, it was tempting to start in with this: the lack of state oversight and the noncompliance of gas corporations. But if I simply wrote this, and went into the history of the law that established this system, I knew eyes would glaze over.
Minerals, let's face it, aren't sexy.
I set out to tell the story through the experiences of mineral owners. I found them at Gas and Oil Board hearings, in board files and court documents I researched, even through online comments that people posted to stories on the issue. I also researched ways to write accurately and descriptively about numbers that were central to the story.
I consulted analysts on the energy equivalents of gas volumes so that I could explain that 128 billion cubic feet of gas (the amount gas corporations in Virginia produced in 2008) was enough gas every second to heat the average American home for 16 days. I consulted gas corporations themselves to determine what pipelines they sold their gas on, so that I knew what price indices would give the most accurate dollar figure for gas produced in Southwest Virginia.
Read more:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=174989
