Here today, gone tomorrow
Weighing pros, cons with the future in the balance
By Amy Widner
LITTLE ROCK — At first glance it may seem that the major pro about the Fayetteville Shale play in Arkansas is increased economic activity and the major con is torn-up roads.
But for the Fayetteville Shale Citizens Association and the concerned residents the group hopes to serve, the issue runs much deeper. They look at the boom-and-bust history of towns that built their livelihood on the extraction of natural resources and don’t like what they see.
“You and me may be gone by the time that happens, but our kids or grandkids will have to deal with the sudden disappearance of jobs and everything that comes along with it,” said Johnny Wheetley, the group’s president. “Somebody will leave with all the gas, and we’ll be left with the mess.”
Wheetley is from Judsonia, where he lives on the same farm where he was raised. He works for the Farm Bureau and even dabbled in politics - with an unsuccessful bid for a District 49 seat in spring 2008.
When he talks about the long-term future of White County, where most of the Fayetteville Shale play in the Three Rivers coverage area is located, he says he doesn’t know all the solutions, but he sure has a lot of concerns he isn’t seeing local politicians address. Maybe they’re blinded by the increase in jobs, tax revenue and economic activity, Wheetley said, and become shortsighted about the area’s future.
“The community side is really what we want to look at,” Wheetley said. “I’m not sure thecommunities have gotten a fair shake out of this. If we let all of our natural gas get pumped out and don’t benefit from it, we’re not very smart people. ... Most of our government officials seem like they’re thinking, ‘Let’s do whatever these companies want.’ But they’ve got to realize, just like those individuals out there who’ve learned this lesson the hard way, if we don’t protect ourselves now while the gas is still here, just wait until the gas is gone and see if you can get them to call you back.”
Whether that means a taxthat is used to help attract diverse, forward-looking industries with longer shelf lives to the area, or what, Wheetley said he doesn’t know. But he wants to see more people looking for those answers, answers that are going to take creativity and innovation.
“I’ve been talking to candidates, legislators, everybody, trying to get them to understand, ‘Hey, we need something now,’ Wheetley said. “I think it’s going to take a lot. I think it willtake the people of the community getting together and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we want.’”
He said he is sentimental about the land where he grew up. He wants to see it protected and see its communities survive and thinks a lot of his neighbors feel the same way. But at the same time he knows the Fayetteville Shale play involves a lot of money and is too big to be ignored. Arkansans are going to have to play a part, but Wheetley wants to see them approach the issue with a plan and emerge intact.
Concerns like Wheetley’s are difficult for anyone to address, let alone the gas industry. However, while they may not be able to ensure the Fayetteville Shale communities’ futures, Chesapeake Energy, the major company working in White County, is certainly pumping millions of dollars into a wide variety of community projects in the here and now.
Chesapeake is a familiar sight on sponsor lists for community festivals and events. Just to namea few from the past several months: A Day of Caring, the Searcy Chamber of Commerce Business Expo, the Get Down ... Downtown festival in Searcy and Searcy’s new Web site. They donated $25,000 worth of art supplies to the schools in the counties where they work, $75,000 to a Arkansas State University-Searcy gas industry training program, $8,100 to put automated external defibrillators (used to restore normal heart rhythms) in Van Buren County schools and thousands of dollars in scholarship money. The list goes on and on.
Chesapeake Media Relations Director Mark Raines said their charitable donations to the community are an extension of the company’s philosophy: to do right by the communities where they work and try their best to be a welcome guest.
“We invest in projects that are important to the communities we serve,” Raines said. “We try to listen to people. If it’s important to the community, it’s important to us. It just goes back to being a good corporate citizen. We offer more to a community than just jobs and tax revenue. We also need to be responsible for the overall needs of the community through our charitable work. We’re going to invest a lot of dollars and put those back into the community to make them even stronger.”
While Wheetley and the Fayetteville Shale Citizens Association may not yet know how they would like to see long-term communitywide issues approached, they have been at work gathering information to help individuals. Many everyday Arkansans have had to navigate the often complicated process of dealing withthe huge, national gas industry by themselves. The Citizens Association’s goal is to aggregate the lessons learned so far for the benefit of those counties and individuals elsewhere in the state just now beginning to deal with a Fayetteville Shale wave. There are different pitfalls that come along with each stage, Wheetley said.
Sharing information will help ensure more individuals make it through the process happily by learning from the mistakes of others, but as far as the whole Fayetteville Shale region goes, Wheetley said Arkansas has only one shot to get things right.
“This is only going to be here one time,” Wheetley said. “When they pull out it’s going to be a ghost town unless we do something to prepare for it.” - awidner@ arkansasonline.com
This article was published Thursday, October 2, 2008.
Three Rivers, Pages 55 on 10/02/2008
