Cherokee Horn Community Forum

You Can Be in Paradise and Not Know Where You Are

In contrast to double-digit declines in home prices that have left homeowners in other areas of the country upside down in their mortgages, property values in Tarrant County are up 4.6%, according to a May 17, Star-Telegram article. Valuations in high-end neighborhoods have shot up 11%.

The area also has experienced $4.4 billion in new residential and commercial construction. This provides a good indication that businesses and developers think this is the place to ride out the recession and the best place to be when the economy begins bouncing back. Tarrant County also brought in $1.2 billion in taxes on gas drilling, which the article says have kept property values from falling.

Although the unemployment rate has risen in Texas to 6.7% in March 2009, our figures don’t come close to those of Michigan with 12.6% or Oregon with 12.1% or even California’s 11.2%.
In fact, Fort Worth-Arlington and Dallas-Plano-Iriving ranked fourth and fifth among large metro areas in the country to find a job in a recent list of "Best Cities for Jobs" prepared by Joel Kotkin for New Geography and Forbes magazines. The top three were Austin-Round Rock, Houston- Sugar Land-Baytown and San Antonio.

Relocation surveys show that a lot of people forced to leave other states to find employment have relocated to Texas. These people would no doubt be the first to say that Texans have a lot to be thankful for these days. With job opportunities and property values rising, we’re looking like the good old days never left us.

Count your blessings...once in a while.

Here in the Metroplex we’re blessed to have an economy that is still holding up under the economic turmoil. One of the key reasons is the stimulus created by the Barnett Shale. It has brought in money and jobs at a very important time when other geographic areas of our country have been hard hit by widespread company layoffs and closures.

Just this week, on MSNBC.com Brett Johnson reported, ... Despite tough economic times nationally, Forbes Magazine named Fort Worth among the Top Five "Best Cities for Jobs." Fort Worth Mayor Moncrief credits the Barnett Shale as representing "an enormous advantage for our local economy.

Often we don’t think about the smaller one-industry communities such as Elkhart, Indiana that are really struggling because residents don’t have jobs. Do you think that if they had natural gas under their feet that they would be complaining?

It is amazing that in light of what could be happening in our area economically that some individuals still choose to complain about gas wells and complain about how much money they’re not getting in signing bonus income. Why not be a little thankful that the opportunity to exercise your mineral rights still exists? And, why not look at the bright side of royalty income instead of focusing on what has become the new lower initial bonus nation wide?

While your job may not directly depend upon the Barnett Shale, in many instances the shale is indirectly responsible for the success of many different types of local businesses. For instance, people are still going out to eat and still shopping. DFW citizens are still purchasing vehicles and homes. Earnings from natural gas production companies have not only placed money in the pockets of individual mineral owners, but they have also placed money in the hands of local charities in the area too.

So the next time you start to sound off against natural gas, count to ten and be thankful that our area is still blessed with bountiful resources and by comparison to other areas of the country, has continuing prosperity.

Reconsidering Biofuels for Natural Gas

Maybe we can hope that change with a capital “C” really is beginning. Perhaps the greening of America is at last more than political rhetoric. Let’s believe that not only is our new president in favor of using more natural gas, but that Congress can also really work with him to get some important initiatives in place that will create more immediate uses for our country’s huge natural gas supply.

President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel of Illinois has been one of Congress’s biggest proponents of compressed natural gas cars. Last summer he introduced legislation that would mandate US automakers to build 10 percent of their fleet with natural gas fueled vehicles by 2018. His bill also included tax credits and other incentives to spread natural gas pumps to filling stations across the country.
The bill has gone nowhere yet, but maybe that’s about to change.

Despite whatever may occur in the future that we can take issue with, it’s quite admirable that a former Illinois Congressman would be a proponent of natural gas as opposed to powering cars with corn. Illinois is in fact one of the top two corn growing states in America.

But life is always full of surprises and this is a good one. Using biofuels may be better than burning foreign oil, but using corn as a biofuel while people starve throughout the world, seems shortsighted. Why should we be turning corn or any other food into fuel for cars now that we have such an abundant of natural gas discoveries. Unlike corn and other food source biofuels, natural gas has only one real purpose and that is power.

More gas vehicles and greater availability of natural gas is a good thing, but supply and demand has always been the key to change in situations such as this. So let’s write our representatives, senators and our new president. Let’s get some demand going in the US to mandate more implementation of natural gas.