Leasing efforts were underway on Fort Worth's West Side months before this nascent blog debuted. The West Side is still playing the waiting game, looking for a better deal while taking measure of Chesapeake Energy and the $10,000-per-acre offers it's floated to homeowners in the Arlington Heights, Crestwood, Monticello, and, lately, Northcrest areas, among others.
We blogged last week about a post that the Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association had put up on 
its own blog, telling homeowners it has banded together with West Side neighborhoods to try and get a better gas deal. The association didn't identify the neighborhoods it's in with. We still haven't heard back from the AHNA leaders, and we'd love to.
Tom Roberts, a member of the Crestwood Neighborhood Association gas committee, says his association isn't technically part of the Arlington Heights group, in that it's not represented by their attorney. But he says the West Side associations are together in spirit, and Crestwood's committee is "willing" to go along with a strong offer that's built on the lease form it wants to use.
"Their lease form deducts for post-production costs, which we do not want," says Roberts, who is a landman.
Crestwood's position also highlights one of the difficulties in trying to organize such a gigantic bloc of property owners, and sheds light on why some neighborhoods get sky-high offers while others nearby contend with $3,000-per-acre bonuses, and how some homeowners get offers while neighbors up the street don't. It's about the drill sites, Roberts says. Chesapeake claims to have them all, and, thus far, he concedes, nobody's proven them wrong.
"We're not going anywhere, or somebody else would have come in here and leased us," he says.
Of Chesapeake drill sites in the Crestwood area, two are in the R
ivercrest area, another near Rockwood Park, and a fourth at Greenwood Cemetery.
It's the Greenwood Cemetery site that most interests Crestwood, because Roberts says Chesapeake should be able to reach the entire neighborhood from that pad. But so far, only homeowners on the western edge of Crestwood have received lease offers, which Roberts takes to mean Chesapeake wants to pool those homeowners in with one of the other drill sites. Crestwood has discussed the Greenwood site with Chesapeake, but the proposal hasn't gone far, Roberts says.
He says the neighborhood is looking around for a potential competitor to Chesapeake's offer of a $10,000-per-acre bonus, 5-year term, and 25 percent royalty.
The gigantic hole in the middle of the Fort Worth leasing map has to be "attractive to somebody," he says.
In Northcrest, on the western edge of Arlington Heights, Linda LaBeau, the gas committee chair, says the committee recently sent out a "five-page document" that asks homeowners whether they're interested in a community lease, hiring representation, and forming a neighborhood association. The document also asks for feedback on what LaBeau says was a "proposal" from the Arlington Heights association.
Northcrest homeowners had received offers that included a $5,000-per-acre bonus. Just recently, an agent for Two Rock, an agency working on behalf of Chesapeake, verbally upped the offer to $10,000 per acre for one homeowner, LaBeau says.
LaBeau, a professional mediator, says she isn't in any hurry to sign a lease. "We just need to take our time," she says.
-- Scott Nishimura
(Photos: a Crestwood home, Splash Day at North Hi Mount Elementary, Toy Story 2 at North Hi Mount)
