CARES Act Report – Sounding The Alarm

The Northwest Landowners Association recently commissioned a report from our firm regarding the CARES Act program. Their interest was related to how North Dakota used CARES Act funding to do reclamation work on abandoned oil wells in ND. The report provides context for thousands of pages of documents that were gathered related to the reclamation work that was done on these wells using the CARES Act funds.

North Dakota’s leaders, decision makers, and stakeholders will be providing guidance for the use of an enormous amount of funding coming from the federal government that was modeled after North Dakota’s use of the CARES Act funds. In researching the report, many problems were discovered with how the CARES Act funds were used. Decision makers need to understand those problems and understand why more oversight is needed before distributing such a massive amount of infrastructure funding following this specific model. They must understand those problems before spending hundreds of millions more on plugging and reclaiming more old wells without any intention to address the problem that led us here. 

The conclusions in this report are our opinions; however, we have provided all the materials, data, and references used to allow anyone reading the report to dig into the source materials themselves and arrive at their own conclusions. Those source materials can be found here.  

The CARES Act Report can be read here: NWLA ND CARES Act Report

Specific details about why the Northwest Landowners Association is sounding the alarm can be read here: NWLA Board CARES Act Letter

Source materials for the report can be accessed here.