As drilling booms so does scramble for royalty dollars.

• Position: ENERGY - Brief article

Colorado used to be known as quite an oil town in the late 1970s to early '80s, until the bottom dropped out of the market in 1982 and helped cause a myriad of economic problems in Denver.

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In the later part of the decade, economic leaders said "never again" and laid out a plan to diversify from depending on natural resources.

But that was then, and now burgeoning mineral extraction in the state has bumped the mineral extraction tax money to $300 million this year. And that's not all that's on the table: One estimate has the royalty collection at $6 billion over 30 years.

Three separate scrambles for the dough have been set off, and they'll dominate state politics in 2008: whether to raise the tax to the level that Wyoming charges; how to spend the money that's been raised; and whether private industry should be allowed to drill in ecologically sensitive areas such as the Roan Plateau on the Western Slope.

A host of bills have been introduced about how to spend the taxes, including one by Sen. Josh Penry, R-Fruita, to funnel royalties back to the Western...