DeSOTO PARISH -- Three years after a massive natural gas strike under this blue-collar cattle-and-timber parish turned unsuspecting farmers, clerks and retirees into millionaires and filled public treasuries to overflowing, the storybook fountain of mineral wealth has slackened, but hasn't quit.
Energy companies' stampede to lease every available acre of woods and pasture to drill for gas is long past. It's old news how even modest landowners collected six- and seven-figure bonus checks, and later four-and five-figure monthly royalty checks.
In rural Mansfield, population 5,000, and in DeSoto's smaller towns and villages, the newly wealthy mostly still keep their day jobs.
And although a few fine new houses sit well back from the state highways and country roads, the careful, conservative rootedness of life in DeSoto endures, largely without the conspicuous consumption that elsewhere might testify to the sudden arrival of Big Money.
Mostly, residents say, people have paid off their loans, helped their kids buy a new car or truck and banked the rest. Or they put in a pool out back. Or took a cruise or remodeled a bathroom and bought some new furniture in Shreveport, 35 miles away, said Linda Foreman, a librarian in Logansport.
"You'd have to know people to know they got wealth," she said.
Which is not to say that nothing has changed.
In three years since the so-called Haynesville Shale supercharged the economy of one of the poorest parishes of the state, DeSoto Parish public schoolteachers have become among the best-paid in Louisiana, with a starting salary of $48,100.
Eleven of DeSoto's 12 schools are about to get new buildings -- paid with cash on the barrel head.
The local police jury has rolled out a program of improvements: an animal shelter, the parish's first public park, a convention center. All of them built or authorized with cash.
A new branch library, at $2.3 million bigger and fancier than anything else in town, will soon become the crown jewel of tiny Logansport, population 1,600.
They're paying cash.
"This is a very, very strange public body," said Steve Brown, the public administrator for the parish police jury.
He pronounces it slowly, to let the words sink in:
"No debt.
"I mean ... No. Debt."
'A blessing'
What happened in DeSoto and nearby parishes of Red River, Caddo and Bossier is the stuff of dreams.
Or Providence.
Indeed, in the evangelical Christian culture that dominates northern Louisiana, people most often refer to the new prosperity with a single term: "a blessing."
They mean a gift from on high. Even -- perhaps especially -- if their only reward has been a modest check or a better job. Nothing life-changing, but enough to ease the day-to-day burden.
DeSoto is relatively poor and sparsely populated. Its median household income in 2000 was slightly less than $25,000. And although DeSoto is nearly as large as Orleans and Jefferson parishes combined, it is barely more populous than Terrytown.
So the drilling boom following the gas strike has reverberated throughout the economy, producing something for most wage-earners or their children, townspeople said.
But even in a boom economy, another population, those with neither property nor marketable skills, are left back, Brown said.
"The poor are the poor," he said.
The blessing began in late 2007 when Chesapeake Energy Co. punched a well into a rock formation called the Haynesville Shale, a geological formation spreading under northwest Louisiana and parts of east Texas.
Mapped long ago, the Haynesville formation is a layer of sedimentary rock two miles down, 100 to 300 feet thick and dense as concrete. One hundred and fifty million years ago, it lay at the bottom of a shallow sea.
"The Haynesville used to be considered a barrier to drilling on the way deeper," said Patrick Courreges, a policy analyst at the state Department of Natural Resources.
But by 2007 innovative drillers had learned how to shatter the underground rock with explosive charges and extend the fractures with high-pressure water.
When they did that for the first time in the Haynesville, gas roared to the surface in prodigious quantities -- a bonanza big enough to provide the entire U.S. all the gas it needs for a decade, by current estimates, Courreges said.
In the epic land rush that followed, Chesapeake and other energy companies leased swaths of pine forests and pasture land under the low hills of DeSoto and neighboring parishes.
The area had some earlier experience with oil, at shallower depths. But nothing like this.
Mineral rights that had gone for $400 per acre quickly went to $13,000, then soared to $20,000 and occasionally $30,000.
Having paid for the right to drill, companies paid again, handsomely, for the gas flowing from underground. Chesapeake, the largest player in the region, said it has paid more than $34 million in royalties to the fraction of DeSoto's 26,000 citizens who owned land.
Energy companies paid property owners still more for the right to lay pipelines that would take the gas out for processing.
"They made millionaires in our family," said Linda Vidler, whose husband's family has owned land around Logansport for years.
"When the shale hit, we were a $165 million bank," said William Dorroh, president of Community Bank of Mansfield. "We grew from $165 million almost immediately to $260 million in less than a year."
Dorroh recalled early days when the bank saw daily jumps of $2 million and $3 million in deposits.
And there was one memorable individual deposit of $11 million, he said.
But most were for four figures; occasionally five.
"A lot of people call it mailbox money. They're not getting wealthy; they're just putting their kids through school."
Dorroh said his customers paid off their loans and helped their kids, then pretty much sat back, he said.
He worried that some valuable employees who he knew had made life-changing money would quit. They could afford to.
No one did.
"You can talk to somebody, and they may be millionaires now where they weren't before. And in talking to them, you'd never know the difference," said Gus Hall, a Mansfield financial planner with Edward Jones Investments.
A few made gifts from their good fortune.
The Rev. Reegis Richard, a big ex-defensive lineman for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, leads his 8-year-old Temple of Knowledge congregation from a new church building on 12 acres at the edge of Mansfield.
Richard said the church got a $30,000 bonus for rights to the gas beneath its five acres.
Then anonymous donors gave the church $170,000, plus seven more acres valued at $360,000, he said.
In the short view, Richard said people liked the work the church was doing, especially among young people.
In the longer view, it was a blessing.
"God has really blessed us," he said. "It's been all him. Not us."
Still at the feed store
Although prosperity spread, Mansfield's Polk Street did not become Rodeo Drive.
Retailing remains the domain of a Walmart Supercenter that opened about the time the shale came in.
While a couple of new restaurants have opened, eating out still usually means hamburgers and chicken at Sonic, McDonald's, Popeyes and Southern Fried Chicken.
As before, mornings still find groups of retired seniors in boots and ball caps solving global crises over coffee at Larry Anderson's feed store in Mansfield.
Some of them are inscrutably wealthy.
At 68, Anderson is a former Army recruiter who saw the world, then retired to his hometown, Logansport.
He did well in the shale, with income from two wells and four pipelines crossing his property.
But he still comes in every day to join two sons running the store.
"I've cut back to six and a half days a week," he jokes. "I'd go crazy otherwise."
If some old rhythms endure, Mansfield is far from sleepy.
Courreges said an estimated 10 percent of all the drilling in the United States last year occurred in DeSoto Parish.
But a slowdown appears to be in the cards.
Since 2008, natural gas prices have sunk to about $4 from $13 per million BTUs, a measure of energy content. Rising prices for oil and liquid gas products have made them more attractive drilling targets than natural gas.
Chesapeake Energy spokesman Kevin McCotter said the company has been telling investors it plans to keep sinking new wells all over the region into the third quarter of this year, to lock down leases it spent $5.3 billion to acquire.
Beyond that, McCotter said, the pace of drilling will become more dependent on the market price of natural gas.
For the past three years, however, the massive industrial effort to tap the Haynesville has set off an economic boom. Its secondary effects have rocked everything in DeSoto.
A new bank, Citizens National, out of Bossier City, has come to town to tap into the boom and offer newly wealthy depositors another place to spread their money in insured accounts.
"You can only insure your money for $250,000," said Scott Gentry, a landowner who made out well. "It don't take no time to do that."
New rigs still appear above the tree tops.
Equipment storage yards are freshly carved out of pine woods.
Energy companies are building new field offices.
Two new hotels are going up in Mansfield. They will relieve the pressure on RV parks that sprouted all over the parish to house drillers and pipeline workers.
Traffic is appalling, and universally bemoaned.
Convoys of heavy trucks barrel bumper-to-bumper along the two-lane highways, carrying all manner of earth-moving machines and oilfield equipment, and more than anything else, water -- either clean water going into a well, or tainted water coming out and headed for special disposal.
A Haynesville well can consume 135,000 barrels of water for deep injection, purchased locally at 25 to 50 cents a barrel.
So roadsides sprout small signs: "We sell water."
"You know how they call Minnesota the land of 10,000 lakes?" said Anderson outside his feed store one day. "DeSoto is the land of 10,000 ponds.
"Around here, anybody who's got a little land, they've dug a pond to sell some water. That's another way a lot of folks have gotten a bit of this."
Tax bonanza
The secondary boom has loosed a torrent of sales and property tax income into DeSoto's public treasuries.
Since 2008, the School Board's annual sales tax income has exploded each year: from $14 million to $28 million, to $54 million.
"I could hit $72 million this year," said Steve Stanfield, the board's director of business services. "We're sitting here trying to figure out what 'normal' is with sales tax, because we can't tell what normal is anymore."
That said, "we generally are conservative in this parish. We've had to be all these years," said Walter Lee, the superintendent of the 4,900-student public school system.
"This is newfound wealth to us, but we still function conservatively. We're not going to overextend ourselves."
After the shale came in, the board reduced property taxes for schools by 13 percent, then further reduced taxes by plowing some of its sales tax bonanza into paying off old debt. Stanfield said DeSoto is the only school system in the state putting money aside to finance retirees' health care.
Since 2008, Stanfield said the School Board has given teachers three pay raises and bonuses of $2,000, $5,000 and $3,500.
Another $5,000 check is in the offing this May, he said.
Teachers in DeSoto and neighboring Red River have gone from last to first on the Louisiana teacher pay scale, according to the state Department of Education.
Today a starting teacher with a bachelor's degree in DeSoto makes $48,100 annually, compared to $39,800 in New Orleans.
DeSoto schools and classrooms now are stuffed with student computers and related technology.
Blackboards are gone; nearly every teacher uses a large electronic "smart board" that, like a weather anchor's computer map, displays text and images a teacher has loaded.
DeSoto has plunged headlong into an expensive professional development program called TAP, in which experienced teachers mentor younger colleagues with a frequency and continuing intensity not seen before. Teachers who improve get bonuses.
TAP is financed for the moment by private grants, Lee said. "But shale is producing enough money for us to make it a priority into the future."
More recently, the DeSoto school system began a program of expansions and building improvements at nearly every school. Three high school football stadiums are about to get artificial turf, at a cost of about $3 million. None of it will involve new debt, Lee said.
The turf project has got some people wondering.
"Most of them are really good people," said Dorroh, the bank president, referring to School Board members. "But I think we have so much money lying around, particularly in government coffers, that we're getting a little awestruck at what we can do."
Still, public officials have tried not to be awestruck -- even after the police jury was presented a now-legendary check for $28.7 million for the rights to the gas under its sleepy municipal airport.
That was about a year's budget in a single windfall, later augmented by $125,000 a month in royalties from three wells.
"They've taken a pay-as-you go philosophy," said Brown of his police jury employers.
Moving slowly, the police jury has built the parish's first animal shelter. It has laid plans to develop DeSoto's first public park and place a convention center and other facilities at the airport.
Brown said the police jury has $15 million in the bank, managed for the first time by financial consultants.
At the edge of town, Richard, the pastor, sees his new church, the booming traffic, the new hotels and better-paid teachers as part of a plan.
"What God gives vision for, God gives provision for," he said.
"The shale is a tool. In Isaiah, the Bible says the hidden treasure shall spring forth, meaning that the shale has always been there, but only for such a time when God allows it to be revealed.
"Everything was set in its place for its appointed time.
"I believe this is the appointed time."
•••••••
Ted Jackson contributed to this report. Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.
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