Government & Politics  August 12, 2015

Estes Park Loop public vote rejected as cost estimate soars

ESTES PARK — Reeling in the face of new, higher cost estimates for creating a one-way loop to ease summer traffic congestion, the Estes Park Town Board of Trustees voted 5-1 on Tuesday night not to place the contentious issue on the ballot.

Instead, the elected board opted to await the final results of a federal environmental assessment, due late this year or early in 2016, and then make a decision itself on the project that has created sharp divisions in this tourist town at the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park.

The vote came after Town Administrator Frank Lancaster dropped a bombshell. In talks on Monday with officials from the Colorado Department of Transportation and Central Federal Lands Highway Division, he said, he learned that preliminary findings in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) study have revealed that the cost of creating the one-way couplet that would divert eastbound U.S. Highway 36 could be nearly double the announced $17.2 million cost.

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The problems are the bridges involved, he told the board – and the capacity of the Big Thompson River that flows beneath them.

“This quickly got into more of a flood-mitigation issue,” Lancaster said Wednesday morning. “To design the road based on what we think will be the new flood data, we’d need channel modification downstream from the bridges” because the ongoing study has determined that the channel of the Big Thompson River below the bridges isn’t adequate to handle a 100-year flood.

“Based on the new data, the bridge we’re replacing for the Loop – Ivy Street – would only withstand a 50-year flood,” Lancaster said. “What happens in the 100-year models is, it backs up over the bridges. Even if we weren’t building the Loop, it’ll still cost us $8 million to fix the channel.”

Lancaster said that making the three bridges involved in the project able to handle a 100-year flood event also would require raising the roadway on either side to get to them. “That means the footprint widens, so we would have to acquire more properties,” he said. “That tentatively brings the cost up to $34 million – an additional $17 million over what we already have.

“That’s not going to happen,” Lancaster declared. “There is no more money to put into the project from any of the partners.”

Under the Downtown Loop proposal, westbound U.S. 36 traffic, toward the park, would use the highway’s current route – west along Elkhorn Avenue through the downtown core of tourist shops and restaurants, then south and west on Moraine Avenue – but eastbound U.S. 36 would be diverted at the Moraine Avenue curve onto West Riverside Drive, across a new bridge over the Big Thompson at Ivy Street, then north on East Riverside Drive to reconnect with Elkhorn east of the downtown core.

Besides easing tourist-traffic gridlock, Loop proponents had said, federal money would pay for replacement of three of five bridges damaged during the flooding of 2013. If the bridges aren’t replaced, they said, the next federal floodplain designation could be expanded to include much of the downtown area, raising property owners’ insurance rates. Loop opponents have said the plan would hurt their businesses by steering eastbound traffic away from the shops along Elkhorn and disturbing the peace of homes and rental cottages along Riverside. Some opponents say improving parking options and crosswalks downtown are better solutions.

The town had planned to pay for the one-way couplet with $13 million in Federal Lands Access Project (FLAP) grant funds and a $4.2 million local match from CDOT’s Responsible Acceleration of Maintenance and Partnerships (RAMP) program. If the plan were scrapped, the town would have to give back the federal money and find another way to repair the bridges, but could keep the RAMP funds for other uses.

However, Lancaster also told the board Tuesday night that a third option – besides either building the Loop or doing nothing, and involving no one-way roads – also was raised during Monday’s talks. He would not reveal its details Wednesday, but said “we did some brainstorming and are talking about something else we could do. We’re working outside the box. All of us thought there may be another way to do this. We’ve got an idea; it just needs to be hashed out.”

Lancaster said he hopes to reveal details by the end of the month, and “we’d like to incorporate that into the NEPA as a third option. Even if we don’t put in the third option though, to really figure out what’s going to with the Loop, we need to see the hydrology numbers – which won’t be ready until November or December. So that’s why I told the board we shouldn’t send the question to the voters until the NEPA process is done. It’s premature to put it out there until we know.”

Twenty-three members of the public – nearly evenly split for and against the Loop – spoke before the board’s vote.

“I know it’s frustrating for people – that we’d been saying one thing and now we’re saying something else,” Lancaster said. “But this is how it’s supposed to work. The study is going on and finding things out. It’s working the way it’s supposed to work.

“This is a different world after September 2013,” he said. “We still have to face that problem – we still have flooding issues downtown.”

ESTES PARK — Reeling in the face of new, higher cost estimates for creating a one-way loop to ease summer traffic congestion, the Estes Park Town Board of Trustees voted 5-1 on Tuesday night not to place the contentious issue on the ballot.

Instead, the elected board opted to await the final results of a federal environmental assessment, due late this year or early in 2016, and then make a decision itself on the project that has created sharp divisions in this tourist town at the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park.

The vote came after Town Administrator Frank Lancaster dropped a…

Dallas Heltzell
With BizWest since 2012 and in Colorado since 1979, Dallas worked at the Longmont Times-Call, Colorado Springs Gazette, Denver Post and Public News Service. A Missouri native and Mizzou School of Journalism grad, Dallas started as a sports writer and outdoor columnist at the St. Charles (Mo.) Banner-News, then went to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before fleeing the heat and humidity for the Rockies. He especially loves covering our mountain communities.
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