Road fight is hardy perennial

Citizen group keeps slugging away at plans for beltway

Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 12, 2005 at midnight

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Tom Hoffman is a man of many careers.

Army for five years. Assistant principal in Jefferson County. Volunteer firefighter for eight years in Coal Creek Canyon. Ski instructor at Eldora and Winter Park.

And now, at 62 and not ready to quit prime time, a road warrior.

Hoffman, who started as a volunteer, is now a paid organizer for the citizens group that is trying to stop the state's plans to extend the metro-area beltway through Golden.

Citizens Involved in the Northwest Quadrant is a collection of everyday folks, many schooled in civic affairs from earlier forays into public issues. But CINQ is not your ordinary neighborhood group.

Members raise money, post Web sites, write letters, hire public relations pros and analyze reams of data to challenge the engineers and planners at the Colorado Department of Transportation.

All this effort and more is directed at a road plan that won't go away.

Golden isn't silent

The Denver metro beltway, now consisting of a combined 83 miles of C-470 plus the E-470 and Northwest Parkway toll roads, nearly encircles the region. Highway planners, government officials and developers have long wanted to complete the missing link in the circle.

That would require a final segment of between 22 and 25 miles from the Northwest Parkway's end near the Boulder Turnpike to the end of C-470 at U.S. 6 in Golden. It's the section through Golden that's drawing all the heat.

Voters rejected a plan to build the beltway's closing segment in a 1989 referendum. In 1998, the highway agency resurrected the idea and commissioned a feasibility study. CINQ organized at that time to fight the segment through Golden.

CINQ and others collected and analyzed data so effectively that the study, which came out in 2001, actually recommended against completing the beltway. Instead, it found that improvements to existing major streets would move traffic best through the north Jefferson County area - the position now being advanced by CINQ.

But CDOT was not deterred.

In 2003, it launched yet another study. The Northwest Corridor Environmental Impact Study is analyzing the entire traffic picture in the northwest metro area. A big part of the study involves the beltway completion.

Costing $15 million, the study has eliminated other alternatives except those that pump all of the traffic through Golden along Colorado 93 and U.S. 6.

CINQ president Tom Atkins, a downtown Golden resident, suspects that outcome was predestined.

"It started when (CDOT chief) Tom Norton said, 'I don't care what the studies say, I'm building this road,' " Atkins said. "How many clues do we need to tell this is rigged? All this says is, 'Don't get in my way.' "

Norton favors beltway completion and responds that the 2001 study recommending against it failed to "adequately consider the regional movement of traffic."

It's not enough, Norton says, for residents of the northwest quadrant to think only of how they get around their area. They need to consider how other drivers from outside have to pass through it.

Tolls would ease cost

CDOT, however, is short on cash for major new endeavors like the beltway project, the cost of which isn't yet calculated. The most affordable option is to charge tolls on the new segment.

That plan has given CINQ a juicy target. To derail CDOT plans in Golden, it has put heat on Denver's two current toll roads, the Northwest Parkway and E-470.

CINQ sent out notices to the news media when Wall Street rating agencies put the bonds for the financially troubled Northwest Parkway on a junk-bond watch list this fall.

The toll road board has since restructured its bond debt and is on more secure footing. Ratings agencies now have its outlook listed as stable.

CINQ recorded another PR coup this summer by publicizing a little- known 1995 agreement between E-470 and Commerce City.

The city agreed that when E-470 opened its segment serving Denver International Airport, it would lower the speed limit on nearby Tower Road from 55 mph to 40 mph and install unnecessary traffic signals, including one at a dirt road crossing, to discourage potential E-470 drivers from using Tower Road as a free alternative to DIA.

That came about in August 2003.

An Internet blogger from Loveland obtained a copy of the noncompete agreement and wrote an exposé about it in August. CINQ got a copy and sent it to local media. When the media looked into it, E-470 and Commerce City decided to rescind the Tower Road restrictions as of Sept. 22.

Shortly after that, Commerce City raised the speed limit on Tower Road to 50 mph, but the signals remain.

Organizer sees collusion

So who are these everyday people who found unity in a common foe?

Tom Hoffman, CINQ's paid organizer, became civically active when his neighbors in Coal Creek Canyon, north of Golden, banded together to fight a now-defunct 18,000-acre development called Jefferson Center.

"I was trying as a citizen to follow this and found out the system was rigged against the citizen," said Hoffman, who now lives in Golden. "The powers that be are pretty much in concert with the special interests and the developers."

Elliot Brown, 56, is a founder of CINQ. A metallurgist by profession, he is comfortable with scientific data. He helps analyze the traffic forecasts from the study.

A Brooklyn native, he moved to Colorado in 1979 and he taught at the Colorado School of Mines. He lives on the south slope of South Table Mountain, and cut his teeth on fighting, first, a proposed gravel quarry on top of the mountain and, later, a proposed headquarters office for Nike.

Dick Sugg, a Sierra Club member, sits on the technical support committee of the CDOT Northwest Corridor study as its environmentalist representative. This gives him entrée to the meetings and some of the data.

"A lot of times, they don't get it to you with very much prep time," said Sugg, 73, a retired military consultant and Army veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam.

Sugg, who once lived four miles from the Washington Beltway in Fairfax County, Va., said he believes the metro beltway isn't about relieving traffic so much as it's meant to promote growth in north Jefferson County.

"I learned the hard way about what growth can do to a region," he said of his experience in Virginia.

CINQ president Atkins, 63, was working in the aerospace industry in Los Angeles when his employer sent him to the Denver area to open a small office in 1972. Atkins soon began his own business and moved to Golden in 1993.

Atkins' first civic involvement came that year. The county commissioners had to cut the library budget and the plan called for closing the underused Golden branch.

Atkins assembled data supporting a bold counterproposal - that residents needed a bigger library, not a closed one.

At the time, Golden was building a new recreation center. Atkins helped arrange a swap in which the city's old rec center became a larger branch library. The old library then became the new home of the Golden Pioneer Museum.

"What I learned from the whole thing is you can't just oppose something," Atkins said. "You have to come up with something positive as an alternative and show that it can be done."

That approach attracted Sherrie Swadburg, who joined CINQ in May. A resident of the Mountain Ridge subdivision on the west side of Colorado 93, Swadburg's daughter goes to Mitchell Elementary School, across the highway. It is through this narrow throat that CDOT would run at least six lanes of traffic if a tollway is built.

Swadburg, whose son has asthma, relentlessly pursues air quality experts to assist CINQ with analyzing the ozone impacts of higher traffic.

"We sit in a canyon and our air quality is not the best," she said.

CINQ's efforts require money.

Rob Medina, who is on the board of the Village of Mountain Ridge Home-owners Association, overlooking Colorado 93, arranged a $10,000 donation from the group.

Medina, 44, grew up in Arvada. He works in advertising and moved to Golden three years ago.

"Our homeowners' association has been the major force behind the revival of the opposition to this highway," he said. "Like any political campaign, it needs to be funded."

It worked out to about $33 per homeowner. It helps to pay for communication and education efforts, the Web site, postage and event marketing.

"It's all very grass-roots," Medina said. "Golden's a very politically active community anyway, so there's been some sharing of lists."

The effort has been a community- building experience.

Said Swadburg: "I'm so glad I live in a place where people really care."

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