RTD seeks more land by eminent domain

180 property owners affected

By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 29, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

Text size

More Traffic

Map my news

RTD is about to notify 180 more property owners along the FasTracks West Corridor light-rail project that it needs some of their land - 306 parcels, to be exact.

In this second round of eminent domain acquisitions, RTD is looking at smaller pieces than the 21 complete parcels it moved to acquire 13 months ago that set off a controversy over property condemnation.

But this new round, approved Tuesday night by the RTD board, is limited to partial acquisitions, some as small as 57 square feet, and easements that don't involve RTD ownership but rather permission to run utilities such as water or electricity to the 12-mile project through Denver, Lakewood and Golden.

The parcels will square off RTD's tracks, stations, parking lots and other facilities, as well as make way for street or sidewalk relocations.

FasTracks spokeswoman Pauletta Tonilas said RTD is sending letters to affected owners this week in advance of formal notices to acquire their property, which will go out in the next one to three months. That's a result of the uproar last year when the formal legal notices went out unannounced and took many of those 16 original owners by surprise.

The list of partial acquisitions was scheduled to come out last spring. But RTD held up the process to refine the design of the project, which has grown in four years from $511.8 million to $707.6 million. The refinement was in part aimed at limiting the amount of private land RTD needed to acquire, to hold down costs.

Of the 180 owners, 16 are government or quasi-public entities, said Susan Altes, RTD's manager of real property. There is potential, Altes said, for a half- dozen or so of these acquisitions to turn into purchases of entire properties if appraisals show that what's left over won't be of any significant value to the owner. In such cases, RTD is obligated to make an offer for the entire property.

But simply because these are only partial acquisitions doesn't mean it will be any easier than the first round of complete takings. First, it involves more than 10 times the number of owners as the first round and more than 14 times the number of parcels.

Second, in some cases RTD's purchases will slice current properties in half. For instance, RTD must build a new track for Union Pacific Railroad to access the Burnham Yards area south of 12th Avenue and Osage Street.

The track will snake through Quadrant Properties' block between 13th and 14th avenues, Shoshone Street and Rio Court. Developer Rick Patten says he already has lost two deals because of RTD's changing designs.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News