Plans to build the contentious Jefferson Parkway toll highway through Broomfield and Jefferson counties — part of a conspicuously missing segment in metro Denver’s 83-mile beltway — are set to come back to life after years of delays, resistance and litigation.
But don’t expect the earthmovers and asphalt pavers to roar to life anytime soon on the 10-mile thoroughfare.
On Dec. 19, the City and County of Broomfield formally, and finally, withdrew from the entity in charge of building the parkway, ceding a critical piece of right of way to the project and ending an internecine battle that had gummed up construction efforts for the past half decade. Even so, numerous roadblocks still stand in the way of the first vehicle ever traversing the toll road.
“I think, at this point, it’s on hold,” Bryan Archer, the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority’s interim executive director, told The Denver Post this fall.
Several factors continue to impede progress: The authority still needs to land a concessionaire to build and operate the toll road. Bloated interest rates make financing the $875 million project increasingly challenging. And environmental concerns persist about the toxic legacy of the nearby former Rocky Flats weapons plant, which once churned out components for the nation’s Cold War nuclear arsenal.
Then there are the hundreds of neighbors who dread the impacts of a four-lane highway whizzing past their homes.
“I’d love it if it doesn’t come,” said Mike LeClare, an eight-year resident of Arvada’s Leyden Rock neighborhood whose house atop an earthen berm looks over the parkway’s right of way. “I kind of have a Hot Wheels ramp into my backyard.”
A pared-down highway authority is prepared to write the next chapter in the Jefferson Parkway saga, with membership in the 16-year-old body now comprising just Jefferson County and Arvada. Neighbor Brett Vernon said it might be time for the neighborhood to regroup in opposition to the road.
“It doesn’t benefit anyone in this area,” Vernon said. “If it were to benefit more of Arvada, I could see how all the tradeoffs could be worth it.”
But its backers cite expected local benefits. A study conducted in 2017 found that completion of the Jefferson Parkway could give a $1.2 billion jolt to Jefferson County over a 20-year period, a nearly 17 percent premium over what the area would receive without the highway.
And the parkway is still seen as important by the Denver Regional Council of Governments, which published its 2050 regional transportation plan in May and included the tollway on its project list. DRCOG is a planning organization that identifies potential mobility solutions across the metro area.
Ron Papsdorf, DRCOG’s director of transportation planning and operations, said the Jefferson Parkway remains one of several “regionally significant projects” in metro Denver.
Arvada City Councilman Bob Fifer, who sits on the Jefferson Parkway authority’s board of directors, said there was a need for a high-speed thoroughfare in the city’s fast-growing northwest quadrant, where Colorado 93 and Indiana Street “are packed all the time.”
“There is a traffic problem in this area — something needs to happen,” he said.
Closing the loop around Denver
The metro beltway — the limited-access, high-speed highway that nearly forms a complete circle around Denver — was built in segments, a reflection of the luster lost for that kind of road design over time. Once seen as critical conduits through America’s burgeoning post-World War II suburbs, the ring routes around cities were later criticized as sprawl generators that promoted car travel over transit use.
Originally planned as Interstate 470, the beltway around Denver quickly garnered opposition from some 1970s-era politicians like Gov. Dick Lamm, who worried about the environmental impacts of road building. C-470, the initial 27.5-mile segment built in the 1980s through the southwest suburbs, was downgraded to a state highway.
The next segment, on the east side of metro Denver, took a completely different route to fruition. E-470, built in the 1990s, was Colorado’s first toll road since the Boulder Turnpike — or U.S. 36 — stopped charging tolls in 1967. It was overseen by a public highway authority that contracted with a concessionaire to build and maintain the 47-mile road, collecting toll revenues as compensation.
That was the model that backers of the Northwest Parkway in Broomfield and Lafayette adopted to build that 9-mile-long road that extends the beltway over Interstate 25 to just north of U.S. 36. That segment brought the circle road to about 80% completion. It opened in late 2003.
Efforts to extend the road to Arvada spurred the formation of the Jefferson Parkway authority in 2008. It was made up of Broomfield, Arvada and Jefferson County. Over the next decade, the authority amassed land for a right of way and, along the way, got ensnared in a lawsuit from Superior — an effort by the town to scuttle the project.
But nothing slowed progress like the news that dropped in August 2019: A soil sample taken on the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge showed an elevated level of deadly plutonium.
It was found just feet from where construction workers would be digging up the earth to lay the roadbed.
Within six months of the radioactive hotspot discovery, one of three firms vying to build the highway dropped out, citing “ongoing environmental challenges” as a reason for its departure. Pointing to the same plutonium sample, Broomfield in early 2020 announced that it wanted out of the project — and an end to its membership in the authority.
That prompted a 2022 lawsuit filed by Jefferson County and Arvada. Both claimed the project would die without Broomfield, and without that city setting aside land it owns to serve as a road corridor connecting the Jefferson Parkway to the terminus of the Northwest Parkway.
Broomfield had also been a financial boon for the project, contributing about a third of the more than $20 million spent so far on parkway planning. Archer, the authority head, said negotiations between the three members were contentious for most of the last five years, laying bare a “lack of trust” between the parties.
But talks continued, resulting in a deal finalized on Dec. 19: Broomfield will grant right of way for the parkway within its boundaries for 20 years.
If the project hasn’t moved forward by then, Broomfield will get its land back.
A spokeswoman for Broomfield said the city “believes this is an amicable resolution” to the yearslong dispute. Mayor Guyleen Castriotta declined to comment.
“Certainly, it’s harder to do a project with two entities than three,” Archer said of the agreement. “But it makes the road viable again.”
Andy Goetz, a professor of geography at the University of Denver, said he was “surprised it’s being resuscitated.” The Jefferson Parkway wouldn’t actually complete the beltway around Denver, he noted. Its western terminus would be at Colorado 93 and approximately 64th Avenue, miles from C-470’s interchange with Interstate 70.
The parkway would then send traffic southward on Colorado 93 through numerous traffic lights and intersections into the heart of Golden, which has never been favorable to having a high-speed highway cutting through its midst.
“It’s instructive that they set a timeline of 20 years to figure it out,” Goetz said. “They may very well need all 20 years to do it.”
As for whether the beltway around Denver even needs to be completed more than 40 years after its first segment opened to traffic, Goetz has his doubts.
“I don’t think that argument is that compelling — if it were that compelling, it would have been finished by now,” he said.
Cost approaching $1 billion
But Archer hasn’t given up on the Jefferson Parkway.
Now that the protracted dispute with Broomfield has been put to bed, things can move forward — albeit haltingly.
Until interest rates come down more, the cost of borrowing money is “just too high for a project like the parkway,” he said. Additionally, the projected cost of the parkway itself has more than tripled from a $250 million estimate a decade ago.
Using the Colorado Department of Transportation’s inflationary index, Archer said the parkway would likely cost closer to $900 million — or even a cool $1 billion if it is delayed much longer.
Not that interest in the Jefferson Parkway is completely absent. A European road-building consortium reached out about the project last summer but didn’t take it further, Archer said.
“We have all the right of way we need and we have a very good design — we’re just looking for market conditions to be right to move forward,” he said. “I think that could take a while.”
Jeff Staniszewski, a Leyden Rock resident for the better part of a decade, said he wouldn’t be surprised if community websites opposing the project — long dormant and inactive — sparked back to life now that project had worked through its legal obstacles. If the project does eventually move forward, he said, certain mitigation measures, like sound walls and fire protection, would need to be included.
In the wake of the 2021 Marshall fire, Colorado’s most expensive wildfire ever, Staniszewski worries about a stray cigarette — tossed out the window of a car traveling the Jefferson Parkway — “lighting up all that tinder” and taking out the nearly 1,500 homes in his neighborhood.
“(The parkway) is a square peg in a round hole,” he said. “Had I known, we would not have bought here.”
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.
