When I was first elected to the Golden City Council, the fight over a proposed high-speed superhighway through Golden had already been ongoing for decades, and protecting Golden from this developer’s fantasy was a major priority during my time serving on the Council and as mayor. Marjorie, after she became mayor in 2012, ultimately negotiated a peace accord with Arvada, Broomfield, and Jefferson County, the promoters of this “every great city has a giant beltway surrounding it” vision. The city’s agreement is a gamble, since there are still some circumstances where CDOT would be allowed to widen the highway through Golden, but so long as those circumstances don’t come to pass we should be much better off for it, and the reconstructed intersection of US6 and 19th Street is almost everything we envisioned it would be for all of those years, leaving Golden safer, quieter, and less polluted.
Golden’s core strategy was a combination of advocating for sensible transportation improvements while simultaneously fighting the superhighway vision in whatever ways we could. We were betting that even if we couldn’t kill the plan outright, we could stall it out long enough that the reality of the economics and the flaws of its archaic transportation logic would eventually catch up and sink it.
These days, the City of Golden is largely a non-player in the ongoing attempt to build something, even if it’s just a short new highway stretch between Highways 93 and 128. But Golden’s strategy of fight-it-off-until-it-eventually-dies just got a huge boost this week when Broomfield announced its withdrawal from the highway authority established to build the project (the Denver Post called it a “gut punch” to “the long-stalled Jefferson Parkway”). The politics in Broomfield have clearly shifted a great deal, with their City Council voting unanimously to back out of the effort.
The proposed highway was always a bad idea unless you owned land that would suddenly be worth a lot more or you are a local government addicted to building new suburban sprawl in order to balance your books. It wouldn’t have improved congestion, it would have intentionally sabotaged local arterials to force traffic onto the toll highway, and it would have resulted in more pollution and carbon emissions. And by building the highway through someone else’s town (the narrow valley that Golden sits in) instead of through your own town (down Indiana or Wadsworth, for instance), you shift the worst of the impacts onto someone else. I understand the appeal for the small number of people who would benefit, but for most people across the region it was mostly downside, and for Golden it would have been devastating.
The beltway promoters’ fantasy of a new toll highway probably isn’t dead yet, but it did indeed suffer a body blow and we are perhaps one step closer to figuring out an actual solution to the Denver region’s considerable mobility challenges.
