New entrance group places focus on less CO2, traffic
Josie Taris, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
The aging Castle Creek Bridge and the potential realignment of Highway 82 over the nearby Marolt-Thomas Open Space has caused decades of ire in the Roaring Fork Valley. A new community group wants to take a hard look at the plans to make recommendations of their own.
Andre Salvail/Aspen Daily News
A new citizen group is gearing up to review and weigh in on the next steps for the entrance to Aspen, hoping to place a primary focus on traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. But whether their input will impact the city of Aspen’s current process is not clear.
John Bennett, a former Aspen mayor and current Basalt resident, said the coalition will work six to 12 months to come up with a set of recommendations for the entrance to Aspen to reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, and examine wildfire risks and total vehicles on the stretch of Highway 82 between the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport and the Castle Creek Bridge. He said they can do it with no new studies.
“If we don’t do that, we’re like a dog chasing our tail. We’re going to keep doing this forever, for another decade or two,” Bennett said. “It’s just getting horrible on the highway, just horrible. And we owe ourselves and our commuters and our visitors something better.”
The group, probably in the form of a nonprofit organization, wants to assemble 25 to 30 representatives of varying Roaring Fork Valley opinions on the entrance. The coalition doesn’t yet have a formal name.
Whether those recommendations are totally different from or supplementary to one of the three main options for the entrance to Aspen (the preferred alternative/modified direct, the split shot and the three-lane bridge) is not something Bennett would commit to at this time.
The city was in the process of gathering information to support a new environmental impact statement and potentially considering new alignment options. It appears the coalition would support that trajectory, given their critique of the record of decision’s lack of significant impact on traffic, travel times or emissions.
“I don’t think anyone with a straight face can call the record of decision (issued by the Colorado Department of Transportation in 1998) a solution. Now it might be a solution if it’s paired with other things. It might not be a solution if it’s paired with other things, but it sure as heck not a solution by itself,” he said.” And it’s going to take, I suspect, strongly, it’s going to take a new EIS to come up with something that actually addresses the problem.”
Stakeholders like elected officials, major employers and relevant agencies like the Roaring Fork Transit Authority and CDOT will be invited and encouraged to participate, Bennett said.
Chuck Marsh, CDOT regional communications manager for Region 3, said the new group’s work will not directly factor into CDOT decisions.
“We at CDOT applaud the citizens group in Aspen for taking an interest and active role in topics important to their community. That said, we will not participate in actions with the group but will continue to maintain our working relationship with the City of Aspen and will work through any entry initiatives at that level,” Marsh wrote in an email to the Aspen Daily News.
He continued, “We have advised the City of Aspen that if they provide sufficient reasoning to the Federal Highway Administration and CDOT, then a new Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process could be approved. If there is valid reasoning to enter into a new EIS, the existing Record of Decision would be vacated and a new one would be drafted based on the findings of that EIS. For now however, we will not speculate on outcomes of decisions that have not been made at this time.”
The city plans to resume its compilation of materials to support a new EIS process with consultant Jacobs Engineering after the election. That includes conducting stakeholder meetings and public outreach to inform a new “purpose and need” statement for reopening the 1998 ROD.
The city plans to submit its intent to reopen the ROD to CDOT and the Federal Highway Administration by early June. CDOT and FHWA will have final say on whether the city can conduct a new EIS on the entrance.
Bennett said that despite the city council’s lack of immediate decision-making power in this situation and the potential for redundancy with work already done by consultants or governmental bodies, it’s still valuable for the coalition to exist and publish recommendations.
It’s the role of community groups to be values-driven and data-informed in their planning in a way that engineers wouldn’t necessarily be, Bennett said. Values like environmental quality, convenience and community character come to mind for him.
“We’re convinced that we will come up with a solution that (CDOT and FHWA) will stress test and analyze,” he said. “If they can find something that does all those things better, then have at it. But, if you can’t, then we think we have a pretty good plan. That’s what we intend to put before them.”
The group will need to fundraise for things like booking meeting spaces, but Bennett said the fundraising efforts will be minimal.
Bennett, Michael Kinsley, Michael Miracle, Auden Schendler, Chris Davenport, Cristal Logan, George Newman, Harry Teague, Alan Fletcher, Chris Lane, Dwayne Romero, Katie Viola, Greg Goldfarb, Johnno McBride, John Sarpa, Bob Wade and Bill Kane all signed an op-ed in today’s Aspen Daily News outlining the plan and impetus for the coalition.
Many of the signatories also participated in the ASE Vision process, which included over 100 people and resulted in the Common Ground Recommendations, which the Pitkin Board of County Commissioners unanimously adopted as a guide for the future of the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport. That process was sponsored largely by the county.
The airport and county were recently awarded a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study multimodal transportation infrastructure plans at the airport, but the future of that funding has been uncertain with the Trump administration’s clawing back and general uncertainty around federal grants.
The city’s Lumberyard affordable housing project and the airport modernization plans are all part of the coalition’s intended scope, Bennett said. They plan to start meeting in March after the city election on March 4.
Bennett said their tentative plan is to utilize existing data and studies and integrate transit techniques like new rideshare technology to build their recommendation, which they intend to present to the Elected Officials Transportation Committee, composed of elected officials from Aspen, Snowmass and Pitkin County.
The coalition will not take a position on Referendum 1 or 2 questions that Aspen voters will decide on next week, Bennett said, because their members’ opinions fall across the full spectrum of takes on the ballot questions.
Aspen Daily News Staff Writer Lucy Peterson contributed reporting on this story.
josie@aspendailynews.com