Tunnel, bridge access coming under attack
Communities by wildlife refuge wary of trail project
Millions of dollars in federal funds to help tie a major regional trail into the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge may be in jeopardy, as communities near the refuge wrestle with the troubled legacy of the former nuclear weapons plant.
This week, Superior leaders unanimously shot down a measure calling for the town to contribute approximately $122,000 to a $6.5 million proposal to build two underpasses and one overpass to provide people and animals access to the refuge across Indiana Street and Colorado 128.
Superior’s decision not to take part in the Federal Lands Access Program grant (FLAP) comes just two weeks after the Westminster City Council decided to punt a decision on whether to contribute $243,000 to the effort.
The grant requires a minimum 17.2 percent match from local communities, which would come to $1.1 million for this project.
The crossings would be a critical link in the Rocky Mountain Greenway Trail, which is envisioned to stretch from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Commerce City to Rocky Flats — and eventually to Rocky Mountain National Park.
Several other communities surrounding Rocky Flats — including Boulder, Broomfield and Arvada — are set to vote in the coming weeks on whether to secure the grant money by making a contribution.
Superior Trustee Sandy Pennington said bringing the public onto the 5,000-acre Rocky Flats site poses a risk that needs to be fully disclosed, given the former facility’s checkered history as a decades-long manufacturing center for nuclear triggers.
A 1,300-acre core area of the property — still classified as a Superfund site — will remain off limits to visitors, even after the refuge’s expected opening late next year.
“Why are we trying to hide the legacy and sugarcoat it?” Pennington said. “When we’re talking about plutonium, a deadly metal, you have to err on the side of caution.”
Her colleague, Deb Williams, said there has been too long a history of contamination at Rocky Flats to support building
tunnels and bridges to give people easy access to the property.
“Constructing a trail through a Superfund site is not good public policy,” she said.
On Monday, several members of the Superior Board of Trustees talked about having the Greenway Trail skirt around Rocky Flats.
But Dave Lucas, refuge manager with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, said a connection through Rocky Flats is critical to the purpose of the Greenway Trail, which in 2012 brought thenInterior Secretary Ken Salazar and Gov. John Hickenlooper to a ceremony recognizing the trail-building effort.
Lucas said the $7 billion cleanup of Rocky Flats, which ended 11 years ago, left behind no dangerous levels of plutonium or other toxic substances. And the trails that will be built inside the refuge never cross into the Rocky Flats’ core no-go area.
Routing the Greenway Trail around the refuge is neither feasible nor consistent with the trail’s purpose, he said.
“The vision for the Greenway Trail was to connect great open spaces, not the FlatIron mall,” he said.
Lucas said FLAP grants come along only every five years and that this is a rare opportunity to “finance it through federal dollars.” The deadline to submit the FLAP application is May 21, and a section of the trail from Two Ponds National Wildlife Refuge in Arvada to Standley Lake in Westminster is set to be completed next month.
He’s confident that with time and accurate information, most communities will buy in to the underpass-overpass project.
“I think they will get the facts and support the greenway,” Lucas said.
Lisa Morzel, a Boulder councilwoman, said she is well aware of the wariness people have toward Rocky Flats. That’s why the city plans to put conditions on its approval of the FLAP grant, should it vote yes.
“If they’re going to do this, they’re going to have to do additional soil sampling,” she said. “If there is nothing to be afraid of, why can’t we sample to assuage the public of concerns that this is something dangerous.”
The Boulder City Council is scheduled to take up the issue Tuesday.
Jon Lipsky, the former FBI agent who led the 1989 raid on Rocky Flats, plans to speak out against the proposal in each community. He said even if samples and readings today show that the site is safe, floods, wind and burrowing animals can bring buried contaminants to the surface and allow them to migrate into the refuge and beyond.
That’s the legacy of four decades of Cold War weapons-making, he said. “I know a lot of people don’t want to hear about the past,” Lipsky said.