Sierra Club joins fight against pending expansion of I-70
Two blocks from the crumbling Interstate 70 viaduct that soon will be torn down as part of a $1.2 billion freeway expansion, 17-year-old Ruben Sanchez and three other members of his family have lived for years with sometimes-debilitating asthma.
They don’t think that’s a coincidence, given the soot and other pollutants that waft off the freeway. And Denver city health data at least confirm that children in Sanchez’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, which also has several industrial operations, seek asthma-related treatment in emergency rooms at a rate that’s 40 percent higher than the city as a whole.
next to the highway has not helped me to improve in the slightest,” Sanchez said. He has watched his mother, Yadira, develop an even more severe case of asthma that limits her ability to work.
In a legal challenge of the project, attorneys representing the Sierra Club and community groups argued in court this week that the expansion of the highway to handle more traffic will only exacerbate alreadyprevalent health risks for nearby residents. They also face higher chances of developing deadly cardiovascular disease.
And the Sierra Club cited new analytical work done by two outside hired experts to buttress its argument that the Colorado Department of Transportation and federal officials, during the decade-long environmental impact study for the project, neglected to fully consider the highway expansion’s health ramifications. The group is asking for that new research to be admitted as evidence in the court record, with a ruling expected next week.
The plaintiffs also argue that the federal standards officials used were woefully inadequate to safeguard public health.
In one instance, officials decided to change the airquality modeling proce- dure used for a handful of data sites, basing the calculations on the elevated height of the highway near the Interstate 25 interchange instead of at ground level, as was done elsewhere. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) still contends that decision was appropriate.
But the Sierra Club’s expert showed that the altered calculations averted particulate-emission projections at five sites that would violate federal standards decades into the future.
“In this case, all of the issues that we’re raising are related to health,” attorney Bob Yuhnke said during Wednesday’s hearing in U.S. District Court in Denver. “The consequences that this project will have with regard to health have not been explored.”
On Thursday morning, Yuhnke joined more than two dozen I-70 project opponents on Columbine Street, near the viaduct, to press their case to the public. If the activists are successful in court, CDOT and the FHWA could be forced to delay part or all of the 10mile widening project while they restudy the community health effects, potentially resulting in project changes or further mitigation measures.
The project includes the addition of new tolled express lanes. Between Brighton and Colorado boulevards, the 2-mile viaduct will be replaced with a wider highway that is sunk“Living below ground level into an open trench — hence the “Ditch the Ditch” rallying cry of opponents, many of whom want CDOT to reroute I-70 to the north.
CDOT plans a host of mitigation efforts aimed at shielding neighbors from noise and dust during the nearly four years of the project. Its largest concession will be a 4-acre parkland cap over the sunken highway next to Swansea Elementary.
So far, other attempts to challenge the project in court have faltered.
And in this case, the Sierra Club’s request to add the new outside evidence to the court record for consideration by Judge William Martinez faces potentially significant legal hurdles.
Because the lawsuit challenges the project’s federal approval, received in January 2017, normal court procedures limit the scope for a judicial review only to the research and analysis actually considered by officials before they made the decision, called the “agency record.”
That was the argument pressed by CDOT and FHWA attorneys Wednesday. They also defended the health and air-quality factors that were considen ered in the federal project review as meeting all requirements.
“At some point, you’ve got to call it good, and the process needs to come to an end,” said Nicholas DiMascio, an attorney for CDOT.
The Sierra Club raised similar concerns during the environmental-review process in its formal comments. But Yuhnke said state and federal officials didn’t fully address such concerns. The new health and air-quality modeling research, done by professors at the New York University School of Medicine and the University of New Mexico’s School of Engineering, only underlines the group’s earlier-stated doubts about the project, he said.
That argument gave pause to Magistrate Judge Michael E. Hegarty, who works under Martinez.
“The major point that maybe has some traction is this: There is data that could be generated that wasn’t — so obviously, (the Sierra Club) couldn’t put that in front of the government unless they had spent a lot of money conducting an analysis that they claimed the government should have,” Hegarty told the lawyers.
Under consideration are a discovery motion and a motion to supplement the administrative record with the experts’ research, both filed by the Sierra Club.
A ruling by Hegarty next week would clear the table for Martinez to consider the Sierra Club’s motion to halt the I-70 project while the court review continues. Both sides are expected to file written briefs in coming months, before a full court hearing on the Sierra Club’s challenge.