Drivers on the E-470 parkway pay tolls to hurry along the 47-mile stretch of highway, while just to the west, a 40-mph speed limit and several stoplights slow the pace on Tower Road, a future major artery in Commerce City.
It’s all part of the plan – the E-470 financial plan.
In the mid-1990s, Commerce City and seven other communities agreed that no other roads would compete with the tollway, a deal that limited what roads could be improved or expanded and whether others could even be built.
Years later, Golden officials say the arrangement – now common in toll development – is one more reason to oppose the completion of a metro beltway through northwest Jefferson County. One proposal would make it a tollway.
It makes little sense, Golden critics argue, to withhold road improvements elsewhere to keep a tollway solvent.
“If you’re going to build a toll road, then you’re making a Faustian bargain never to be able to build competing capacity, or you will hurt your ability to get paid back,” says John Putnam, a city attorney for Golden, which has argued that completing the beltway would cause pollution, split neighborhoods and give oncoming growth a free pass into the corridor.
The proposed 22-mile section would link the Northwest Parkway at U.S. 36 to the convergence of U.S. 6 and Interstate 70. The 12.5-mile Northwest Parkway did not require no-compete deals.
Proponents of the E-470 agreement say the elimination of roadway competition was all part of a well-conceived plan – ensuring repayments on loans made to the E-470 Public Highway Authority from local governments.
Such deals have become commonplace across the country. Over the past 10 to 15 years, tolling authorities have turned to no-compete deals to assure bondholders that a toll project can produce the revenue needed to repay them.
Without the no-compete guarantee, proponents say, banks would have been foolish to finance a pay-to-ride road when comparable, and free, alternatives were nearby.
“The project hinges on the ability to sell bonds,” said Neil Gray of the International Bridge, Tunnel & Turnpike Association. “If the banks aren’t assured … it will not come to pass.”
Along with Commerce City, officials in Aurora, Brighton, Parker and Thornton and Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties signed the no-compete pact and lent millions of dollars combined – which has been repaid – to the authority. The communities sit on the authority’s board.
Officials from those communities say they haven’t been constrained, that the road has allowed residential and commercial traffic to pass easily on municipal streets, rather than battling toll customers who are looking for the fastest way through town.
For its part, Commerce City ceded control over speeds along Tower Road and agreed to put stoplights on the thoroughfare to slow traffic.
And in Aurora, once-barren land to the east became a gold mine for real-estate taxes and retail businesses as homebuilders rushed to develop and sell properties along the then-new E-470 corridor.
The revenues, says former Aurora Mayor Paul Tauer, have “been significant.”
“We want to have good additional roads, and we were able to accomplish that,” says Tauer, who signed the tolling agreement and has no regrets. “We can still improve roads to the degree that they suit the community.”
A March 2004 General Accounting Office report cast some doubt on those arguments, though, raising concerns over the “political costs” of the “limited ability to improve competing publicly owned roads.”
Golden officials and the Citizens Involved in the Northwest Quadrant, or CINQ, prefer a transportation plan in the corridor that would widen streets such as Indiana and McIntyre, rather than creating a toll that could prohibit improvements to those arterials and to Colorado 93.
“It could affect people driving to Boulder who want to drive on Colorado 93 for free,” said Tom Atkins, president of CINQ. “Like Tower Road, a no-compete clause would make Colorado 93 inconvenient to use.”
Tauer says a tollway in Golden “should not be a big thing for them.”
Golden “can look at their master plan for transportation and figure out what can be done to minimize competition and work out an agreement,” the former mayor says.
Meanwhile, Commerce City, which has the speed-limit restriction on Tower Road, is studying whether the 40-mph limit should change.
The area near E-470 is growing by roughly 1,800 homes each year.
Even if the speeds in Commerce City change, Golden officials bristle at the idea of giving up control over some local roads and say their city isn’t ready for a toll.
“For the segment to work, the people who are promoting the beltway (through Golden) … have to somehow create enough congestion to force people to take the tollway,” says Golden City Manager Mike Bestor. “The traffic numbers aren’t there now.”
Staff writer Ann Schrader can be reached at 303-278-3217 or aschrader@denverpost.com.
