RTD officials said about 164 additional private landowners in the west light-rail corridor soon will be notified that portions of their properties are needed for the rail line.
At a special meeting of the Regional Transportation District board Tuesday night, directors approved a measure that will lead to the acquisition of property needed for the west line, said Susan Altes, RTD’s property manager.
RTD already has given notice to 16 landowners that their entire properties are needed for west rail-line construction. For most of the additional 164 private owners, RTD needs only a portion of their land, said Pauletta Tonilas, spokeswoman for the agency’s FasTracks transit expansion.
The $707 million west rail line is being built in the West 13th Avenue corridor that includes parts of Denver and Lakewood. It will run between central Denver and Golden and is the first train line under construction for the FasTracks expansion.
In all, RTD expects to have 306 “impacts” on about 180 owners of private properties and 16 other entities in the west corridor, including the city and county of Denver, the Colorado Department of Transportation and utilities, Tonilas said.
Some of the impacts will be the acquisition of easements from utilities and public entities, Altes said.
RTD will not know how many full properties it will need to acquire among the 164 additional property owners notified until appraisals are completed, Tonilas said, but the agency expects it to be only about five or six of that total.
At times, even when RTD needs only a portion of an owner’s land, appraisers determine that it leaves the property owner with an “uneconomic remnant,” she said, and the agency ends up buying the whole property.
RTD pledges to follow federal rules on giving property owners “just compensation” when land is needed for transit purposes, and the agency offers relocation assistance.
But its eminent domain practices have provoked controversy, especially after some of the original 16 property owners in the west corridor complained that RTD planned to take their land for a rail station parking garage and then considered bringing in other private interests to develop commercial businesses on floors above the parking.
By allowing private development on top, RTD might lessen the cost of the parking structure and save money for taxpayers, agency general manager Cal Marsella said.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, RTD’s board decided to continue to talk to three teams of private firms that are bidding to finance, design, build, operate and maintain two FasTracks rail lines — the east corridor train from Union Station to Denver International Airport and the Gold Line train to Arvada/Wheat Ridge.
The board could have selected only one or two of the teams for further discussions on a public-private partnership, or PPP. RTD expects to select a winning team for the PPP in early 2010.
Jeffrey Leib: 303-954-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com
Trying to team with RTD
Three teams of private companies have expressed interest in forming a public-private partnership with RTD to build the $1.67 billion East Corridor train to DIA and the $666 million Gold Line train to Arvada/Wheat Ridge.
The team names and each group’s companies are:
Mile High Transit: John Laing plc; Hochtief PPP Solutions; Bombardier; Flatiron Construction; Archer-Western; Aldridge Electric; DMJM Harris/AECOM; CH2M Hill
Denver Transit Partners: Fluor Enterprises; Macquarie Capital; Ames Construction; Balfour Beatty Rail; Alternate Concepts; HDR Global Design Consultants; Arup; Gannett Fleming; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Interfleet Technology; Romero & Wilson
Mountain Air Transit Partners: Babcock & Brown; Siemens; Veolia; Kiewit; Herzog; Stacy and Witbeck; HNTB Corp.; Mass. Electric Construction Co.; Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; Citi; Merrill Lynch
Source: RTD
