El Paso County commissioners question CDOT on road projects, funding

Future transportation projects and how to pay for them were the subjects of a Tuesday afternoon work session for El Paso County commissioners and Shoshana Lew, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Commissioners discussed a list of 33 priority projects costing $210 million with Lew. Those projects will help guide CDOT’s funding decisions over the next 10 years.

But the county is hoping to have its projects completed by the end of 2023.

“We’re visiting every county in Colorado to see what their needs are,” she said. “Not just big projects, but small projects too. We’re trying to do the best with the limited funding we have. But although the state’s budget has grown in recent years, our funding has not. People need to realize that.”

The limited funding frustrates some commissioners.

“I’m trying to wrap my head around it,” said Chairman Mark Waller. “Help us to understand it.”

“It baffles me that we’ve ignored transportation,” said Commissioner Longinos Gonzalez.

Commissioner Stan VanderWerf said one future priority should be constructing a loop around the east side of Colorado Springs.

“We shouldn’t give up on Powers Boulevard being that loop, as it was originally designed to be,” he said. “It may have to be Marksheffel Road or even farther east than that. Those roads were fine in the past, but we’ve grown since then and need something better.”

VanderWerf said he’d also like to see more continuous east-west thoroughfares through the city.

“They’re repaving U.S. 24 and I’m glad to see that,” he said. “But we need more with the way we’re growing.”

VanderWerf said he hopes CDOT won’t ask the county to pay more of a local match for state funding.

“We have a lot of roads that we’re responsible for, and it really stretches our budget just to meet those responsibilities,” he said. “We’re open to paying a larger funding share for smaller projects, but we can’t really do it for major projects.”

Several weeks ago, CDOT announced a plan to spend more than $100 million over the next decade on five projects designed to help improve transportation in and around local military installations.

CDOT has said its next major project is building an overpass at the busy intersection of Powers Boulevard and Research Parkway in northeast Colorado Springs.

“We need more overpasses, or grade-separated interchanges,” VanderWerf said. “The few we have, all have traffic signals on parts of them. Denver has interchanges with no traffic signals so that traffic keeps flowing in all directions without stopping. I’d rather have an interchange than add lanes to a road.”

Around 40 people attended the work session in the Centennial Hall auditorium. Among them was a woman who recently moved back to Colorado Springs after living on the East and West coasts.
“We’re not doing the things they do to bring in guaranteed funding,” she said. “They require vehicle emissions. They have turnpikes so that people can pay to keep the roads nice and safe. Their mass transit systems are better than ours.”

Also in the audience was Wayne Williams, the husband of current Commissioner Holly Williams, who’s a current Colorado Springs city councilman, former commissioner, and former secretary of state.

“There are going to be more deaths, more injuries, and more crashes unless we get more of these projects done,” he said.

According to 6,000 responses from a CDOT driver survey, the top concern are road conditions and safety, followed by growth and congestion and expanding travel options.

In other county business Tuesday, commissioners voted to allocate up to $1 million to repair the county’s 400-space parking garage next to Centennial Hall.

The garage was built in 1986 and a recent inspection found it needed immediate and long-term repairs because of age and weathering.

Officials closed the garage last week and hope to reopen it next week after emergency repairs are finished. Long-term repairs will take around nine months to complete.

The garage is used by citizens, county employees and court jurors.

Finally, a network outage knocked out service to many Colorado Department of Motor Vehicle offices Tuesday.

Citizens were unable to finish motor vehicle transactions or receive driver licenses and state ID cards.

DMV officials were working to discover the source of the outage and resolve the problem. It’s unclear whether online services are affected. Some citizens said they could still make transactions online; others said they couldn’t.

The outage was discovered just before 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and is believed to be affecting some DMV offices in El Paso, Teller, Pueblo, Chaffee, Las Animas, Prowers, Park and Huerfano counties in southern Colorado.