The Voice of Aurora: Complete the widening of I-225 with FasTracks work

From the Aurora Sentinel, Colorado is like any other government, a massive bureaucracy slow to turn once momentum has begun. Still, the state has long shown a penchant for rising to the call and exhibiting a pluckiness indicative of life in the West.

It is those attributes that have made it illegal to slander broccoli, an effort to protect the farmers in the state, and to lead the nation in requiring an open and accessible government. In Colorado, when the chips are down, its residents and leaders are not.

That's the attitude needed to keep the state from wasting millions of increasingly rare taxpayer dollars in how and when it builds new light rail tracks along the Interstate 225 corridor and eventually widen that highway.

Currently, the Regional Transportation District and the Colorado Department of Transportation are looking at how RTD will expand light rail from Parker Road at I-225 north to near I-70. The expansion is part of the heavily-funded FasTracks program adopted by voters about four years ago.

Both RTD engineers and their counterparts from the state agree that it would be cheaper, more convenient and easier for I-225 to be widened to six lanes at the same time light rail is built in the median. There's no doubt that the vastly overused highway is in need of widening. State officials have planned for and promised the widening for decades, always agreeing instead that there were more pressing needs elsewhere in the state. And that's happened again.

RTD is now trying to create a plan to install light rail in advance of the widening, losing out on a host of economic and practical benefits of building the entire system out, similar to how it was done on the T-REX project.

Someone needs to intervene because this makes no sense. The widening of I-225 has been "on the books" for almost as many years as the highway has been paved. It's been on the "go list" for decades, waiting only for funding. In the meantime, countless other metro area projects have moved ahead.

A state as remarkable as Colorado doesn't have to see its transportation department implement this much waste. Someone needs to find a way to do what it takes to find the funding now to complete the widening of I-225 from essentially East Alameda Avenue to Parker Road.

Aurora has long been a good soldier for the past few decades, paying for its own interchange while other metro-area communities didn't have to, and waiting and waiting for its turn while helping pay for others that always seemed to move ahead. It's time to reward Aurora for that patience and reward all state taxpayers with a prudent plan.