Arvada will not proceed with the construction of a voter-approved underpass beneath railroad tracks on West 72nd Avenue because the estimated cost to build the tunnel has mushroomed as negotiations with Union Pacific, which owns the tracks, have bogged down.
The 72nd Avenue improvement project was part of an $80 million bond issue approved by voters in 2018. That package also included upgrades to Ralston Road near Olde Town Arvada. The Ralston Road work was completed in 2024 at a cost of $24 million.
The 72nd Avenue piece of Ballot Issue 3F was originally slated to cost $64.5 million. Two-thirds of it has already been completed, including widening a stretch of the road between Simms and Oak streets to four lanes. But this week, the city announced it was no longer feasible to build the underpass west of Kipling Street.
“The benefit just simply isn’t worth the inflated cost of the underpass,” City Manager Don Wick told Arvada City Council at a meeting Tuesday night.
The original cost of $64.5 million for improvements to the entire corridor had exploded to a projected $137 million because of “extreme inflation in the transportation construction industry in the last five years,” the city wrote in a news release issued this week.
Wick told the council there was another factor at play.
“Here’s the bottom line: The railroad did not want the grade separation,” he said, referring to the practice of boring the road under the tracks to obviate the need for a rail crossing and to do away with motorists having to wait for a train to cross.
A slide presented at Tuesday’s meeting outlined a detailed five-year negotiation process with Union Pacific that yielded no solution to the impasse.
Arvada Mayor Lauren Simpson called the cancellation one of the “hardest realities we’ve had to face” in her six years on council.
Several other council members expressed disappointment in the decision to scuttle the underpass project, which was first conceived 30 years ago as part of the city’s comprehensive plan. More than 18,000 vehicles drive over the tracks each day.
“What can we do in the future so we don’t put something out in the public and then have to immediately reverse course like this?” Councilman Michael Griffiths asked.
Wick said accurately estimating costs for complex infrastructure projects is notoriously difficult, especially in an inflationary environment.
While the underpass itself was not in the language of the 2018 ballot measure, plans for its design had been released by the city ahead of the election, said Katie Patterson, a spokeswoman for the city’s infrastructure department.
The city pitched the bond issue as “Two Big Projects, No New Taxes.” That’s because Arvada had finished paying off a previously issued bond, freeing up $4.5 million in annual payments already accounted for in the city budget. With Ballot Issue 3F, voters essentially agreed to allow the money from the previous bond to be applied to the new bond.
The city warned in its announcement this week that trying to pay for the underpass construction at the higher cost could jeopardize the city’s reserve fund and take money from other capital projects.
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Jacqueline Rhoades, the infrastructure director for Arvada, told the council that the city now planned to repave the stretch of 72nd from Oak Street to Kipling Street that was being prepped for the underpass project. Her department will also look into widening the road at the railroad tracks that lack a grade separation so that it doesn’t continue to act as a two-lane bottleneck.
The city is organizing an open house at 5 p.m. Feb. 2 at the Apex Community Recreation Center, 6842 Wadsworth Blvd., to allow residents to ask questions about what happened and about the best next steps to take.
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