Opponents of Rocky Flats regional trail route press Westminster to withdraw money for bridge, underpass

Opponents of a planned regional trail across Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge are pressing their public safety concerns at Westminster City Hall just two months before construction is set to begin on a bridge and an underpass needed for the project.

The group is attempting to scuttle those plans by persuading city leaders to back off a $220,000 contribution to a $4.7 million Federal Lands Access Program grant that would fund the trail’s connection points at Rocky Flats. The site is the former home of a Cold War nuclear weapons manufacturing plant that underwent an intensive cleanup.

The City Council discussed that contribution during a study session Monday. The activists’ hope is that if Westminster pulled out of the project, like Broomfield did four years ago, it could mean the end of the effort to route the Rocky Mountain Greenway trail through potentially contaminated land.

The routing would rely on a pedestrian bridge across Indiana Street on the east and an underpass beneath Colorado 128 on the north.

“The toxicity of plutonium is incontrovertible,” Randy Stafford said during a Monday afternoon news conference. He has served on the Jefferson Parkway Advisory Committee and has monitored contamination from former nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities across the country. “It is morally irresponsible to encourage people to recreate there.”

The council will make a final decision on the matter at a future meeting.

The Rocky Flats trail opponents sued several federal agencies in January, claiming they violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not considering alternatives to construction of an 8-mile trail “through the most heavily plutonium-contaminated portion” of the refuge.

Their effort gained new life in early April, when Michael Ketterer, a professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, captured plutonium in airborne dust blowing off the refuge on a windy day. Excavation to anchor a footbridge on Indiana Street would run the risk of uncovering and releasing more of the hazardous element, he said.

“The more we disturb the soil, the greater the transfer of this stuff from federal property to non-federal property,” he said Monday. “It’s a very windy place at Rocky Flats.”

But Dave Abelson, the executive director of the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, said Ketterer’s plutonium readings in April — ranging from 0.15 picocuries to 1.19 picocuries per gram of soil — were well below what the federal government considers hazardous.

The standard for cleanup of the Rocky Flats plant, where triggers for nuclear weapons were manufactured over a 40-year period, was 50 picocuries per gram.

“What his data is showing confirms what we have been seeing for nearly 20 years — that there are extremely low levels of radionuclides in the soils of Rocky Flats,” Abelson said. “There is nothing new here — rather it confirms prior studies.”

Refuge Manager David Lucas wouldn’t comment on ongoing litigation, but he said contractors were completing final submittals for a September start to construction of both the bridge and the underpass. Rocky Flats officially opened as a national wildlife refuge in 2018.