Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists captured the wolf on Aug. 30 and it died on Sept. 3, the agency announced Monday. Biologists had found the wolf, identified as 2309-OR, in poor condition, with several injuries to a hind leg and severely underweight, according to CPW.

“CPW staff believes that it was unlikely the wolf would have survived for very long in the wild,” the agency said in a news release.

State wildlife officials decided in August to capture the Copper Creek pack after the male wolf killed and maimed multiple cattle and sheep in the Middle Park area. The removal of the wolves from the wild was a setback for the voter-mandated effort to reintroduce the apex predator to the state’s landscape, beginning with the release of 10 wolves in the state in December.

Another of the reintroduced wolves died this spring. The state’s known wolf population now stands at 14: eight survivors among the reintroduced adults, plus the four pups from the Copper Creek pack and two adult wolves remaining from a pack established earlier by wolves that migrated from Wyoming.

The decision to recapture the pack came with risk and uncertainty, CPW Director Jeff Davis said in an interview. Wildlife officials did not want to remove the male wolf while the pups and the female wolf relied on his hunting for survival.

“We’re trying to balance the fact that we have so few animals on the landscape, and (we have) our mandate to restore a sustainable population of wolves while avoiding and minimizing impacts to the ranching industry,” he said. “There was an opportunity to remove the animals from the area of conflict, kind of reassess what the next steps are.”

An outside agency will investigate the cause of death of the male wolf and release a report, Davis said. He expected the investigation to take between 45 and 60 days.

The rest of the recaptured Copper Creek pack — a female wolf and four pups, one more than previously known — were captured and will be held in a facility for eventual rerelease.

The pups were underweight but otherwise healthy and taken with their mother to a “large, secure enclosure with limited human interaction,” according to CPW.

Citing a concern for the safety of the wolves, Davis declined to provide more details about the facility — including whether the facility is public or private and whether it is in Colorado.

Rerelease planned later in fall

The agency plans to release the remaining pack together between mid-November and December, once the pups have reached adult size, Davis said. Biologists will collar the pups before release, he said.

The pack will be released within the same broad area where the wolves were set loose in December, Davis said. The zone stretches north to south between Kremmling and Aspen, and east to west between Loveland Pass and Rifle.

CPW officials will speak with local elected officials and landowners in possible release areas before it occurs, according to the agency.

Davis and other CPW officials began discussing the possibility of removing and relocating the Copper Creek pack in early August, he said. The agency announced its decision to capture the pack five days after the operation was underway.

CPW began attempts to capture the pack on Aug. 22. Its biologists captured the wolves using leg-hold traps over the next two weeks, in this order:

• Aug. 24: adult female, 2312-OR
• Aug. 30: adult male, 2309-OR
• Tuesday: male pup, 2401
• Wednesday: male pups, 2403 and 2405
• Thursday: female pup, 2402

Wildlife officials continued to work in the area until Sunday to ensure all pups were captured.

“After three more days of operations, CPW felt confident there were no additional pups on the landscape,” according to the agency’s news release.

CPW veterinarians do not believe the leg-hold trap caused the injury to the now-deceased male wolf’s leg, Davis said.

The leg had puncture wounds high on the inside of the back right leg, which a leg-hold trap could not inflict on an adult wolf, Davis said. That leg was atrophied and the hair on the paw had grown long, indicating that the foot had not been used regularly for a long time, Davis said. Veterinarians administered antibiotics to the captured wolf to treat infection from the wound.

State deviated from its own plan

CPW’s wolf management plan states that relocating wolves to halt depredations “has little technical merit,” since the wolves could return to their previous territory or simply start killing livestock in their new area.

Davis acknowledged that the relocation decision strayed from the plan, but he said it was a necessary choice when trying to balance the mandate to restore wolves and also “take a little bit of steam or temperature out of the ranching community by removing the conflict.”

The majority of the 24 cattle and sheep killed and maimed by wolves since reintroduction were attacked by the paired wolves that formed the Copper Creek pack, CPW officials previously said.

“This isn’t necessarily exactly what our plan says, but this is a little bit of a perfect storm event, so it requires some flexibility and unique solutions going forward,” Davis said.

The four pups had not been involved with the livestock but were approaching the age when they would begin hunting with the adults, Davis said. It’s unclear whether the female wolf has killed or injured any cattle or sheep, he said.

Had the male wolf survived, he would have been held in captivity permanently, CPW officials said at news conference Monday afternoon.

While it is difficult to digest the death of the male wolf, the relocation was the best option for CPW at the time, said Rob Edward, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, which supported reintroduction. Now that the pack has been relocated, CPW can pivot to focusing more on preventing depredation by coordinating earlier with ranches that have a wolf presence nearby.

CPW also can make sure ranchers have easy access to nonlethal deterrents, he said.

“Now we can turn our attention to why CPW had to relocate these wolves — and what they can do better as they implement the will of the voters,” Edward said.

Despite the death of two of the 10 animals released in December, CPW officials remain optimistic that the reintroduction program will succeed.

“I’m not concerned about the overall success of the program,” Eric Odell, CPW’s wolf conservation program manager, said during the news conference.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

Draft plans for Weir Gulch — which envision the acquisition of up to 70 residential properties — are now more than five years old. But they’ve attracted only limited public notice as city officials have discussed larger plans to revitalize the South Platte system.

City and federal officials emphasize that those plans are subject to change as they ramp up public outreach to impacted residents and get a clearer picture of what flood risk looks like in 2024 and beyond.

While some potentially affected residents in the Barnum and Barnum West neighborhoods told The Denver Post they were aware of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 2019 study and property map, the risks and project recommendations were news to at least some who live a stone’s throw from Weir Gulch.

Miki Yang, who lives two doors down from the gulch on Perry Street, had no idea last week that her property was part of any federal environmental study or real estate plan. She has lived in her home for three years but has owned the property for over a decade, renting it out to others before moving in with her family.

“Kind of strange,” she said after learning from a reporter that her home was circled on the Army Corps map, recommended for acquisition. “I never heard about it.”

Improvements along Weir Gulch and Harvard Gulch are planned as part of a larger South Platte revitalization project that has won $350 million in federal funding for the city. The Post reported Sunday on the significant potential impact on the horizon as city officials, developers and nonprofits work on projects to improve the South Platte and build dense new neighborhoods alongside it.

Water-flow and habitat projects along the gulches, which travel through Denver neighborhoods on their way to the river, are still being solidified.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2019 published a report identifying roughly 70 residences — mainly in the Barnum neighborhoods — that may need to be acquired to make room for the expansion and improvement of Weir Gulch. The total value at the time was $23.1 million, the report says.

As for south Denver’s Harvard Gulch, the Army Corps determined that there was no economically feasible plan for acquiring structures. Instead, it recommended voluntary participation by some homeowners in flood-proofing measures, such as elevation improvements to their lots or having their basements filled in.

Reducing flooding during storms

Weir Gulch, a zig-zagging waterway, takes the form of a close-to-natural creek bed in some places. In other segments, it’s an open-air concrete basin or runs completely underground. It travels under roadways, park space with playgrounds and even some buildings as it ferries water from Lakewood to the Platte in the Sun Valley neighborhood.

Weir Gulch and the areas around it represent the largest unmitigated flood risk in the city, said Ashlee Grace, director of Denver’s Waterway Resiliency Program, an overall $550 million project.

“The intent is definitely to increase the conveyance capacity so (that) it keeps the flows in the channel, and not spilling into the community that surrounds it” after heavy rainfall, Grace said.

Despite that 2019 report, officials say it’s not a certainty that the city and its partners with the Mile High Flood District will need to acquire the homes identified by the Army Corps.

Design work is complete only for the portion of the Weir Gulch project in Sun Valley between where it meets the river and West Eighth Avenue, city officials say.

The city negotiated the purchases of five commercial properties last year to make that first phase possible, according to Nancy Kuhn, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. Of those parcels, two were vacant land and the others housed tenants including a construction company, a software firm, and a granite slab testing and storage business.

“Additional portions of Weir Gulch have not yet moved into the design phase, so it’s too early to know what, if any, property impacts there will be,” Kuhn wrote in an email last month.

In an emailed statement, Bert Matya, the project manager overseeing the South Platte River and tributaries work from the Army Corps’ side, also said that it was too early to specify property impacts beyond the Sun Valley section.

“The Corps looks forward to working alongside Denver to develop innovative approaches that deliver the intended benefits of the project to the community,” Matya said.

City-led outreach aimed at better determining the risk in those neighborhoods will begin in 2025, according to Kuhn, though she said the Mile High Flood District may start reaching out to people who live along the gulch sooner.

The study phase of the broader Waterway Resiliency Program dates back to the Obama administration, and the program has evolved over the more than 10 years since the Army Corps launched that assessment. It reached two major milestones in 2022, Grace said, when it was granted the $350 million in upfront federal money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Denver became part of an Army Corps pilot program.

That pilot is aimed at overhauling how the U.S. government approaches massive infrastructure projects, with an aim of speeding up timelines and saving money. Part of that is accomplished by giving local governments more control.

“That puts Denver in the driver’s seat of project delivery and the Army Corps in the approve-review role, which is a complete role reversal,” Grace said.

Moving “would turn my life upside down”

In the Barnum West neighborhood, Caroline Cordova has had a portion of the concrete channel of Weir Gulch as a neighbor for 25 years. She knew her home on Quitman Street was on a map of potential acquisitions for the waterway project after attending some community meetings about it a few years ago, she said.

Her takeaway from those meetings was that officials hoped to avoid using eminent domain to acquire properties to make way for the work.

But Cordova has no interest in selling her home and moving. She said she’d never been affected by flooding even when the water was high in the channel next door. In the high-priced Denver housing market, she’s not even sure where she would go. Her house has tripled in value since she bought it.

“It would turn my life upside down if I had to move,” Cordova said.  “As far as I am concerned, I am there until the day I die.”

City Councilwoman Jamie Torres, who represents west Denver neighborhoods, said improving Weir Gulch is going to be a very challenging project that will require “potentially scary conversations.”

She emphasized that discussions about home acquisitions, should any be necessary, could still be years in the future.

But Torres has already advised one homeowner who lives near the gulch not to build an accessory dwelling unit on her property, at least not before the city has provided more clarity.

“I hate to think of my residents taking on additional real debt when we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen in this gulch area,” Torres said. “At the end of the entire process, though, we want to help create a much safer corridor. We want to help utilize this open space so it can be a better park system for residents (and) a better trail system for residents.

“So we’re just trying to make sure that we’re very honest and very careful about that conversation.”

Grace, from the city, said the city’s increased authority over how the project is run already is netting some benefits.

The section of the Weir Gulch that the city will get to work on next year in Sun Valley was eyed for a long box culvert in the 2019 study. Denver instead will build a bridge over an open channel at Decatur Street, a design change that Grace says will improve safety during high-water events and provide more accessible open space the rest of the time.

“One of the strengths Denver brings to the table is we know our community,” Grace said. “We’re in the midst of updating what was understood to be the conditions in 2019.”

Barnum and Barnum West have been identified by the city as neighborhoods vulnerable to economic displacement. After looking at the Army Corps’ map, Ean Thomas Tafoya couldn’t help but notice all the Latino last names listed on the properties identified for potential acquisition.

Tafoya is a former Denver mayoral candidate and the Colorado director of Green Latinos, which advocates for environmental justice issues. He also grew up in Barnum and remembers catching crawdads in Weir Gulch.

Tafoya said he supports projects that protect water quality and reduce flood risks. But he has seen Denver’s minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of the impacts of other large infrastructure projects, like the recent Interstate 70 expansion in northeast Denver.

He expressed hope that city leaders could find solutions that don’t uproot residents along Weir Gulch.

“In the middle of a housing crisis and a climate crisis, we think the solution is to displace historic Latino communities?” Tafoya asked.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

While a new era of river revitalization projects and riverside development plans is taking hold, water quality often remains below state standards. Some sections of the South Platte still stink. And despite a promise by former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock to make the river swimmable, city health officials still warn against going in the water — especially during the summer months.

“If you want to go swimming, go to a swimming pool — you’re much safer there,” said Jon Novick, the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment’s water quality program administrator.

The recent swell of attention on the South Platte — by developers, community leaders and city officials working to improve conditions — has highlighted the many environmental challenges still present.

Wastewater plants discharge effluent into the river, and companies such as Suncor Energy release a range of substances into the South Platte and the streams that flow into it. Among them: inorganic nitrogen, arsenic and the class of PFAS compounds known as “forever chemicals.”

Denver’s health department for decades has tracked a swath of contaminants as well as river conditions. The department monitors water temperature, acidity, nutrients and metals.

But the department’s biggest concern is E. coli bacteria, which can cause infections or sicken people if ingested, Novick said. E. coli can enter the water through animal or human waste. Denver’s aging infrastructure means that sometimes wastewater pipes leak sewage, which eventually reaches the river, he said. All of the city’s stormwater flushes to the South Platte.

The bacteria spreads faster in the warmer waters of summer, which is when people are most likely to want to take a dip. E. coli concentrations increase as the river flows downstream to the north.

In its most recent water quality report, published last October, the DDPHE ranked South Platte water quality as “fair” — above “marginal” and “poor,” but below “good.” E. coli levels exceeded the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission’s standard year-round in 2022. The river also exceeded standards for arsenic, which is naturally occurring in the bedrock under the city.

The river also suffers from the byproducts of the millions of people who live nearby. Anything on Denver’s streets and sidewalks not blown away or picked up eventually makes its way to the river: trash, lawn fertilizers, runoff from roads, pet waste, oil and grease from vehicles.

Part of the Mile High Flood District’s work is to help local governments better clean stormwater before it reaches the river.

The district — founded in the wake of Denver’s catastrophic 1965 flood — has tracked some positive trends in the river’s health. Nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen have generally declined, said Holly Piza, the district’s research and development director. The nutrients from products like fertilizers can cause algae blooms and hurt aquatic ecosystems.

But other water quality issues are worsening, she said, including salinity — which hurts aquatic life and can damage infrastructure.

Attempts to mitigate the problem across Denver include a set of bioretention ponds outside the Carla Madison Recreation Center on Colfax Avenue. Those help retain water after rainfall and filter it through the dirt, instead of allowing all the water to flow immediately toward the river.

Novick and Piza urge Denverites to be more thoughtful: Don’t use fertilizers with phosphorus or nitrogen. Don’t litter. Wash your car at a car wash. Make sure sprinklers are watering grass, not pavement.

“There’s a ton the city is doing to improve water quality,” Novick said, “but we can’t be everywhere and we can’t do it all.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

Voters in November will decide whether to ban the practice, along with the trapping of bobcats. That prospect has set off a deluge of competing claims about what will happen if big-cat hunting ceases.

People supporting the ban say that mountain lion populations are self-regulating and will stabilize at a level supported by their available habitat and food resources. Those opposed to Initiative 91, meanwhile, say a hunting ban would induce a rapid increase in the number of big cats, which in turn would pose a significant threat to deer and elk herds.

The truth is likely a mix of the two, according to studies and experts.

But beyond biology, the statewide ballot measure is asking Coloradans to consider deeper questions about the future of Colorado’s wildlife, both opponents and supporters said.

State wildlife managers now set hunting limits on the number of mountain lions that can be killed while still maintaining a lion population, said Samantha Miller, the manager of the Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign. The ballot initiative’s proponents want wildlife managers to focus instead on how to foster the best and healthiest population possible for the intrinsic value of having the animal roam the landscape.

“I think it’s a fundamentally different question that we’re asking,” Miller said.

Mountain lion hunters represent about 1% of the more than 200,000 big-game hunting licenses the state sells every year. But hunters opposed to the measure fear it’s the first step in a slippery slope toward banning all hunting.

“You start taking out pieces of the puzzle and soon you don’t have a puzzle,” said Dan Gates, executive director and co-founder of the Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association. He’s a leader in a number of groups opposing the ban, including Colorado Wildlife Deserves Better, Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project and Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management.

Self-regulation or out-of-control growth?

The number of mountain lions in Colorado is difficult to determine because of their elusive and solitary nature. Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists estimate between 3,800 and 4,400 adult lions live in the state and say the population has grown since the species was classified as a big game species in 1965.

State biologists do not have an estimate for how many bobcats live in Colorado, but they believe the population is healthy and may be increasing in some areas.

Neither mountain lions nor bobcats are listed as federally threatened or endangered species. An estimated 20,000 to 40,000 mountain lions live in the U.S., as do more than 1.4 million bobcats.

“Both informal and recently collected empirical data suggest Colorado’s lion population is strong and lions are abundant in appropriate habitat,” states a Colorado Parks and Wildlife pamphlet on the species.

In the 2022-2023 hunting season — the most recent for which CPW data is publicly available — 2,599 people bought mountain lion hunting licenses and hunters killed 502 lions, making for a 19% success rate.

Those with opposing views of the ballot initiative posit different futures should mountain lion hunting be banned. But the truth is likely a mix of the two, said Jerry Apker, a retired CPW wildlife biologist who worked as the statewide carnivore biologist for 17 years before his 2017 retirement.

Populations would likely spike in the first years after hunting ends before increased mortality rates temper that growth, Apker said. Eventually, mountain lion populations tend to reach a stasis and fluctuate based on what food and habitat is available.

The felines have larger litters with higher survival rates when more resources are available, but in times of stress, they have smaller litters and more mortalities.

A cessation in hunting would also likely increase human interactions and conflicts with lions, he said. The most hunted lions are typically subadults and young adults — the same lions still working to establish home ranges. More young lions on the landscape means they will eventually be pushed to subprime habitats as well as more populated areas.

There’s no way of knowing how many mountain lions would live in Colorado should hunting stop — there’s never been a statewide research study done on the question, Apker said.

“I think the statements of doom and gloom that they’re going to take over are a convenient argument, but that’s not true,” he said.

Apker opposes the effort to ban mountain lion hunting, but he said other opponents’ argument that the ban would decimate elk and deer herds is far fetched. While predation might increase, the largest impacts to deer and elk populations would come from human alteration of the landscape. Less habitat, the degradation of existing habitat and brutal winters are significantly larger factors that determine population change.

California comparison

Colorado and other western states have enacted various levels of restrictions on mountain lion hunting.

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission earlier this year ended the state’s spring mountain lion season, instead restricting legal hunting to a single season that runs from November through March. The commission also banned hunters from using electronic recordings of other lions or distressed prey to lure mountain lions to an area.

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission in July voted in favor of stricter limits and shorter seasons for cougar hunting. It acted on a petition filed by a number of local and national conservation and animal rights groups.

California voters in 1990 chose to ban mountain lion hunting in the state permanently, though hunting of the felines had not been permitted since 1972 — when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a moratorium. California is the only state with a full ban on hunting pumas, and it officially states that its aim is to instead conserve the species “for their ecological and intrinsic values,” according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

A study published in 2020 compared California’s lion population with those in 10 western states where hunting is legal, including Colorado. The authors found that California had similar cougar population densities and similar average deer densities as the other states.

California also had the third-lowest rate of cougar-human conflicts per capita, similar rates of cattle depredation and lower rates of sheep depredations.

“In sum, our analysis of the records obtained from state and federal wildlife agencies found no evidence that sport hunting of pumas has produced the management outcomes sought by wildlife managers aside from providing a sport hunting opportunity,” the authors wrote.

Charges of “ballot-box biology”

Proponents of the hunting ban say it is a way to address unethical hunting methods, like the use of dogs, and whether hunting is necessary to manage lion populations. Opponents say it is another example of “ballot-box biology” that lets the majority make decisions often left to wildlife managers.

Apker disagrees the initiative is “ballot-box biology” — he doesn’t think it’s about biology at all. Instead, the question is a broader referendum on hunting as a whole, he said.

“The bottom line is that there are people who think hunting is wrong,” said Apker, who has voiced his opposition to the ballot measure publicly.

Proponents of the ban say hunting for mountain lions is trophy hunting because hunters are allegedly seeking the thrill of the hunt as well as the skins and heads of lions — not the meat. The ballot measure, if passed, would ban trophy hunting, defined as hunting “practiced primarily for the display of an animal’s head, fur, or other body parts, rather than for utilization of the meat.”

Cougar hunters have said repeatedly that while they do often pose with their kill — just like elk and deer hunters — they also eat the meat and are not hunting solely for a trophy. Colorado law requires that mountain lion meat be prepared for consumption by hunters. Gates, from the hunters association, has made steaks, tacos and burritos from lion meat.

“Not only do people eat mountain lion, but they also cherish mountain lion,” he said.

But ballot initiative supporters express doubt — Miller, for one, says there’s no way to know whether meat is eaten. The campaign is not against hunting, she said, but opposes unethical hunting.

“There are plenty of other species to hunt that aren’t so problematic under hunting ethics,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project and a lifelong hunter, during a news conference last month in support of the ban.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

Nitrogen and ammonia, largely generated by heavy traffic along the Front Range and by agriculture in Larimer and Weld counties, are carried by air currents to the highest elevations of the treasured national park and deposited by rain and snow onto sensitive alpine tundra, where thin soil and delicate plants struggle to buffer the pollution.

If the contamination worsens, wildflowers could disappear and algae could bloom in alpine lakes, changing the waters’ look and endangering fish, scientists told The Denver Post.

“This issue gets worse as you go up in elevation as the sensitivity gets higher,” Jim Cheatham, an environmental protection specialist with the National Park Service’s air resource division, said during a recent meeting with Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission.

Over time, the excess nitrogen — largely from vehicle exhaust — acts as a fertilizer to plants and changes the ecosystem, said Jill Baron, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and senior research scientist at Colorado State University.

“You’re fertilizing Rocky Mountain National Park,” Baron said. “But you don’t really want to fertilize a national park.”

Baron, who has spent her career studying excess nitrogen’s effect on the park, said she has seen the beginnings of algae growing in mountain lakes because they are getting nutrients from increased nitrogen in the air.

“It’s a change from pristine conditions,” she said. “We are not at the bright green and stinky stage yet, but we are at the beginning.”

The point of creating national parks was to preserve pristine land across the United States, so scientists want to protect Rocky Mountain’s natural beauty and prevent as much human-caused change as possible, Cheatham said.

“The tundra is the primary resource the park was created to protect,” he said.

Over the years, state and federal air quality regulators have managed to reduce the amount of wet nitrogen — how the main pollutant is identified once it becomes trapped in rain or snow — that drifts into the park. But the amount of wet nitrogen falling in the park is 0.6 kilograms short of a 2022 goal of 2.2 kilograms per hectare per year, according to an Aug. 15 milestone report presented to the Air Quality Control Commission.

Ammonia pollution exceeds nitrogen

One component of wet nitrogen — nitrogen oxides — has been reduced since the project began nearly 20 years ago.

However, ammonia — which is also a form of nitrogen — has increased, according to the Rocky Mountain National Park Initiative’s 2022 Nitrogen Deposition Milestone Report. In fact, ammonia is now a bigger pollutant in the park, exceeding nitrogen deposits since 2013.

The push to clean the air in the Rocky Mountain National Park began in 2004 when the Environmental Defense Fund and Trout Unlimited petitioned the federal government for improvement. Over the years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment have created plans to reduce air pollution that damages the park’s ecosystem.

This project is different than another effort to reduce the haze that is visible from Rocky Mountain National Park and other federally protected areas. That haze is created by severe ozone pollution in the region. And Rocky Mountain National Park isn’t the only Colorado park impacted by the haze.

Every five years, scientists from the National Park Service and the state health department present a report to the Air Quality Control Commission, which establishes rules to regulate air pollution in the state. The most recent report was presented in August, and the next one is due in 2029. The latest Rocky Mountain National Park Initiative report is open to public comment until Sept. 23.

In between reports, scientists monitor the park’s air quality and work with various partners, including the Colorado Livestock Association and Colorado Dairy Farmers, to figure out ways to reduce pollutants flowing into the park.

The bulk of the nitrogen pollution comes from the nitrogen oxides produced by burning fossil fuels through driving gasoline-powered cars and trucks, as well as oil and gas production.

Rocky Mountain suffers from the same severe ozone pollution seen in metro Denver and the northern Front Range, Cheatham said. So any attempts to improve air quality through emissions reductions in lower elevations will help the park.

Scientists have recorded a 15% reduction in nitrogen pollution in the past five years, Cheatham said.

However, ammonia pollution has increased, with the highest recorded levels occurring in 2021, according to the presentation given to the air commission.

That pollution is generated by agriculture, primarily in Weld and Larimer counties. Cattle waste, particularly from feed lots, contains ammonia and fertilizer poured onto crops contains nitrogen. Overall, the number of beef cattle in the region increased between 2018 and 2022, which was the period studied, and the number of dairy cattle reached maximum capacity in 2021, according to the latest report.

In the spring and fall when upslope weather patterns carry air from the south and southeast into the park, the ammonia from the cows is swept into the mountains, said Jeffrey Collett Jr., a CSU professor of atmospheric science.

“All of these things get pushed up the slope of the mountains,” Collett said. “As that happens, the air is expanding and cooling and you often form clouds, and that results in heavy precipitation.”

Agriculture in Larimer and Weld counties generates more than $2.5 billion annually for Colorado’s economy, according to an Aug. 15 presentation by Bonnie Laws of the Colorado Livestock Association.

Preserving “icons of pristine national beauty”

Beef producers and dairy farmers want to do their part in reducing emissions and protecting the national park, but it’s a tricky balance, Laws said during her presentation.

“Sometimes when you control air emissions you could end up creating a water quality problem or you could end up with practices that increase greenhouse gasses,” she said.

Farmers and ranchers try to reduce pollutants by being more efficient with food or fertilizer that contains nitrogen. The more difficult challenge is finding ways to minimize it on the back end.

One of the tools available is an early warning system for agriculture producers that notifies them when an upslope storm is in the forecast. The producers receive emails and text messages days ahead of the predicted storm so they can change how they manage their livestock.

For example, a feedlot manager could hold off on cleaning big manure piles, which kicks up ammonia, or change their pen cleaning schedules until the storm passes, Collett said.

Some are testing whether wetting a pen’s surface ahead of a storm reduces the amount of pollutants lifted into the air. Others are looking at whether changing the nitrogen and protein in animal feed would make a difference.

“There are people working on trying to test these different practices to find ways to reduce these ammonia emissions without impacting their ability to produce beef or milk or whatever their goal is in the operation,” Collett said.

Megan McCarthy, a senior air quality planner with the state health department, said the combined efforts are slowing the potential damage to the park and the various agencies and organizations involved are a one-of-a-kind effort in the country.

Baron, the ecologist, said there are some things, such as large-scale global warming, that cannot be controlled by people in Colorado. But efforts to reduce nitrogen oxides emissions statewide not only help the park but also people who suffer from respiratory ailments.

“Catching it early rather than waiting until it’s a crisis has been very helpful,” she said. “These parks are important to the American people as well as all over the world. The lakes themselves are icons of pristine national beauty. It’s one of the few places on Earth where things are protected.

“Those things are fixable if we have the social and political willpower to do so.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

Even now, after decades of revitalization and efforts to stabilize flows, sections of the urban South Platte still smell of decay and waste, and city officials discourage swimming. But cyclists also pedal along miles of paved trails on the riverfront. Kayakers and surfers play in the whitewater. Carp and trout lurk under bridges, while families of ducks paddle along the calmer waters. And strips of green parks border long stretches of the river where, in previous decades, factories spewed sludge and landfills leached pollutants.

After a long era of neglect and abuse, city officials, nonprofit leaders and developers hope to build on that progress as they pose a question for the future: How can we turn the city toward the river — the waterway that made Denver’s existence on the High Plains possible — instead of putting it at our backs and ignoring it?

More than a quarter of a billion federal dollars are flowing into ecosystem restoration and flood management along the South Platte. For the first time, the Denver City Council recently created a committee dedicated to issues on and development near the river.

Developers plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars along the river in coming years, building as much as 15 million square feet of combined new residential and commercial space on the land where Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park sits today. If completed, that square footage will be nearly five times larger than Denver International Airport’s terminal building.

Should that and other ambitious projects reach their full potential, the Platte would serve as a focal point of brand new high-rise urban neighborhoods that expand the city’s skyline in a new direction.

“The South Platte River is the birthright of Denver,” said Jeff Shoemaker, who for 40 years led a nonprofit group created to advocate for the river. “We took that birthright and made it a toilet. Fifty years later, it can once again be celebrated as its birthright.”

Property owners ranging from the Denver Housing Authority to Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, to the city itself will all play roles in determining how new construction capitalizes on a restored South Platte.

The impending turnover of underutilized and unappreciated land has generated buzz and a glut of glossy renderings. At the same time, it’s inducing heartburn in some corners of the city that have seen new investment like that drive gentrification in nearby low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Still, establishing the river as an asset rather than a barrier to urban growth is a sea change that veteran Denver city-builders like architect Chris Shears have hoped for decades would come.

His firm, Shears Adkins Rockmore, has its hands in nearly every landscape-shifting project being contemplated near the South Platte today. The plans include transforming the vast parking lots around Empower Field and Ball Arena into new mixed-use neighborhoods.

Another project to the south would turn the long-vacant field once occupied by the Gates Rubber Co., just south of the Regional Transportation District’s Broadway Station, into a mixed-use community. Plans call for more than 550,000 square feet of office and retail space and nearly 900 apartments.

He compares the opportunities in front of the city today to the 1980s, when then-Mayor Federico Peña set an ambitious agenda that would lead to Denver’s evolution from a stagnant plains town to a modern metropolis.

“This is the time to plan for the future and be optimistic,” Shears said. “The river is going to be much, much more important.”

The South Platte has served as a geographic divide between east and west Denver for nearly all of the city’s existence. Generations of city residents compounded that division by adding man-made barriers, including Interstate 25 and the consolidated freight rail lines, that follow the river’s path.

For Denver city planner David Gaspers, the public and private investment in the river’s restoration and the surging interest in new development near the water present a chance to overwrite some of the mistakes of the past.

“It’s an opportunity to make Denver feel whole again,” Gaspers said. “It’s not a barrier. It’s actually a place where people want to come together.”

After century of neglect, a flood changed everything

French explorers named the South Platte River for its lassitude — in French, “platte” means flat. Some called it the “upside-down river” since, in some places, one had to dig into the riverbed to find water.

Indigenous people for centuries wintered near the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek, eventually joined by explorers, French trappers and Mexican gold seekers. In 1858, after prospectors found gold nearby, Denver was born on the banks of the confluence.

The South Platte’s year-round water allowed for settlement and population growth on the arid High Plains.

“The South Platte is the cradle and birthplace of the city,” said Tom Noel, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado Denver who has authored numerous books and textbooks about Colorado history. “But it took quite a while for people to respect it.”

Early Denver’s industry grew along the river. Hog farms, stockyards, factories and landfills sprouted on its banks in the late 1800s because the river could carry off all the waste, Noel said.

Workers at a paint factory on the river used to stand behind the facility and watch the river turn the color of the paint being made that day as the factory’s discharge reached the water.

The river held the city’s darker secrets: bodies, cast-off burglary loot. Only the poorest of the poor lived near the water.

The waste, the chemicals and the sludge accumulated. A Rocky Mountain News reporter in 1962 toured the river as the city considered building a sanitation project and wrote that he came away with tears in his eyes.

“The tears weren’t from emotion,” the reporter wrote. “It was from the stench. The foul odors were enough to lift the hat from your head.”

The neglected river took its vengeance in 1965. After days of rain, its waters surged on June 16, building into a moving wall that picked up debris as it rushed toward Denver — cars, mobile homes and heavy equipment all caught in the swell.

The flood killed at least 20 people in the Denver area and caused $5.4 billion in damage in today’s dollars — one of the most devastating natural disasters in city history. It wiped out railyards, warehouses, neighborhoods and all but one of the city’s bridges spanning the water.

As the river split the city, Denver state Sen. Joe Shoemaker received a call while working on his family’s farm in Iowa during a summer break. His son, Jeff, remembered his father coming back from the house, face white as paper. He told the family the river had flooded.

“What river?” responded Jeff Shoemaker, then 11 years old.

Despite growing up in Denver, he didn’t know a river existed — an ignorance, or at least common disregard, held by many in the burgeoning city until the river tried to wash it away.

The flood — and the phone call to the Shoemaker farm — altered the future of the South Platte.

In the aftermath, Denver Mayor Bill McNichols created the Platte River Development Committee in 1974 to restore the river and mitigate future flood risk. He appointed Joe Shoemaker as chairman.

A year later, the committee opened Confluence Park — the first park on the river. Though crews could build only a quarter mile of riverside trail in either direction before being blocked, the creation of the park marked a turning point in the river’s history.

The committee in 1976 morphed into the nonprofit Greenway Foundation, which methodically transformed landfills and industrial sites along the river into parks. A landfill became Globeville Landing Park. Eleven industrial sites became Commons Park, a stretch of green behind Union Station. A city maintenance site became Gates-Crescent Park, now home to the Children’s Museum of Denver.

“My dad’s motto, which is now mine, was: ‘There’s no done, there’s only next,’ ” said Jeff Shoemaker, who took over leadership of the Greenway Foundation in 1982 and worked there until his retirement in 2022.

As green spaces prospered on the riverbanks, more Denverites came to run, bike and picnic. The Greenway Foundation looked to the future, creating a series of master plans for the river and the land around it.

But the foundation — and other advocates who hoped the river could be more than a moving sewer — needed to overcome a culture that for decades ignored or scorned the South Platte.

While most Denverites now know the river exists, there is still work to be done to overcome its negative image, said Ryan Aids, current executive director of the Greenway Foundation.

“Every great city has a river running through it: Chicago, New York,” Aids said. “And every city has done what Denver did to its river in the beginning, which is neglect it, abandon it, pollute it, turn its back on it.

“Then cities started revitalization — to turn their front door to the river. And Denver is starting to do that as well.”

“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”

City documents recognize the potential in the land along the river.

The 2019 version of Blueprint Denver, the city’s comprehensive plan, includes a growth strategy map. It shows clusters of dense future development along the river, marking those areas as “regional centers.” Regional centers, as a category, are expected to provide 50% of the city’s job growth and 30% of its housing growth by 2040.

But with the renewed attention to long-neglected areas near the South Platte comes the specter that new money will push out longtime residents. As the city mitigates flood risk and pollution — the factors that made living near the river more of a curse than a blessing — low-income residents will be vulnerable to rising costs.

That’s a reality Denver knows well after some of its long-established Black and Latino neighborhoods, themselves largely the result of racist housing policy, faced rapid demographic change as the city’s population grew over the last two decades.

In west Denver, Councilwoman Jamie Torres’ district includes some of those long-neglected areas that are now seeing a swell of interest and investment.

Sun Valley is home to both subsidized housing and the Denver Broncos’ stadium. A framework plan to build on Empower Field’s south lots could be a catalyst for a stampede of new development — though that is on hold for now and depends on the whims of the franchise’s new ownership group, which hasn’t ruled out the option of building a new stadium elsewhere.

On the east side of the river, the Auraria neighborhood is the epicenter of ambitious projects that, if fully realized, could see the city’s skyline roughly double in size.

Much of that neighborhood, once home to a largely Latino community, was already wiped away and remade in the last century. After the 1965 flood battered the economically marginalized neighborhood, voters in 1969 passed a bond measure that laid the groundwork for the multi-school college campus that anchors the area today.

All the potential development near the river “can marginalize existing communities if there isn’t any way of shepherding that dialog together — because it’s just so based on property ownership,” Torres said. “That could be a really gentrifying factor.”

But the council’s newly formed committee promises to shape the future of Denver and its river. And Torres is its chair.

The South Platte River Committee has met just twice since forming in July, but even its creation sends a message, according to council leaders. City staffer members focused on the river see it as much more than a sleepy procedural step.

“What will make any project (or) any effort great is leadership support,” said Ashlee Grace, the director of the city’s Waterway Resiliency Program, the name of the city-run river project fueled by $350 million in federal river restoration money. “This committee forming, I think, is a huge step for the city. Our elected leaders recognize the value of the South Platte River and how it can truly be a part of a vibrant future for Denver.”

The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and then-Mayor Michael Hancock signed the agreement launching the Waterway Resiliency Program in May 2023 after years of study, negotiations and wrangling for federal funding. But even that mammoth undertaking is focused only on a portion of the river, along with its Harvard Gulch and Weir Gulch tributaries.

Private projects such as the long-awaited River Mile development — slated to eventually replace Elitch Gardens — are also aimed at improving the health of the river, while adding recreational opportunities and housing for thousands of people.

Council president Amanda Sandoval highlighted other projects with the potential to transform the city, all within half a mile of the river, including the still-progressing National Western Center campus overhaul north of downtown and the 60-acre blank slate of state-owned land at the former Burnham Yard railyards, south of the city center.

The river “is literally running through all of the catalytic projects that are all coming to fruition at the same time,” Sandoval said in an interview. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If we don’t prioritize it, it will be done piecemeal.”

Smaller projects have tested the waters

The megaprojects on the horizon follow smaller redevelopments on the South Platte.

Developer Susan Powers remembers when she first came across the abandoned warehouse and barrel-roofed building that she and her partners eventually would turn into the $65 million mixed-used development dubbed Steam on the Platte.

She was riding her bike along the river when she came upon an unexpected detour that routed her onto Zuni Street near Old West Colfax Avenue. There she spotted the cluster of buildings on the river’s eastern bank. That former warehouse has been transformed into an office building that appeals to techie tenants, while the barrel-roofed building is occupied by Raices Brewing Company and its often-bustling taproom.

As far as Powers knows, Raices is the only bar or restaurant in the city that offers outdoor seating along the South Platte — for now, at least.

“When you go there, it has its own little ecosystem,” Powers said. “Rabbits are still running around. There are lots of birds, and you can really get away from what really, only a couple of blocks away, is more urban life.”

Powers has sold her stake in the office building and plans to sell Raices’ owners their building. She also hopes to sell a vacant chunk of land that could see a new condo development, with the building facing the river.

Steam on the Platte may gain much more company along those banks in the decades to come.

On the east side of the river, the potential vertical development would come on the seas of asphalt parking along Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway, turning them into lively mixed-use neighborhoods. The River Mile and Ball Arena projects are siblings divided mainly by the consolidated rail tracks that run between the arena and the amusement park.

The South Platte River Committee on Aug. 14 received a briefing from city planning and finance staff regarding plans to rezone 70 acres of land around Ball Arena.

Details shared in that briefing included 6,000 units of apartments and other new housing, more than 1,000 of which would be reserved for low-income residents. There would be no limit on building heights on the land if the property owner — billionaire developer and sports mogul Stan Kroenke’s company, Kroenke Sports and Entertainment — were to live up to city-brokered affordable housing conditions.

The arena district wouldn’t directly touch the river, but a network of walking and biking trails would help weave it into the city’s multimodal transportation network, providing easy access to the river for future residents and visitors. In fact, plans call for eight bike and pedestrian bridges that either carry users to the South Platte or Cherry Creek or take them over those two waterways, said Greg Dorolek a landscape architect working on that project.

Dorolek is co-president of Wenk Associates, which is among the many cooks in the kitchen for the Ball Arena area redevelopment. It’s also involved in the neighboring River Mile project.

“You can live on this river and restore it at the same time, and I think it’s going to be exciting,” Dorolek said, adding that Denver is on the verge of becoming “a river city.”

The River Mile made a big splash when its ambitious plan was unveiled in early 2018. It’s a joint endeavor between Kroenke’s KSE and boutique developer Revesco Properties, and the development’s leaders seek to fill in what Revesco president and CEO Rhys Duggan has referred to as “the doughnut hole” between downtown and the rest of the city.

Renderings released over the years have shown attention-grabbing details, from tall, spindly residential towers to grand promenades that step down to the water. Anchoring it all is the river.

The development team also has pledged to invest $100 million in reinvigorating the milelong stretch of the South Platte, including likely dredging 6 to 8 feet of sand from the riverbed to create a narrower, deeper channel that would help restore fish habitat.

For now, the ambitious project is in a holding pattern as Duggan and company keep their eyes on the ebbs and flows of another often-unpredictable force: the U.S. economy.

“Obviously, the interest rate environment has shifted dramatically in the last two years, and I think we need to come into a period of normalization before we can get to work on the river,” Duggan told The Denver Post.

The development team continues to work on designs, engineering and entitlements as well as seek local and federal approvals needed for the work.

Meanwhile, Duggan is celebrating the momentum on the river.

When he rides his bike along the banks, he sees a buildup of exciting new development, including the Hurley Place and Denargo Market projects in the River North Art District northeast of downtown.

The South Platte isn’t a barrier. It isn’t a dump. Now, Duggan said, it’s a public asset.

Finding an oasis close to home

On a recent afternoon just north of Denver, Jack Borthwick tossed his fly fishing rod off the bridge to a friend standing below on the riverbank. A giant carp thrashed on the line, bending the rod — now in Nic Hall’s hands — into a sharp U.

Car tires, a Mountain Dew bottle and an Amazon box littered the bank. A broken-down and opened-up trailer sat abandoned just off the road, and an eerie industrial siren screeched from across the river.

On one side of the bridge, a water treatment plant churned through 2.2 million peoples’ waste, its smell sitting on everything in its vicinity. On the other, the smokestacks of Suncor Energy’s oil refinery thrust toward the sun.

But this is one of Borthwick’s favorite places to fish, and the carp pulling on his rod made the scramble up and down the banks worth it.

He said the thrill of sight-casting to huge carp on unoccupied riverbanks beats fighting crowds for prime fishing spots on the more famous trout waters an hour or so outside of Denver.

Best of all, this spot — known as “The Stank” —  is 10 minutes from his house in northwest Denver.

The river and its parks are critical pieces of nature accessible to people in the city who don’t have the money, means or time to drive to the mountains, said Nic Hall, Borthwick’s fishing partner and the president of Denver Trout Unlimited. The Denver chapter of the national fishing and conservation group is the only local affiliate dedicated to a city river.

“A lot of people look at an urban river and think, ‘Gross,’ ” Hall said as he scouted for carp. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Slowly, Denverites’ perception of the river is shifting, said Jolon Clark, the executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation.

He worked for the Greenway Foundation for 18 years and served two terms on the City Council before joining new Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration last year.

“There’s still a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on down on the river,” Clark said. “But being in the middle of the city and seeing a skyscraper — and a blue heron fishing right beneath it — that’s just a magical experience.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made grants to Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah for “biomonitoring,” which refers to testing blood or other bodily fluids for chemical contamination. The grants will allow them to test the amount of lead and other heavy metals in rural residents’ blood, while testing for per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) will focus on firefighters and other people in jobs where they frequently use the chemicals.

The four states previously worked together to quantify their residents’ exposure to pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

Researchers from Colorado School of Mines and Johns Hopkins University took samples from a stretch of Clear Creek in the city of Golden and compared them to an upstream location with relatively little tubing activity. In addition to the increase in bacteria, they found a higher concentration of metals, such as lead, suspended in the water.

The study, first reported by Denver 7, attributed the increase in metals to human activity stirring up the creek bed, where they had accumulated since Colorado’s mining days. The spike in intestinal bacteria suggests that at least some people tubing on the creek also used it as a bathroom.

The authors said the spikes resolved quickly following a high-use weekend, however. They didn’t assess the impact on plants or animal life.

At the same time, parents whose children attend Dupont Elementary School are organizing to fight the construction of five additional storage tanks at the Magellan Pipeline Company’s terminal at 8160 Krameria St., which is across the street from the school in the Dupont neighborhood.

The additional tanks would increase the amount of volatile organic compounds, benzene and other hazardous chemicals emitted into the air.

And Cultivando, a nonprofit that focuses on community health and clean air in Commerce City and north Denver, is joining Adams 14 officials at 10 a.m. Saturday to rally resistance during an event at Adams City High School.

About 40 people gathered last week at the elementary school to learn about Magellan’s expansion plans, their environmental impact on the neighborhood and how parents and nearby residents might push back against the new storage tanks.

Parents and neighbors are concerned about how increased pollutants would impact people’s health, especially school children who play outside, and about more truck traffic in the neighborhood — another pollution source.

“Let’s do it! Vamos!” one father shouted as Wednesday night’s meeting concluded.

Magellan applied in the fall of 2023 to build the five additional gasoline storage tanks at the site. Twenty already are there, and those tanks store fuel delivered via a pipeline that is then trucked around Colorado to fuel vehicles. The company wants to expand, in part, to store reformulated gasoline, which is a special blend required from June to September along the Front Range to reduce ozone pollution.

But people in the neighborhood, including the school principal and residents who live next to the storage facility, were unaware of the project until The Denver Post reported on it in July.

School officials, environmental activists and neighbors are furious about the lack of communication from the company or from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division, which has the authority to approve, amend or deny the expansion application.

In their application to build the new tanks, Magellan officials wrote that they would notify the neighborhood of the plans by posting signs on the front gate. When Guadalupe Solis, Cultivando’s environmental justice programs director, mentioned the signs at the Wednesday meeting and asked the crowd whether anyone had seen them, multiple people scoffed and laughed.

“That’s what we thought. That’s why we are here,” Solis said. “They are doing this because we are people of color. We are immigrants, and they are sure we are not going to say anything, that we are going to be silent.”

Annelle Morrow, a spokeswoman for ONEOK, Magellan’s parent company, said the Dupont terminal expansion was in the works when the two companies merged in September 2023.

“Whether the proposed project is ultimately approved or denied, ONEOK intends to be a good neighbor to the school and surrounding community for years to come,” she said. “We have already reached out to the school district, and it is our genuine hope that — over time — we can demonstrate ONEOK’s commitment to engaging meaningfully with the communities in which we operate.”

Determining the environmental impacts

As part of its permit application, Magellan was required to submit an environmental justice impact analysis, to determine whether the work would take place in a disproportionately impacted community.

That analysis determined nearly 45% of the residents in the neighborhood surrounding the terminal qualify as low income, 79% are people of color, 31% are burdened by the cost of housing and 12% speak limited English. The environmental impact on the surrounding community is supposed to be taken into consideration by state regulators when they review the permit application.

The parents, school board and neighbors have an uphill battle.

Magellan filed for a construction permit, which doesn’t require the same level of scrutiny as other permits, and the Air Pollution Control Division already has given it preliminary approval.

Michael Ogletree, the division director, said his staff’s work is defined by the law and they must follow it when making decisions on permit applications.

“We must approve permits that comply with the law,” he said.

In the wake of the complaints over the permit’s secrecy, the Air Pollution Control Division extended the public comment period to 60 days, instead of the usual 30.

Ogletree also said the state health department plans to install air monitors near the school to detect emissions. He told The Post that plan was in the works before the newspaper published its July 22 story about the project, but people at the school and neighborhood residents said they had not heard about air monitors until they started complaining about the expansion project.

When asked about that discrepancy, a division spokeswoman, Leah Schleifer, sent an email to The Post saying Ogletree meant monitors were in place “in the area of the school district,” and he directed his staff to explore the possibility of adding monitors near the school.

Ogletree said his agency will listen to community feedback and offer support.

To that end, the health department is planning a community listening session from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 17 at Eagle Pointe Recreation Center in Commerce City. Schleifer said attendees must register in advance at bit.ly/APCDPublicSession. If not enough people sign up, the meeting will be moved to online-only, she said. She also noted that the meeting was not about any specific permit application.

“This is not fair”

Joe Salazar, chief legal counsel for Adams 14, said “the cake has been baked,” but he still believes there is a chance organized opposition could halt the permit. The school board voted unanimously last month to allow Salazar to fight the project on behalf of the district. He said it was unusual for a school board to take that step.

The Center for Biological Diversity will join the parents’ group, Cultivando and the school district in resisting the project, Salazar said.

“We’re up against it right now and we’re going to have to fight really hard to get the Air Pollution Control Division to change their minds,” he said.

Parents who attended last week’s meeting were worried about their children playing outside, but Dupont Elementary Principal Amanda Waller said she hoped to allow outdoor playtime as long as she feels it is safe.

“I pray we are not going to have to go that far,” Waller said. “It’s not fair to our kids.”

Waller broke down in tears as she talked about the gasoline storage expansion, saying she had been caught off guard when she learned about it. She also called it “a big deal” for the school.

“I just want you to know that I love and care for this community so much that this is really painful to me and I’m going to do everything I can to encourage all of us to join together because it’s about the kids,” she said. “This is not fair. This doesn’t happen in Cherry Creek.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

For 25 years, 10 city and county governments near the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site northwest of Denver have monitored for contaminants and other hazards through their participation in the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council. But now the council, which has met regularly to discuss conditions on the troubled property-turned-wildlife refuge is disbanding.

Broomfield pulled out earlier this week, joining Golden, Superior, Thornton, Northglenn and Boulder County in abandoning the council — a sufficient number of member defections to trigger the organization’s demise. The body will hold a final meeting this fall, clear the books and dissolve by early next year.

Deven Shaff, a Broomfield city councilman who has sat on the stewardship council for the past five years and serves as its vice chair, said its death doesn’t mean concerns about Rocky Flats will go away.

“You have an end to the stewardship council, but there is a story ahead for Rocky Flats,” Shaff said. “There’s a sense that there’s a new chapter for Rocky Flats.”

That new chapter could begin as soon as next week, when construction is set to start on two regional trail access points at the edge of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Looming over the project is a potential ruling from a federal judge that could halt plans to build the planned underpass and bridge, which will bring the Rocky Mountain Greenway trail onto the refuge.

The stewardship council’s demise and the continuing controversy are the latest developments in the long and tortured history of Rocky Flats.

The weapons manufacturing facility opened in 1952 and made plutonium triggers — or fission cores — for the nation’s nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. On a windswept piece of Jefferson County prairie between Arvada and Superior, the ugly result of all that industrial activity was the creation of tons of hazardous chemicals and barrels of noxious waste, some of which leaked or burned over the years.

Rocky Flats, which employed about 40,000 workers over its nearly 40-year active phase, was closed down after the FBI raided the plant in 1989. It sent 70 armed agents in a convoy of vehicles to the U.S. Department of Energy property to ferret out suspected environmental crimes.

“No way” everything was cleaned

Despite a 10-year, $7 billion cleanup that ended in 2005, many remain leery of what Jon Lipsky, one of the lead FBI agents during that raid — and an outspoken critic of Rocky Flats for years — calls an “unlicensed nuclear dump.”

“There’s all sorts of infrastructure that exists underground, and nobody knows what’s there,” Lipsky told The Denver Post. “There’s no way the Department of Energy cleaned everything.”

The Rocky Flats Stewardship Council is compromised because the Department of Energy funds it and “runs interference” for it, Lipsky said. That’s a sentiment shared by the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Chris Allred, who works on nuclear issues for the center, said there needs to be an organization that can look out for public health “without being subject to regulatory capture by the DOE.”

The peace and justice center is not convinced that the 6,500-acre site, which opened as a national wildlife refuge six years ago, is safe for human recreation. It’s one of several environmental groups that sued the federal government in January in an effort to stop the trail connections from being built on Colorado 128 and Indiana Street.

About 1,300 acres in the middle of the refuge remains a Superfund site, off-limits to the public, where the plutonium triggers were manufactured inside what amounted to a small standalone city.

“Rocky Flats is not stable in the environment,” Allred said. “This will only be made worse if construction projects are allowed to continue spreading contaminated dust.”

Dave Abelson, the longtime executive director of the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, flatly rejects the claim that he is bought and sold by federal interests, saying his accusers “have not shown a single example of where the funding source affected the actions or comments of the board or of the contract staff.”

“Not a single instance,” he said.

Abelson agrees that it’s time for the organization to sunset — not because it’s untrustworthy, he says, but because the science says so.

Water samples from the site have been relatively stable and within a safe range for years, while hundreds of soil samples — with the exception of one that generated headlines five years ago for its elevated plutonium reading — have also been deemed safe.

“Do you need the same type of intense focus that the governments have put on this?” Abelson said. “The answer appears to be no. You don’t need the same level of focus because it’s a stable site and has been for many years.”

Concern about lack of collaboration

The stewardship council grew out of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, which was launched in 1999. The council, created in 2006, was a more formal version of its predecessor and was created under a mandate in federal law to provide local communities a voice in the management and monitoring of contaminated sites nationwide.

The council has proven vital in looking for and identifying post-cleanup problems at Rocky Flats, Abelson said.

One year, city and county officials on the council challenged a plan by DOE officials to breach ponds on the site. They also expressed concern with the condition of Rocky Flats’ notorious landfills.

“The governments were alarmed when it became clear that portions of the original landfill that lie above Woman Creek were not stable,” Abelson said. “DOE eventually remedied the problem.”

In more recent years, things have been quieter, said Thornton Mayor Jan Kulmann, who chairs the stewardship council. She’s served on the body for a decade.

Thornton’s main concern is water quality, she said, with Standley Lake — just east of Rocky Flats — serving as a major source of drinking water for the city of 145,000.

“The data that we’ve been receiving from DOE … have not changed in 10 years,” Kulmann said. “We’re cautiously optimistic that it has reached a more stable condition.”

Broomfield’s concerns are different than Thornton’s, given its closer proximity to the refuge.

The city and county has been aggressive in separating itself from all things Rocky Flats in recent years. It started in February 2020, when the city’s elected leaders unanimously voted to pull out of the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority following the discovery in 2019 of an elevated reading of plutonium along Indiana Street and in the path of the proposed highway.

Not long after that decision, Broomfield withdrew from the Rocky Mountain Greenway project, resulting in the trail being rerouted through Westminster. But Broomfield Councilwoman Heidi Henkel isn’t so sure the city should have withdrawn from the stewardship council without having an “exit plan.”

“The only way to make government accountable is (that) you make everything public,” said Henkel, who served on the stewardship council for two years. “It’s disappointing to me that with a Superfund site there, we’ve decided to stop this group without any commitment to further the public discussion.”

While the Department of Energy will send quarterly water quality reports to the cities and counties that made up the stewardship council’s membership, Henkel worries about the lack of collaboration and shared knowledge that comes from everyone sitting down at a table together.

50,000 visitors to Rocky Flats

Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of Energy Communities Alliance, said the cities and counties around Rocky Flats are in a unique position because their advocacy organization — the stewardship council — is one of the first in the country to disband.

His Washington, D.C.-based group works with communities that are located near former nuclear weapons plants and nuclear energy facilities.

“Remedies fail and you have to keep on top of these issues,” Kirshenberg said. “The remedies need to be protective of human health and the environment. Hopefully, all we see is the use of the site — but if something happens in the future, they may have to put it back together.”

A Department of Energy spokesman told The Post that the agency would continue doing what it has been doing while the stewardship council has been active.

“The cleanup of the Rocky Flats site has proven to be protective of human health and the environment for nearly 20 years,” spokesman Jeremy Paul Ortiz wrote in a statement. “As we move into the third decade since cleanup, DOE will continue reporting on-site monitoring and maintenance activities and post this material on our public website.”

The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge saw 50,000 visitors in the most recent fiscal year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

One of those visitors is Jeanette Hillery, a member of the League of Women Voters of Boulder County. She’s also been a member of the stewardship council since its inception 18 years ago.

She said she’s struck by how the contamination horror stories of decades ago still seem to guide people’s thinking about Rocky Flats today. The site isn’t pristine, she said, but the testing and data she has seen over the last two decades indicate the risk posed by Rocky Flats’ legacy is more than manageable.

“There are a lot of people who want to go back to the 1970s and 1980s — and think that what was going on then is still going on today,” Hillery said. “The testing indicates it’s safe.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.