Westminster is making it clear the city doesn’t want to increase access to hikers and cyclists visiting the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge — the one-time site of a Cold War nuclear weapons plant that continues to spark health worries 30 years after it closed.
The city last week became the second community surrounding the 6,200-acre federal property to withdraw from an intergovernmental agreement supporting construction of a tunnel and bridge into the refuge, home to more than 200 wildlife species, including prairie falcons, deer, elk, coyotes and songbirds.
Broomfield exited the $4.7 million Federal Lands Access Program agreement four years ago, and both cities point to potential threats to public health from residual contamination at the site — most notably the plutonium that was used in nuclear warhead production over four decades — for their withdrawal.
“I think we have a moral obligation to get out of this,” Westminster Councilman Obi Ezeadi said during a meeting Monday night.
Westminster’s withdrawal comes less than a month after a federal judge denied several environmental organizations a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the project cold. The plaintiffs had sued federal agencies in January, claiming the refuge is not fit for human use.
As part of the City Council’s 4-3 vote last week, Westminster will not pay the nearly $200,000 it owes to the project. The city also will no longer complete a 0.4-mile trail segment in its Westminster Hills Open Space property that would bring hikers and cyclists traveling from the east to the bridge to cross into Rocky Flats.
But what practical effect the city’s decision will have on the ground is uncertain.
The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge has been open to the public for six years and an extensive trail network has already been built inside its boundaries. An informal, or “social,” trail already exists in the Westminster Hills Open Space property, where the city decided last week not to build a formal thoroughfare.
Meanwhile, work on the pedestrian bridge over Indiana Street on the east side of the refuge is underway while construction of the underpass at the north end of the property is set to start in the coming weeks. The purpose of the access points is to create a pathway for the Rocky Mountain Greenway, a 27-mile trail designed to link Rocky Flats in Jefferson County to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Adams County.
Westminster Councilwoman Claire Carmelia seemed to acknowledge last week that the city’s exit from the federal grant program would likely have little effect on the project’s eventual completion. But she said it was important to show “in the face of history where we stand on this issue.”
“The significance in what we decide tonight really is not so much in the physical difference in what is already out there, but it’s more us making a stand and setting a precedent for the power that municipalities have protecting their residents and protecting their welfare,” she said.
Carmelia, who voted to withdraw, posted on her LinkedIn account this month that she had accepted a board member position with Physicians for Social Responsibility of Colorado. Physicians for Social Responsibility is one of the groups suing the federal government over the access project.
The fight over how safe Rocky Flats is for visitors has been the subject of protests and lawsuits for decades. During its 40-year run, Rocky Flats’ five plutonium-processing and fabrication facilities and two major uranium facilities created a stew of contaminants, some of which leaked into the ground or were ignited in fires.
The complex was raided by the FBI in 1989, and agents collected evidence of environmental crimes committed there. More than 21 tons of weapons-grade nuclear material was removed from the site during a 10-year, $7 billion cleanup that ended in 2005.
For some, Rocky Flats’ legacy as a facility that manufactured components for nuclear bombs is hard to overlook.
“I believe this is a historic decision for local governments standing in solidarity to protect public health, and many of the elected officials on Westminster City Council agree,” said Chris Allred, who works on nuclear issues at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder.
The center was one of half a dozen plaintiffs that sued several federal agencies in January over the access project, claiming they had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not considering alternatives to constructing the Greenway trail “through the most heavily plutonium-contaminated portion” of the refuge.
The lawsuit repeatedly cites a soil sample found in 2019 along the eastern edge of the refuge that had plutonium levels more than five times above the cleanup standard. The plaintiffs requested a federal judge issue a preliminary injunction to stop the project.
But U.S. District Timothy J. Kelly this month denied the injunction request, concluding that the plaintiffs’ warnings of increased cancer risk at the refuge were “acontextual and exaggerated.”
The judge noted dozens of additional soil samples taken by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and others in the vicinity of the plutonium hot spot discovered five years ago that found no additional hazardous levels of plutonium. That includes testing conducted by the peace and justice center itself, he wrote.
“Subsequent testing confirmed that (the 2019 particle) was an anomaly, and a single, anomalous testing event cannot upend all the other scientific data,” Kelly wrote in his Sept. 8 opinion.
The plaintiffs, Kelly wrote, “heap speculation upon speculation” in claiming that people will be sickened by a visit to Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
“They do not come close to establishing irreparable harm on this theory,” the judge wrote.
But Randall Weiner, the attorney representing the plaintiffs in the federal suit, said far too few soil samples — one for every 6.5 acres of refuge land — were taken to establish that it is safe for public use.
“This outlandishly small amount of sampling was far from adequate to determine if hotspots of plutonium exist, which may pose a cancer risk to refuge visitors and the public at large,” Weiner said. “We plan to ask the judge to reconsider his decision on safety at the refuge.”
In the meantime, Jefferson County is intent on seeing the access project completed. The county, along with Arvada, Boulder and Boulder County, remain contributing members to the Federal Lands Access Program grant.
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“We’ve been at this endeavor for a long time,” Matt Robbins, spokesman for Jefferson County’s open space department, told The Denver Post. “We’d like to see the project go through.”
Not all Westminster council members were comfortable with abandoning the project last week.
Councilman David DeMott worried about liability the city might be opening itself up to by refusing to pay its portion under the agreement. Mayor Nancy McNally expressed concern about how the city’s decision might impact its relationship with neighboring municipalities.
“If we were doing something and they were partnering with us and all of a sudden they start dropping out, it lays a burden on someone else,” she said.
The bridge and tunnel at Rocky Flats are supposed to be up and running by March of next year, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife refuge manager Dave Lucas.
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