GREELEY — A $125 million road reconstruction project in Weld County will help ease some of the dangers fueled by rapid oil and gas development, county officials said Monday.
They touted the Weld County Road 49 Corridor project, which will reroute oil and gas traffic from U.S. 85, during a nearly day-long conference aimed at tackling transportation issues in northern Colorado.
The biggest topic was highlighting the need for an expanded Interstate 25 from north Denver to Fort Collins. The corridor already supports 8,500 trucks per day, making it a federally designated “Highway of National Significance” and in dire need of improvements.
But the $1.2 billion needed to revamp the highway is not arriving anytime soon.
U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner told the 300 or so who gathered at Island Grove Regional Park that local governments must unify in support of an expanded I-25. New methods of paying for the project — besides relying on an outmoded and underfunded national gasoline tax — also have to be identified, Gardner said.
“There are lots of ideas on the table, but we need to begin putting them into place,” Gardner said.
A proposal introduced by Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Barbara Boxer of California to use revenue from taxing overseas corporation profits for road and bridge repairs in the United States is one viable alternative, Gardner said.
Weld officials said their plan to reroute oil field production trucks off of a heavily used U.S. 85 and onto an improved Weld County Road 49 will make it safer for not only truck drivers but also farmers and other commuters.
“Basically, it would become a parallel route to Highway 85 and make it another major north-south corridor,” said Elizabeth Relford, Weld County’s transportation manager. “It will be widened and make it a much safer corridor.”
The project, scheduled to be finished in just over two years, will extend from the I-76 interchange at Hudson to the U.S. 34 interchange in Kersey and widen the road from two lanes to five and add a turn lane in the center.
Officials say safety is the prime mover behind the improvements to Weld County 49, which accesses some of the biggest oil and gas fields in the state.
The national occupational fatality rate for the oil and gas industry was seven times higher than general industry and 2½ times higher than the construction industry between 2005 and 2009. And the most common fatal events in the oil and gas industry during that same period were due to highway crashes, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907, mwhaley@denverpost.com or twitter.com/montewhaley