Save the Date! Virtual Foothills Town Hall Meeting on March 27th

Wildfire Risk and Evacuation Planning:
We've known for many years that Highway 285 in the Front Range is decades behind in safety and congestion improvements; CDOT has a written plan from the early 2000s for all of the work that is recommended. Every year that has gone by, the summer weekend traffic has worsened to the point that residents feel trapped (the actual word they use) in their homes on Fridays and Sundays because I-70 and Hwy 285 are the two major routes out of Denver into the mountains. The insufficiencies of our communications infrastructure and internet capabilities in our rural mountain areas is well documented, and mirror those of the town of Paradise, California which suffered horrifically during the Camp Fire. I recently learned from Park County Dispatch that our cell towers become overloaded simply when 60,000 cars are going down the highway trying to get home or go camping on one of those busy days, and during an emergency they may have to tell first responders to cease communications so that they could send a CodeRED emergency notification, thus delaying the ordering of air support, additional mutual aid, and critical communication during the precious moments at the beginning of a wildfire when it's easiest and least costly to stop before it grows too large. The Fire Chief of one of our mountain fire departments shared that given the topography and local climate we have that a fire that starts in the Bailey/Platte Canyon area will most likely be driven right toward Highway 285, the cell tower on Mt Bailey would most assuredly be lost if fire got to that mountain, and it would be safer for him to send people evacuating the area southbound to Fairplay rather than north toward Denver. That stretch is mostly two lane, winding highway that cannot handle large volumes of [panicked] traffic.

Given all this, I feel that the plans to widen and improve the engineering for Highway 285 from Conifer through Kenosha Pass (at the least, if not all the way to Fairplay) be made a higher priority, imperative even, and our internet and communications infrastructure be vastly improved. Wireless communication is much more difficult in the mountains, more fiber is desperately needed. The political will has been lackluster toward Highway 285 safety and transportation issues, with I-70 having received the lions share of attention and funding for improvements over the years. Is there any way that Highway 285 could be made a higher priority for project planning, with funds dedicated toward transportation and communications improvements where catastrophic fire danger is highest in Colorado so that lives won't be lost during a wildfire? With the current infrastructure we have, and a devastating wildfire being a matter of when, not if, we certainly will lose lives if we don't start working on this immediately.

Thank you