Thursday, October 13, 2005

An Evening At the Open House

Our friends at CH2MHill host a small party.

Attended the New Pueblo Freeway Open House last night. It was hosted by our friends at CH2MHill at the behest of CDOT.

The topic of the overall program was Pueblo’s heritage vis-a-vis that part of which was under potential threat of being demolished or at least degraded as part of the proposed plan to widen Interstate 25 as it passes through the center of the city.

There was a cute series of presentations by 8th-graders from Beulah School on the history of Colorado, stemming from the initial exploration by Coronado, in his vain effort to find the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, through the founding of CF&I from three competing steel/metal smelting operations. Each of the kids was dressed in attire apropos for their part of the presentation. Personally, I found part of it informative, as I’m a service brat and learned all about Louisiana history, being there at that age. However, I get the impression that the natives were getting a re-bluing—as we’d say in the Army—of stuff they’d known all their lives.

I am curious why they had to go to a charter school in Beulah to get these children. But that’s another question, better asked of Christian Piatt and Kitty Kennedy, who are running for D-60 school board.

Back on topic….

I had hoped that our friends from CH2MHill would have spent a bit of time at the lectern bringing us up to speed on changes to their plans and the current state of affairs with respect to the timeline on the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA), both of which are essential to the overall project. But we didn’t hear anything specific.

In order to learn about those activities we had to go to the boards and beat the bushes.

The boards did have information about the timeline for the EIS, but nothing specific that I could see about who was doing what with it right now. There was no one at that particular board to ‘beat about the bush’ with in order to find out.

Looking that the boards on the planned widening of the interstate, it was not readily apparent what had changed since our friends from CH2MHill had last shown us what was planned. I had to ‘beat about the bush’ with the guy there for details. He did point out that some rainwater collection ponds had been added to the plans. This in an effort to prevent localized flooding in the event of another deluge we have every Summer. [Note: With respect to these intermittent ponds, I would like to make a suggestion on how to use them for two purposes. I see a potential recreational use for them when they are not being used for their original purpose. More on that later.]

The gentleman working that board could not identify much else in the way of changes. I would like CH2MHill to highlight any changes they’ve made to their plan as we saw it last year, just so we can catch up to them. We all studied their plans last year. But we’ve slept since then. They’ve slept WITH their plans. We’d like to get up to their level of familiarity.

There was a board about the plans for Mineral Palace Park. However, I did not see anyone I could talk to about any changes to the plans to mitigate the impacts I-25 has had in the past and will have in the future on that district park. Looking over the plans, I did not see anything that jumped out at me as a significant change to what we had seen described before.

There was no board nor any person to beat about the bush with over the status of the IGA. However, I did catch wind that the IGA was being discussed. I think it would be VERY nice if our friends at CH2MHIll would bring us up to speed on the IGA process. Where it is. Who is doing what. And allow some of us to kibitz on the meetings.

It was nice of CH2MHill to invite us to their open house. The children were, as all children dressed-up, rehearsed and trotted before serious adults are, charming. Some good information was provided. A lot of necessary information was not.

In all honesty, I still think this whole project is going to be significantly impacted by the proposed Super-Slab to the east of town. The Slab is coming. It’s much more needed than this project, in my personal opinion. But that’s another essay.

Next entry: Action On Sewage in Fountain Creek Previous entry: Referenda C & D? No

1. I didn’t find much of substance at this meeting. It struck me as a rather obvious PR activity designed to make people feel more friendly towards the CDOT, CH2M Hill, and their plans for making “corrections” to I-25 in Pueblo, without revealing any information which might upset the audience, which was in itself a little disturbing. All the classic PR distractions were there: free food, cute kids, letting local historical groups set up displays and help with the presentation so it looked like they supported whatever CDOT’s got planned, and weren’t just providing information.

   About the only really new things were some maps and draft reports (16 volumes) on an historic structure survey done by a consulting firm. This is mandated under federal law. The display was not mentioned by the presenters and it was camouflaged in that it was presented in the same form as all the other maps and materials on the walls. The fact is, if you talked to the man answering questions, that a rather large number of potentially historically significant structures and sites would be impacted by further development of I-25 through Pueblo.  You can look at this two ways: 1) there’s a lot of old houses in the way, or 2) we’re about to lose some of our unique and wonderful structures to a slab of concrete. What was needed was a description of how this information would be presented in the Environmental Impact Statement on the project.

   As a taxpayer, I have to wonder why “My Highway Dollars” were at work delivering history lessons and gathering oral histories. (PR Tip #1: Make people think you like them by letting them talk about thenselves.) The adult presenters were given the title “Highway Engineer” and did an adequate job of reading their scripts, but I did not get the sense that they had internalized, processed, appreciated and applied the history lesson they were giving. Otherwise, more emphasis would have been placed on Pueblo as a trading and transportation hub.

   .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  10/13  at  11:06 AM

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