RMNP could see stimulus money

By Zak Brown of the Daily Camera

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

ESTES PARK, Colo. — One of the most well-known stretches of Colorado road may soon get a facelift if Rocky Mountain National Park gets a piece of the National Park Service’s $146 million economic stimulus check.

Colorado’s biggest national park has submitted requests of more than $20 million to the park service, asking for money to refurbish Trail Ridge Road — the highest continuous highway in the nation — and help halt the pine beetle infestation. Park officials were asked to submit any “shovel-ready” projects they deemed deserving of stimulus money, and now they will wait to see how the money gets spread around the country.

“We were asked to identify needs that we have to make projects ready within 18 months,” Rocky Mountain National Park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said. “We provided some projects that we have done all the compliance work on and that we’re basically ready to step forward with.”

The money allocated to the park service in the $787 billion federal economic stimulus bill passed earlier this month is only available until September 2010. So the projects submitted by each park needed to be in the final stages, and the most pressing in Rocky Mountain National Park is repairs for the western half of Trail Ridge Road.

The two-lane road from the Alpine Visitors’ Center to the Colorado River Trailhead is scheduled to be repaired in the summer of 2010 at a cost of $9.4 million, Patterson said. But crews could begin work this summer if the money is available, and that money would go to private companies contracted to do the work.

The park also has plans to spruce up the eastern section of the road, at a cost of about $6 million. The timeline is for construction to begin in the summer of 2013, but Patterson said park staff could fast-track the project and have it ready for summer 2010 if stimulus money is available.

“The immediate roadwork could be moved forward,” Patterson said. “We have roughly 110 miles of road, and many of those roads were built in the 1920s and 1930s, and those are projects we could continue to chip away at.”                                                                                 

Rocky Mountain National Park has asked for about $6 million to help stem the tide of pine beetles. Park staff members and outside contractors have already been working to mitigate the epidemic, and the stimulus money could help expand their reach, according to Patterson.

How the money will be handed out to the nation’s parks hasn’t been determined, but the decision will be made under the direction of the Department of Interior, now headed by former U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado.