'Super Slab' Plan Shelved

Colorado’s “Super-Slab” private toll road, proposed to run 210 miles between Fort Collins and Pueblo, well east of the urbanized Front Range, was effectively killed on Tuesday when lawmakers on the Senate Transportation Committee voted 6-1 to indefinitely postpone House Bill 1030, which would have allowed the road to move forward. What led to the defeat of the bill, which last month flew through the House 62-3, was concern over the lack of public input into planning major projects financed privately, such as the toll road. The committee was greeted at the Capitol by some 750 angry but well-mannered protesters from the plains. It was by far the largest crowd to come to the Capitol on a single bill in the living memories of numerous Statehouse old-timers. Organized in large part over the Internet in just the past three weeks, the crowd represented at least six of the seven counties through which the superhighway corridor would have run.