To do a reality check on Jefferson Economic Council President Preston Gibson's assertion that completing the western beltway link will "help stall sprawl," one needs only to look at the eastern sprawl taking place in Aurora and in Arapaho and AdamsCounties associated with the development of the E-470 toll highway.

The explosive growth in DouglasCounty to the south has been accelerated by the development of C-470, which is already congested during rush hours. The NW Corridor Environmental Impact Statement Study, which cost Colorado taxpayers $17 million, projected that only 5% of the population growth for the Denver metro area from 2005 to 2030 would be in northern Jefferson County; 95% will be to the northeast, east, southeast, and south, where the need for transportation improvements is much greater than where Jeffco, Arvada, and Broomfield want to build a superhighway.

What Mr. Gibson did not mention is that their proposed beltway extension would be a toll highway that would not produce enough revenue to pay for building it, let alone operating and maintaining it. He also omitted the significant fact that the prospective builders and toll collectors insist that their contract include a "non-compete" clause, meaning that nearby existing free roads that could be used by drivers to avoid paying the tolls cannot be improved. The currently existing roads, such as SH-93, and Indiana (SH-72)/McIntyre, are the very ones that Mr. Gibson says are already congested and in need of improvements, yet construction of the toll highway would prohibit those needed improvements.

He refers to a pro-beltway web site that has 25 supporting organizations. The largest number of members is realtors; others include those who would profit from the beltway construction, and even the NW Parkway LLC, which was losing so much money on that toll highway that they had to sell a 99 year lease to a foreign company to take over payments and collect ever-increasing tolls.

Because neither the 2000 NW Quadrant Feasibility Study nor the NW Corridor EIS Study recommended a beltway as the best way to improve mobility while preserving quality of life in northern Jeffco, those important studies have been deleted from the web site beltway "History."

Mr. Gibson claims that citizen access to the many Open Spaces in JeffersonCounty is now restricted by the highway system. Not true, and neither is his claim that the point to point toll highway through northern Jeffco will improve that access.

Richard Sugg is a Golden resident