Another interesting tidbit showing the power of the web and the blogs.
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Toll road gets tangled in Web of defeat
Bloggers' successful blocking of 'Super Slab' bill stuns developer
By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News
March 24, 2005
The information superhighway beat the real highway.
Developer Ray Wells said Wednesday he was blindsided by the massive, online-organized opposition that led to the defeat of legislation he needed to move forward on his proposed Front Range Toll Road on the eastern plains.
On Tuesday, the Senate Transportation Committee killed the road-related bill on a 6-1 vote after hundreds showed up to protest. Instead, the 1882 law that enabled private toll-road companies to operate will be referred to a legislative committee for study this summer.
Still, Wells vows to press on.
Wells, 71, former manager of the Denver Tech Center, said he will go back to his boardroom and rework his proposal for the $2 billion, privately financed tollway between Fort Collins and Pueblo.
"We've begun the process of going back," Wells said.
The opposition, spanning communities in seven rural counties, will no doubt be along for the ride.
Opponents say the road would threaten their rural lifestyle and, in some cases, force them off their land. They nicknamed the project "Super Slab," a name Wells dislikes, and organized themselves in a matter of weeks, in large part through Internet discussion groups, e-mails and bulletin board sites called Web logs, or "blogs."
Wells said he had never even heard the term "blog" before his highway became the topic of one at frontrangetollroad.blogspot.com.
Another opponent quickly set up a Yahoo! Groups forum called NoSuperSlab, currently at 11 members. Then there is a Toll Road Elbert County Action Group online.
"I didn't know what blogging was. It amazes me, being at my age," Wells said. "I've been in plenty of controversial proposals, and I've usually judged the tenor of things by watching the letters to the editor in the papers. There were no letters in the News or the Post about this."
The bill would have allowed the Colorado Department of Transportation to set the tolls for the road. The 19th century law gives that power to each county's board of commissioners, an unwieldy way of setting such rates.
More important for Wells was another provision. Under current law, Wells could not sell individual assets of the company but could sell the corporation only as a whole. The bill would have let him sell assets, such as parcels of land along the route, making the business more flexible and attractive to investors.
The bill's defeat gives Wells "so many loose ends right now because we had a certain time schedule to meet" to seal the deal with his investors, he said.
While hundreds of landowners said they hadn't heard of Wells' toll road, first floated in 1985, until recently, Wells said he's been all over the countryside talking to people about it for years. He said much of what the opponents said distorted his aims.
Wells said he met Wednesday with leaders of the Boy Scouts of America, which owns a large camp in Elbert County. One Scouting representative told senators on Tuesday that the toll road would slice through the property.
Wells said he would work with Scout leaders to make sure the final route spares the camp.>>>>>>>>>>> |
