Proposed I-270 Widening Shows CDOT Hasn’t Learned From Its Mistakes

Posted November 20, 2025

Here we go again. Years after the prolonged fight over the Colorado Department of Transportation’s widening of Interstate 70, CDOT is now proposing to widen Interstate 270.

Coloradans learned painfully from I-70: projects that expand highways in historically burdened neighborhoods don’t heal communities, they compound harm. But, apparently, CDOT did not learn from its past mistakes.

The most immediate concern is timing: the planned 60-day comment period for the project’s environmental review process — which begins Nov. 17 — falls over Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas, the New Year, and other end-of-year holidays. CDOT has denied requests by GreenLatinos and other groups to delay this comment period, choosing to bulldoze ahead and force community members to defend their health and well-being during one of the busiest times of year. This decision reflects CDOT’s philosophy that community input is an afterthought. CDOT must delay the comment period, or it will further erode public trust and faith in our government.

This decision reflects CDOT’s philosophy that community input is an afterthought.

Timing aside, widening I-270 is a bad idea. For more than a decade GreenLatinos and the residents of North Denver and Commerce City have been raising our voices for cleaner air and healthier neighborhoods. We’ve documented how highway traffic — especially in conjunction with nearby industrial facilities like the Suncor refinery — concentrates pollution in front-line communities, and we’ve pushed for transportation solutions that prioritize health, not mere vehicle throughput. As GreenLatinos’ community work and reports make clear, widening a highway that slices through these neighborhoods will only worsen the pollution burden that residents already shoulder.

That pollution burden matters. Asthma, cardiovascular disease, and other pollution-related illnesses are not abstract statistics for North Denver and Commerce City — they are daily realities. The settlement reached over I-70 included commitments to health studies and air monitoring because the I-70 expansion exposed gaps in how transportation impacts on community health were assessed and mitigated. If CDOT wished to put health first, it would shift away from road widening and toward strategies that reduce vehicle miles traveled, invest in clean transit, and protect the people who live closest to the freeway.

Colorado also has concrete climate goals that highway widening would directly undercut. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and planners and advocates have repeatedly pointed out that adding lanes inevitably induces demand — more driving, more emissions, and more pollution dumped into vulnerable neighborhoods. Induced demand also means that adding a lane will not help with congestion. We cannot credibly meet 2030 and 2050 targets while building capacity that invites more tailpipe pollution. Policy and infrastructure must instead pull in the opposite direction, toward climate solutions.

There’s another practical problem with CDOT’s plans for I-270: cost. Colorado is facing significant budget pressures — from state revenue hits tied to federal changes to ongoing deficits — and yet CDOT is discussing multi-hundred-million-dollar to billion-dollar projects that lock in maintenance and environmental costs for decades. In a moment when state resources are scarce, we should be asking whether this is the highest and best use of public dollars. Investments in electrified transit, community health protection, and targeted industrial enforcement would deliver far greater returns for Coloradans.

Remember why Colorado created the Office of Environmental Justice and strengthened environmental justice processes in CDOT and state agencies: to prevent precisely this kind of proposal from steamrolling through without adequately protecting front-line communities. Those reforms came about because residents and organizations fought to make them real after the harms of past projects. If Colorado’s environmental justice commitments are meaningful, they must be more than checkbox language. They should be a veto against proposals that increase pollution exposure and displacement risk for disproportionately burdened communities.

What comes next if we continue down this path? If CDOT’s core philosophy remains focused on moving cars rather than making people healthier, we will be replaying the same fights we saw with I-70: more lawsuits and more broken trust. But the state has tools to change course. Rather than widening highways, it can and should prioritize zero-emission transit, congestion-fighting tools like differential tolling, and community-led health and safety improvements like green space and bike paths. Communities have been clear about what they need, and CDOT should listen.

CDOT’s mandate is to connect Colorado. That cannot mean sacrificing the health and futures of low-income and Latino communities to (in theory) save a few extra minutes of drive time. It must mean an approach that centers environmental justice, aligns with climate goals, protects public dollars, and restores trust in our government. And that starts with delaying the planned comment period to allow for adequate community engagement and meaningful consideration of alternatives.

If we’re serious about justice and climate, CDOT should be widening the path to a healthier, more equitable future — not I-270.

Ean Thomas Tafoya is vice president of state programs for GreenLatinos in Colorado. This commentary is republished from Colorado Newsline under a Creative Commons license.