An apparent miscommunication between Steamboat Springs city staff and the Colorado Department of Transportation and Governor Jared Polis’s office in recent weeks has raised concerns for city officials over the prospects of a federal transportation grant application.

The city’s $18 million planning grant submission is a request for federal money to support the exploration of options for widening U.S. Highway 40 west of Steamboat — work that would be needed sooner if voters pass the March 26 Brown Ranch referendum measure.

City Manager Gary Suiter told City Council members last week that after submitting the grant request, city staff requested a letter of support from CDOT as part of the application process.

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The email received in response, sent by CDOT Region 3 Transportation Director Jason Smith, said “the message that we received from the governor’s office is that they do not fully support this project in its current stage of conceptual development.”

Smith added the governor’s office stated their position that “widening any roadway, especially one as significant as U.S. 40” would “increase the transportation footprint” in a way that would increase greenhouse gas emissions.

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“Before they can definitively support this project, they would need more information, data (and) analyses on how it will mitigate those environmental consequences,” Smith wrote.

Suiter said the reply “raised some yellow flags,” adding that he spoke with CDOT’s legislative liaison, who told him “there was a misunderstanding or there was a miscommunication.”

Gary added the liaison said the agency was seeking more information and data related to the environmental concerns, but that the email from Smith did not mean the agency was saying “no” from CDOT to support the grant and it was “not a comment on Brown Ranch.”

“My level of concern with this is moderate at this point and I just think we need to wait and see how this plays out,” added Suiter.

The email from CDOT seemed to conflict with the governor’s past gestures of support for Brown Ranch, including a phone call he made to City Council member Joella West in October in which he called on her to vote in approval of passing the annexation ordinance without sending it to a voter referendum.

Citing Polis’s conversation, West changed her position and voted to approve the annexation agreement, but a successful citizens’ petition ultimately pushed the matter to a voter referendum scheduled for March 26.

A spokesperson for Polis did not answer specific questions about the apparent “miscommunication” over the transportation planning grant, but said in a statement that the governor and CDOT “enthusiastically support the Brown Ranch housing development.”

The spokesperson, Shelby Weiman, noted that Polis has “passionately and closely” followed the project beginning with the housing authority’s $24 million purchase of the 534-acre Brown Ranch property in 2021.

“CDOT and the (Polis) administration look forward to working closely with local partners to efficiently identify the best options for transportation connectivity to make this project even more amazing and accessible and avoid barriers to needed housing by streamlining and accelerating infrastructure access approvals,” Weiman wrote.

Suiter said last week the timing around when the U.S. 40 expansion project would happen is unclear, but the federal grant application was to support planning for the project and included a range of potential environmental mitigation solutions such as exploring high-occupancy vehicle and transit dedicated traffic lanes and commuter trails.

The special projects and intergovernmental services manager for the city, Winnie DelliQuadri explained the purpose of the planning project “is to identify how we might move forward with improving transpiration access while considering multi-modal options and greenhouse gasses and everything else.”

“There are a lot of ways to increase transportation, all of which frankly require some widening of highway 40 so that Is why we submitted a grant for the planning process so all of that is within that project narrative that we put together,” she said.

DelliQuadri noted city staff and the public works department “are all on the same page,” but “once you get beyond the folks who are working on the ground, there is room for misunderstandings to happen.”

She said support from CDOT for the project is a requirement for the federal planning grant and that ongoing conversations between local and state officials in the coming months would be “important” to the grant request’s approval.

“Whatever council can do, or the (Yampa Valley Housing Authority) can do between now and the next two months … would be great.”