Woodmen, Academy interchange clears legal hurdle

The City of Colorado Springs has the right to take a portion of land in a shopping center that is critical to the $45 million Woodmen Road widening project, a 4th Judicial District judge ruled today.

The ruling by Judge Thomas Kane essentially clears the way for work to begin in mid-September on widening Woodmen Road to six lanes and constructing an interchange at the intersection of Woodmen and Academy Boulevard, said Robin Kidder, the city’s roadway engineering manager.

Lawyers for the California-based owner of the Woodmen Valley Shopping Center and for tenants King Soopers, Hobby Lobby and Boston Market had opposed the city’s petition to take immediate possession of the property, after long negotiations to buy the strip of land, most of which is adjacent to Woodmen, failed.

The lawyers argued voters were promised in 2004 that if they approved a one-cent sales and use tax and created a funding arm for regional road work, now called the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, that agency would not have the power to condemn private property.

Kane said he found nothing in the wording of the ballot or in a subsequent intergovernmental agreement that the city of Colorado Springs had given up its power of eminent domain on projects the RTA was funding. The RTA was to have funded most of the $45 million cost of the first phase of the Woodmen project, but the federal government has since offered to fund $35 million of the project with economic stimulus money.

Robert Kaufmann, an attorney for the shopping center’s owner, said out of court that the real issue that led to the two-day hearing was the city’s refusal to make concessions that would assure King Soopers would remain the key tenant in the shopping center. He said the center’s owner fears King Soopers will abandon the center during construction, potentially dealing the shopping center a death blow. Kaufmann said the grocer wanted a right-out turn from the shopping center onto Woodmen and assurances the construction work would be staged to minimize impacts to customers.

With Kane’s ruling, the city will now post a $2.9 million bond for the strip of privately owned land it plans to use for the project. A judge in a yet-to-be-scheduled condemnation hearing will decide what the city has to pay to the shopping center’s owner for the land.