Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1997 | 9:44 a.m.
BOULDER CITY -- To bypass or not to bypass. That should be the question.
Boulder City's primary focus no longer should be on the location of a new Colorado River crossing, says state Sen. Jon Porter, R-Boulder City.
"We were looking at the bridge as the primary project," says the former Boulder City mayor. "Being involved in this for so many years, I'm guilty myself.
"The important thing to Boulder City is really not the bridge, it's the traffic and how that's handled. And the community needs to take a solid position on that."
A meeting next month (date and time not set) in Boulder City should rekindle the debate. While it's ostensibly an open house hosted by the Federal Highway Administration to get public input on the three river crossing alternatives, the Nevada Department of Transportation will be there to discuss the impact on Boulder City.
The $184 million bridge will ease the Hoover Dam bottleneck, which is clogged with 14,000 vehicles every day. But it won't do anything but encourage more traffic through Boulder, a city of 14,000 residents that is pretty clogged itself.
U.S. 93 is "inadequate for current traffic," NDOT reported recently. That traffic is expected to increase by 50 percent in the next 10 years.
Which is why the state-funded $168 million bypass option sounds pretty good to a lot of folks.
"When you look at it, there aren't a lot of choices," says City Councilman Bill Smith. "I think a bypass that goes through the southern part of town would be good for everybody."
Smith believes residents have been driven to see the light of this alternative, and that the City Council will support the route drawn up by NDOT in late 1994.
The 12-mile bypass, which would begin just before the Gold Strike hotel-casino and connect before Railroad Pass, will face some opposition.
For instance, a group called CAUTION (Citizens Against Unsafe Traffic in Our Neighborhood), which wants the truck traffic away from town, is still fighting for the Willow Beach route across the Colorado River, about 14 miles south of the dam.
"It's not out of the picture," says CAUTION member Steward Dayton. "The Willow Beach bypass is the route we want. The total cost of the south route will be less money because it will be shorter. If you put the bridge near Hoover Dam, then they'll come through town with a freeway, and we don't want a freeway through here."
The Willow Beach alternative is out of the picture, however, in the eyes of the government agencies leading the bridge project because of its impact on National Park Service land.
In addition, "We feel that we could build our bridge and not significantly impact that traffic in Boulder City even if they didn't build their bypass," says Terry Haussler of the Federal Highway Administration, which is spearheading the environmental impact statement for the bridge project.
That's the idea Bill Ferrence is banking on. First of all, the longtime manager of the Boulder Dam Credit Union thinks the traffic in the one-stoplight town has been exaggerated.
He knows a Boulder City resident who questioned a "traffic expert" about the alleged problems. The expert asked, "How often do you have to wait for two (green) lights?" The reply: "Never." And the expert said, "Then you don't have a traffic problem."
If there were a problem, Ferrence believes, it couldn't be bigger than the one a bypass would cause.
"That scares me to death!" he wrote in his weekly "From the Manager's Desk" advertorial in the town's newspaper. He intends to lobby the Chamber of Commerce to help fight it.
"I'm concerned that the tourism-oriented businesses would have a downturn that would be almost unbelievable," he said. "I'm concerned that other businesses would have a fallout from that. I'm concerned that if there's too much of a downturn, we could have an economic situation in Boulder that would cause property to go down. And none of that appeals to me."
That doesn't appeal to Smith, either. But he thinks that theory overestimates the need for drive-through traffic and underestimates the relief of drive-around traffic.
"If Boulder City wants in fact to be a tourist attraction, it has to attract tourists," he said. "You can't force them through town."
Smith points out that just 10 percent of the traffic stops in Boulder City anyway. And 72 percent are vehicles clogging up access to local businesses as they hurry through town.
But the 10 percent that does stop is vital to the economy, Ferrence argues.
"When you have that many vehicles coming through your community, you only need a real small piece of the pie to make a living," he said. "I'm concerned that if those small slices of the pie are gone, then ..."
Goodbye, Boulder City.
Ferrence said he never would have even said hello to Boulder City 24 years ago when he was driving from Las Vegas to his home in Tucson, Ariz. "If that bypass had been in place then, I would have never seen it," he says. "I would have been on that freeway heading back to Tucson as fast as I could get there."
With that kind of sentiment, it should be an interesting debate -- not to mention an important one.
"Over the next 20 years, it's gonna make a huge difference to Boulder City," Smith says.
Only if it's decided soon, Porter reminds.
"It's in NDOT's five super-projects, but it could still be eight to 10 years for the funding. That's why we need to make it a priority."
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