Plans to build the contentious Jefferson Parkway toll highway through Broomfield and Jefferson counties — part of a conspicuously missing segment in metro Denver’s 83-mile beltway — are set to come back to life after years of delays, resistance and litigation.

But don’t expect the earthmovers and asphalt pavers to roar to life anytime soon on the 10-mile thoroughfare.

On Dec. 19, the city and county of Broomfield formally, and finally, withdrew from the entity in charge of building the parkway, ceding a critical piece of right of way to the project and ending an internecine battle that had gummed up construction efforts for the past half decade.

Even so, numerous roadblocks still stand in the way of the first vehicle ever traversing the toll road.

“I think, at this point, it’s on hold,” Bryan Archer, the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority’s interim executive director, told The Denver Post this fall.

Several factors continue to impede progress: The authority still needs to land a concessionaire to build and operate the toll road. Bloated interest rates make financing the $875 million project increasingly challenging. And environmental concerns persist about the toxic legacy of the nearby former Rocky Flats weapons plant, which once churned out components for the nation’s Cold War nuclear arsenal.

Then there are the hundreds of neighbors who dread the impacts of a four-lane highway whizzing past their homes.

“I’d love it if it doesn’t come,” said Mike LeClare, an eight-year resident of Arvada’s Leyden Rock neighborhood whose house atop an earthen berm looks over the parkway’s right of way. “I kind of have a Hot Wheels ramp into my backyard.”A pared-down highway authority is prepared to write the next chapter in the Jefferson Parkway saga, with membership in the 16-year-old body now comprising just Jefferson County and Arvada. Neighbor Brett Vernon said it might be time for the neighborhood to regroup in opposition to the road.

“It doesn’t benefit anyone in this area,” Vernon said. “If it were to benefit more of Arvada, I could see how all the tradeoffs could be worth it.”

Originally planned as Interstate 470, the beltway around Denver quickly garnered opposition from some 1970s-era politicians, including Gov. Dick Lamm, who worried about the environmental impacts of road building. C-470, the initial 27.5-mile segment built in the 1980s through the southwest suburbs, was downgraded to a state highway.

Efforts to extend the road to Arvada spurred the formation of the Jefferson Parkway authority in 2008. It was made up of Broomfield, Arvada and Jefferson County. Over the next decade, the authority amassed land for a right of way and, along the way, got ensnared in a lawsuit from Superior — an effort by the town to scuttle the project.

But nothing slowed progress like the news that dropped in August 2019: A soil sample taken on the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge showed an elevated level of deadly plutonium.

Within six months of the radioactive hot-spot discovery, one of three firms vying to build the highway dropped out, citing “ongoing environmental challenges” as a reason for its departure.

Pointing to the same plutonium sample, Broomfield in early 2020 announced that it wanted out of the project — and an end to its membership in the authority.