Fountain Fixed the Creek by Last Summer. Southmoor Drive Stayed Closed for Another Year.

"People come looking for The American Legion, they get on Waze, and it says to go down the north side of that way coming there. And then they get there, and then it's blocked off."

That's John Langley, a post commander at American Legion Post 36, describing the problem to the Fountain City Council back in January. It's a small complaint on its face, a GPS routing people down a dead street. But it captures something the erosion warnings and engineering reports never quite got at: for six years, the map of north Fountain and the real streets of north Fountain disagreed with each other, and nobody had a clean answer for which one was right.

Southmoor Drive is a two-mile street running along a bluff above Fountain Creek on the north side of town. A section of it, roughly a third to half a mile between the Legion post on the south end and Paladin Place on the north, was closed to traffic in April 2020. The creek had eaten into the bank so aggressively that the drop-off came within a few feet of the pavement. It stayed closed through a pandemic, two council elections, and by most accounts two separate "hundred-year" storms.

Here's the part that gets flattened in the shorthand version of this story: the erosion itself was fixed by the middle of last year. What kept the road closed for another twelve months after that had almost nothing to do with the creek.

The creek work was the fast part

The Fountain Creek Watershed District, which manages the creek across nine local governments stretching from Palmer Lake to Pueblo, broke ground on the Southmoor restoration in November 2024. Crews smoothed out the bend in the creek that had been catching the worst of the high-velocity flows, widened the banks, and blended rock and timber into the slope to slow erosion for good. By July 2025, the district was calling the project complete. It celebrated with a ribbon cutting on June 30 for the newly restored Fountain Creek Regional Trail that runs alongside the same stretch, and the district's final price tag for the work landed at more than $7.5 million.

Alli Schuch, the district's executive director, told a reporter in April 2025 exactly what would happen next: "It is a city responsibility to maintain the road. And we're super-thrilled to have partnered with them on this project. Once we are done and out of here in terms of the creek restoration project, the city can then come in and look at the next steps for the road."

That handoff line is the whole story. The watershed district's job was the creek. The city's job was the pavement. Those are two different budgets, two different governing bodies, and as it turned out, two very different timelines.

Then the road sat closed for another year

With the creek stabilized, you'd think reopening a third-of-a-mile stretch of neighborhood street would be a formality. It wasn't. In January 2026, the Fountain City Council met to discuss Southmoor and voted to take no action at all. Todd Evans, the city's deputy city manager, laid out why in blunt terms: some of the repair options on the table, specifically full repaving with new guardrails, would cost as much as or more than the city's entire annual street maintenance budget. He also wasn't willing to promise the fix would hold. "Those 100-year storms we had a few years ago, we had two, back-to-back, and even with those, mitigation may last through those, and then one gets hit again five years from now," he said. "There's really no engineering specs they can put to it, that say that this is absolutely, 100% guaranteed to work."

Residents pushed back hard. Gerald Whitten told the council he wanted the street open because the detour was costing him time and safety margin every time he needed to get to Walmart. "If I want to go to Walmart, I have to get on Highway 85/87 and fight the traffic," he said. Adam McDonald, another neighbor, credited the intersection improvements CDOT had already made at Carson Boulevard and Highway 85/87 as a partial fix, but added, "it's still a dangerous highway."

The council came back in February with three options on the table:

• Reopen the road as-is with new guardrails only, the cheapest path
• Reopen with guardrails and repave the short section nearest the old closure
• Reopen with guardrails and repave nearly a full mile north to the city limits, the most expensive option

They landed in the middle. The council approved $450,000 to repave the short section and install a guardrail along the creek side, skipping the pricier mile-long extension. Mayor Sharon Thompson pointed to a symbolic deadline for the project: finishing before Veterans Day, which would matter to the Legion post sitting closest to the closure.

How Fountain actually paid for it

The $450,000 didn't come from a tax increase or a bond. Evans traced the money back to a permit fee paid by the developer of a new apartment complex the city approved the previous fall. Crews started milling the old asphalt on May 26, 2026, and by mid-June, public works director Bob McDonald reported the repaving nearly finished, with striping and the guardrail installation left to go. The city saved on materials by recycling the existing asphalt on-site rather than trucking in fresh pavement, which freed up roughly $320,000. That savings didn't just disappear into the general fund. City officials redirected it to repave two additional streets and run chip-seal treatments on three more, meaning the Southmoor project ended up funding small maintenance work elsewhere in Fountain that residents on those blocks probably never connected to a road three miles away.

Southmoor was expected to officially reopen before the Fourth of July.

What's actually different if you drive this corner of Fountain

The shortcut is back, but the workaround the city built while it was gone didn't go anywhere. CDOT's redesigned intersection at Carson Boulevard and Highway 85/87, with its new signal and protected left turns, is a permanent upgrade that predates the reopening and stays in place now that Southmoor is open again. That means residents in the Southmoor neighborhood effectively ended up with two safer routes instead of one. The direct route back to the Legion post and the businesses along the highway is open again, and the highway detour that carried six years of traffic is safer than it was in 2020, signal and all.

It also means the Waze problem John Langley described should finally sort itself out as routing apps catch up to the reopened street. For six years, anyone unfamiliar with the closure got sent down a dead end. That's the kind of friction that doesn't show up in a council memo but shapes how a neighborhood actually functions day to day.

The pattern worth watching

If you're paying attention to how Fountain handles infrastructure, the Southmoor timeline tells you something useful: the engineering rarely takes as long as the budgeting. The creek got fixed in about eight months once the Army Corps permit came through. Deciding who pays to reopen a road on top of that fix took a full year of council meetings, a citizens' advisory committee, and a developer's permit fee that happened to be sitting around at the right time. Fountain still has at least one comparable project sitting in the queue, the W. Ohio Street railroad crossing near Loaf 'n Jug, which the city's own streets department lists as in progress pending additional technology upgrades required by the railroad. Southmoor suggests that project's actual completion date will hinge less on the technical fix and more on when the city decides the line item is worth funding.

Pulse Real Estate Group pays attention to this kind of change because it's the texture of daily life in every corner of the Front Range we work, not just Fountain. If you want a closer look at what's shifting in this part of town, our Fountain neighborhood guide tracks it alongside everything else worth knowing about the area. And if you're ever curious what a change like this, or anything else nearby, means for what your own home is worth, Pulse Real Estate Group is always glad to run a free home valuation, no obligation attached.