This US 85 bridge north of Louviers in Douglas County is being held up by temporary steel supports. FASTER was set up to replace bridges like this, not fund streetcars.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

A streetcar line on Colfax Avenue between downtown Denver and Aurora’s Fitzsimons medical campus may or may not prove to be a good idea. That answer depends on studies yet to be completed.

But no study is needed to know that it’s not a good idea to break faith with an already angry electorate by diverting newly raised auto registration fees from the FASTER bill to help pay for it.

State Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, has floated the idea of diverting a portion of the total fees – $4 from vehicle registration surcharges within one mile of the Colfax corridor – to a special district that would be set up to finance, build and operate the streetcar line.

Aside from the political and legal problems this could cause, the proposal expands and perpetuates Colorado’s convoluted transportation funding flow chart. If you want to fix roads and bridges, then charge fees or propose taxes that do so, as FASTER does. If you want to build a streetcar line, then come up with a logically connected financial plan that has the people who benefit from it paying for it, without robbing from another fund for it.

FASTER’s increased charges are user fees – that’s the argument for how they pass muster with TABOR.

Since TABOR passed in 1992, instead of asking voters to increase the gas tax, we’ve been increasingly holding the system together with duct tape and baling wire out of fear voters would say no. We’ve been taking general fund dollars in surplus years and backfilling major CDOT corridor projects with it – a feast or famine cycle that inhibits good planning.

So finally, after Gov. Bill Ritter’s transportation finance panel reaches a consensus two years ago that a minimum of $500 million more per year is needed merely to catch up to deferred bridge and road repairs, the legislature barely gets through the FASTER bill that gets us only halfway there.

We were told last year that these increased fees – the first all-new revenue source for transportation in 18 years – were vital to repairing falling-down bridges and unsafe roadways.

And that’s correct.

The Colorado Department of Transportation, which has 124 bridges rated poor, is projecting that more and more bridges will slip below the good and fair threshold into poor condition by 2019 without additional funding.

As to roadway surface, CDOT has projected that without new revenue for its maintenance program, the share of highway mileage rated as good or fair would fall from 49 percent this year to 29 percent in 2019.

Read about that in CDOT’s 2009 Transportation Deficit Report.

FASTER is already threatened with repeal by some legislators and by a citizen initiative headed for the November ballot – which would also reduce total auto license fees that now support city, county and state road maintenance to a flat $10 a year.

Diverting any of FASTER’s fees to anything other than fixing the roads and bridges is politically unwise and a potential violation of the limitations imposed on the state to raise taxes. As long as FASTER fees are spent directly on providing the road and bridge infrastructure to the drivers who are paying them, then they can reasonably be called user fees, not taxes. Siphoning off revenue for a non-highway project neutralizes that argument and bolsters the case of opponents that it was an illegal tax increase.

Under FASTER, the fees go into the Highway Users Trust Fund for allocation to the State Highway Fund, counties and municipalities around Colorado. The bridge fees further go into a separate enterprise fund to insulate them from TABOR restrictions. Diverting those fees to any venture that is not a bridge project, such as a Colfax streetcar, creates a legal problem.

It’s time for Colorado to start facing transportation funding needs head-on, with bridge fees spent on bridges, road fees spent on roads, and streetcar funding that’s tied directly to the beneficiaries – perhaps a Union Station-like special district.

Don’t try to trip up the first bit of progress Colorado had made in catching up to road and bridge maintenance.