A wonderful cartoon on the cover of MS magazine once featured a stylish 40-something smacking her head in dismay, crying: “Oh, no! I forgot to have children.”
Gov. Bill Ritter knows how that woman felt. In his State of the State speech, he forgot to mention transportation.
Oh, technically, he did “mention” it. But only in the sense of one of those “honorable mentions” awarded to contest entries that don’t qualify for a prize.
On page 2 of his text, the governor said the “big challenges” faced by Colorado include “how to fund a 21st century transportation system.”
You have to wade through the next six single-spaced pages to get Ritter’s own recommendations on that matter. Here they are, every word our chief executive spent on the state’s most important infrastructure issue:
“Another pillar of Colorado’s economic infrastructure is our transportation system. We all know what we face: Demand and costs are soaring. We need to focus on safety and efficiency. We must build our capacity, including alternative-transit systems to cut down on pollution and give travelers more options. So, last year, I appointed a bi-partisan transportation panel to identify sustainable funding sources to replace today’s dwindling revenues.
My deepest thanks to everyone who served on the panel. They did extraordinary work, and are providing us with real options. Now we must work together to find common ground. We can continue to make steady progress this year. But how we go forward depends largely on whether we can build a bi-partisan consensus around contentious funding issues.”
Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it? We need a new bipartisan committee to tell us how to carry out old bipartisan committee’s recommendations.
Did I say “committee?” Pardon the faux pas, that word should never be used in polite political society in Colorado. This state only has “blue-ribbon commissions.” In the event the millinery shops are sold out of blue ribbons, as often happens on Ritter’s watch, spinmeisters can always borrow a few “task forces” from Mayor John Hickenlooper’s lexicon.
Silly me, I thought the whole point of appointing a special committee — oops, I mean “blue ribbon commission” — was to give Ritter some options from which to choose recommendations to the legislature with an eye toward having the voters ratify a transportation package this fall.
The committee-commission-task force apparently thought so as well, because it offered El Guvo a choice of four packages of tax and/or fee increases totaling $500 million, $1 billion, $1.5 billion or $2 billion a year in new money for the state’s mounting backlog of transportation needs.
The highest-priced package would have raised $56 billion by 2035, still a bit short of the $63 billion the Colorado Department of Transportation’s 2035 Statewide Transportation Plan describes as the minimum increase it needs “just to sustain existing transportation service levels” through that year. The minimal $500 million figure — enough to just maintain the roads and bridges we already have — could theoretically be raised without a vote of the people by hiking automobile registration fees an average of $100 bucks per vehicle.
The 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights requires a vote of the people for tax increases, but not for fee increases. But that exemption was designed to avoid calling an election every time parking meter rates were raised — to cite one example used to defeat previous versions of the TABOR amendment. (Eight previous TABOR-style amendments, beginning in 1967, were rejected by voters before the current one was passed in 1992.)
But here’s the rub. TABOR has conditioned people to vote on tax increases and a typical two-car family might not be so eager to pay a $200 annual “fee increase” as some transportation advocates believe. They could well take out that anger on legislators seeking re-election in 2008.
So Ritter, faced with a choice between angering taxpayers and angering transportation advocates boldly called for further study.
Transportation has always been a political football in Colorado. But Ritter took this one and punted on first down.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
