Coloradans deserve reasonable solutions to our state’s transportation problems.
Instead, we’re left with either nothing, which has been the governor’s plan the past two years, or schemes, including this latest Republican plan that actually drains funds from Colorado water projects into a single pork-barrel project on Interstate 70.
Yes, politicians who long promoted urban sprawl with the slogan “Drive until you qualify” (for a home loan) are now telling our embattled motorists to “Drive until you die of thirst.”
Unfortunately, the initiative’s sponsors, Republican state Reps. Cory Gardner of Yuma and Frank McNulty of Highlands Ranch, as well as the usually sensible Sen. Josh Penry of Grand Junction, already have turned in their petitions to the Colorado secretary of state. That office has not yet certified whether they met the necessary legal requirements.
We hope they fall short. But if Initiative 120 does make the ballot, we urge Coloradans to crush this return to the 19th century pork-barrel politics that once disgraced the Colorado legislature’s handling of state highway funds.
In the bad old days, the legislature appropriated state highway funds with the same gay abandon Congress still does with federal highway funds — building bridges and roads to nowhere in home districts of powerful politicians while more pressing needs elsewhere were neglected.
Voters rebelled against that corrupt system and in 1952 created a state Highway Commission to fairly allocate road and bridge funds. The system has worked so well that, with minor changes, it is still operating today on a broader stage as the state Transportation Commission.
Now, Initiative 120’s backers want to bypass our constitution by earmarking new severance tax revenues to a single highway project in their districts. This is a doubly dumb idea. First, as earlier noted, it would actually rob money now earmarked for water needs to highway projects. Second, and worst of all, it would open up the highway fund to similar pork-barrel raids in the future. As Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, warns, what would stop urban legislators from passing an initiative requiring all gas tax revenues to be spent in the county where they are collected? Such a policy would devastate rural Colorado.
Initiative 120 is another bad idea.
