Suppose you were the Regional Transportation District and had promised voters you could build a multi-modal, comprehensive metro-wide mass transit network for $4.7 billion.
Now suppose global economics, the price of building materials, fuel and an economy hurling towards recession has stopped you in your . . . tracks?
On the one hand — thanks to $4 a gallon gasoline — ridership is up. On the other — thanks to $4 a gallon gasoline — consumers are worried and spending less. Sales tax revenues, the lifeblood of RTD’s budget, are plummeting.
The current estimate for the full build-out of the program sold to voters in 2004 is $6.2 billion and rising. Trial balloons suggesting either lengthening the promised timeline or reducing the initiative’s capacity have fizzled.
Metro-area mayors, who worked hard to sell the initiative to constituents, insist that neither program nor schedule is negotiable. However, the mayors have stopped short of endorsing the inevitable tax increase necessary to fulfill promises RTD made to the voters.
RTD wants to locate a maintenance facility for up to 450 buses on the old Denver Post printing site at West 44th Avenue and Fox Street, smack in the middle of the Globeville urban neighborhood. Despite the fact that RTD had the opportunity to purchase the 44-acre site last year, the agency recently determined the parcel is the best of 25 possible locations for the bus facility. Too bad a group of private investors bought the property earlier this year with the idea of developing a mixed-use retail and light industrial project — something to bring jobs, new development and commercial activity to this under-served community.
Too bad RTD didn’t include neighborhood stakeholders in their process of going from 25 alternatives to one.
RTD’s decision to locate its Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility near its existing Platte River bus operation was the catalyst for moving the bus maintenance facility to Globeville. The CRMF will repair, maintain, fuel and store 80 to 110 commuter rail cars. Studies recommended locating it on the Union Pacific ground near the proposed 40th and 40th transit site, but negotiations between UP and RTD fell apart.
The agency claims to have evaluated 25 locations before announcing its decision to build the CRMF on the Platte River. This requires condemning adjacent land including a parcel where Zeppelin Development’s phase three, mixed-use project is planned, entitled and designed. Phase three is also the recipient of a site specific, federal brownfield grant.
In a meeting more than six months ago, RTD head Cal Marsella agreed to collaborate with Zeppelin in planning for the facility. Ignoring the developer’s plan, RTD drafted a scheme directly in the path of the planned building, adjacent to Denver’s only river.
The Platte boasts a meager 1.1 miles of developed, accessible waterfront. However there is an additional 2.5 miles of downtown waterfront available. Two miles of this potential urban amenity sits directly in front of the proposed maintenance yard. Should RTD’s current plan be realized, Denver will distinguish itself as the only city among America’s 50 largest to propose new heavy industrial development on its waterfront amidst a recently transformed former industrial area, River North.
Do these actions respect the values of the community? The community who will likely be asked to pay more taxes in order to deliver RTD’s four-year-old promises to build a comprehensive transit system.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were the Regional Transportation District. But I repeat myself.”
