The price of the FasTracks rail expansion — if it is to be completed by 2017, as promised to voters — has jumped from $6.1 billion to $7.9 billion, according to officials familiar with RTD’s latest analysis of the program.
Today, Regional Transportation District planners will brief the agency’s directors about options they have for completing the financially stressed Denver-area transit expansion as construction costs continue to soar.
Planners are expected to present directors with three basic alternatives:
• A “build to budget” option requiring major reductions in the scope of the massive project and possibly threatening the flow of federal funds for key train lines.
• Extending the completion date beyond 2020, an approach that would increase the total long-term cost but give RTD the flexibility of tapping sales-tax revenues over a longer period.
• Staying on the 2017 delivery schedule and trying to build the six new train lines and two rail extensions largely as promised to voters when they approved a sales-tax hike in 2004 to pay for the project. This option carries the $7.9 billion price tag, officials say, and includes the prospect of going back to voters for an increase in the FasTracks tax.
That alternative may be politically unacceptable.
Centennial Mayor Randy Pye, who heads the 37-member Metro Mayors Caucus, said Wednesday that “the option of a tax increase is not palatable to the mayors.”
“We’re interested in working with RTD to come up with a solution to implement what we voted for,” Pye added, referring to the widespread view that area residents will not accept truncated train lines or a construction timetable that takes FasTracks completion well beyond 2017.
The mayors’ caucus was instrumental in getting the 0.4 percent metro Denver sales-and-use tax passed in 2004 to fund the bulk of FasTracks.
But costs have skyrocketed since then.
Last year, RTD’s annual financial evaluation of the program found that the price of the project had grown to $6.1 billion from the original 2004 estimate of $4.7 billion.
RTD then attributed the huge increase largely to steeply rising prices of construction materials such as concrete, steel and copper.
Since that review, the price of these materials has stayed high and the surge in fuel costs has only made matters worse.
The expectation that construction costs may continue to rise 12 percent to 14 percent a year is at least partly responsible responsible for the dramatic hike in the cost of FasTracks to $7.9 billion, officials say.
In lieu of an increase in the tax, RTD might try to get more money for the project from the federal government or from local cities and counties in the area.
RTD already is banking on getting at least $308 million in federal money for the West Corridor light-rail line to Golden — the only FasTracks line that is under construction so far — and as much as $1 billion in federal funds for the East Corridor line to DIA and the Gold Line to Arvada/Wheat Ridge.
One wild card is the new administration in Washington, and whether John McCain or Barack Obama would push for expanded funding of the Federal Transit Administration, which backs major projects such as FasTracks.
Pye said that the metro mayors’ group has “concerns” about the state of FasTracks’ finances and that the elected officials want to protect the flow of federal funds for the project.
Just as an increase in the FasTracks tax is politically problematic, so would be any attempt to cut the length of rail lines or push out the completion date of some.
Three FasTracks projects — commuter-train lines to Boulder/Longmont and north Adams County, and the Interstate 225 light-rail line in Aurora — might be candidates for cuts or construction delays since they are not in line to receive federal funding. But local officials and residents in those corridors would be expected to squawk loudly if such an approach were taken.
Jeffrey Leib: 303-954-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com
