It’s crunch time for the Denver area’s indispensable but increasingly expensive FasTracks project.
Billed as a $4.7 billion construction project when voters approved it in 2004, the estimated cost of the expanded rapid-transit system has jumped to $7.9 billion, according RTD’s latest analysis.
It’s not a matter of bad management or cost overruns. A worldwide surge in the cost of concrete, steel, copper and other essential materials has sent costs soaring. Meanwhile, a slowdown in the local economy has cut into the sales tax receipts RTD needs to pay for the projects.
In a briefing prepared for RTD’s Board of Directors on Thursday, RTD General Manager Cal Marsella said the agency’s leaders have three choices:
• Build to budget, making major cutbacks in the project but completing it by the originally scheduled date of 2017.
• Stretch construction out as long as 2035.
• Seek additional sources of funding, including another tax increase from the same voters who just four years ago agreed to up the RTD sales tax from 0.6 percent to a full 1 percent to fund FasTracks.
We’d say forget about a tax increase, which voters probably would crush in the current economic climate.
There is one possible exception to that rule. Shoppers within the RTD area already pay a 0.1 percent sales tax to pay off the bonds on Invesco Field, which will expire Jan. 1, 2012. If voters agreed to extend that existing tax to help pay for FasTracks, it would add about $40 million a year. But it’s unlikely that the state legislature would authorize such a vote until 2011, so such money can’t be plugged into RTD’s current plans.
Otherwise, we hope the next president, be he John McCain or Barack Obama, will press for a sizable increase in federal aid to transit. But that would probably require a jump in federal fuel taxes, and Congress isn’t eager to do that with pump prices hovering around $4 a gallon.
Finally, we hope Gov. Bill Ritter’s blue-ribbon panel on transportation includes increased funding for transit in the recommendations it sends to the 2009 legislature. But since voters would have to approve any overall transportation tax increase, such funds can’t be plugged into RTD’s current plans either.
For now, RTD has to concentrate on cutting costs by further extending its public/private partnership program, already in place on the Gold line to Arvada and Golden and the East line to DIA, to include the next round of rail systems running north into Adams County and northwest to Boulder and Longmont.
Finally, the RTD board should prepare plans to stretch out some projects if the hoped-for extra funding doesn’t materialize. The West line to Golden is already under construction and the Gold and East lines have been approved for about $1 billion in federal funding, so any such stretchouts will have to come from the projects later in the pipeline.
FasTracks cannot be allowed to fail. But RTD does have to figure out how to pay for it.
