Some Denver-area mayors are growing understandably frustrated with RTD and its financially troubled FasTracks project.
If the mayors are going to sell another tax hike to their voters to complete the massive rail and transit initiative, they want some assurance that their communities will get complete rail lines and that the project will be finished on time.
“It better be more than happy talk; it better be legally binding,” argued Thornton Mayor Erik Hansen.
But rather than issuing idle threats — Hansen suggested that voters get their money back if the lines aren’t built as promised — the mayors would be more helpful if they were instead pushing RTD to provide more realistic revenue projections for FasTracks that they can sell honestly to voters.
RTD wants to finish the project by 2017, as planned. As do the mayors.
But that’s based on voters approving a second sales tax hike and, we think, overly rosy revenue projections. The mayors — and voters — need revenue projections rooted in reality. And less rosy, more realistic projections might mean that FasTracks isn’t completed by 2017.
RTD needs that flexibility.
By now we’re all weary of hearing how the transit agency misread the tea leaves on projecting costs and revenues when it sold a 0.4 percent sales tax hike to metro voters in 2004 to fund the project.
RTD may ask voters next year to double the tax to 0.8 percent in order to close a more than $2 billion shortfall.
However, passage is not a sure bet in this economy. Neither is the big chunk of federal funding that RTD needs for the project. (However, given FasTracks’ stature as one of the nation’s major rail projects, and the fact the federal government is doling out big bucks these days, the federal money is a decent bet.)
And while mayors have reason to worry, there’s just no realistic way to include language in a ballot measure that promises, as Hansen suggests, that if the lines aren’t built as pledged RTD “will give you your money back.”
First, sales tax is paid by more than just citizens in the seven-county metro area. And there’s no way to know how much sales tax any single metro resident paid.
And it would be irresponsible for cities to attempt to back out now, considering their earlier support helped launch the project.
As we said, RTD needs some flexibility going forward.
A more sober review of the money coming into RTD might suggest a longer time frame is needed.
If an additional tax is not passed, RTD says it will take until 2034 to build out the lines. But independent analysts recently released a report that says RTD’s current projections, should voters approve a new tax hike, remain too optimistic as well.
RTD predicts that yearly sales tax growth will average 5 percent.
Analysts with Urban Engineers and First Southwest Co. told the Denver Regional Council of Governments that the assumption isn’t a sure thing. In fact, the analysts found that a 10-year average going back to 1999 showed yearly sales tax growth in the area of 2.3 percent.
Instead of asking for impossible promises of a refund, the metro mayors could help their residents in a far more meaningful way if they insisted that RTD re-examine its projections in light of the new DRCOG report.
Assuming 5 percent growth from 2011 forward could prove to be a disastrous miscalculation.
Haven’t we already been down that track?
