Most residents of metro Denver consider RTD a transit agency that runs buses and trains. But RTD is something else, too: the biggest high-stakes gambler in the state. It’s counting on billions of dollars that it may never see.
If the gamble goes south, so does the FasTracks build-out.
And RTD has no Plan B.
Not yet, anyway. After many months of defying reality, the RTD board may be ready to consider a retreat from its high-wire act. Two board members have asked their colleagues to back a “Regional Equity Compact” to govern future investment if voters reject a sales tax hike next year.
They want the board to pledge to boost bus service in the corridors where rail plans would be put on hold while committing to the principle that “the North, Northwest, U.S. 36 and I-225 corridors will have priority for all remaining funds and bonding authority from the original FasTracks sales tax.”
Permit me to translate: Hell will freeze over before taxpayers in the southeast and southwest corridors see those rail lines extended, as promised in 2004.
Predictably, the RTD director from Lone Tree, Jack O’Boyle, was not pleased. “This is not equitable to all sectors of our district,” he said at a board meeting this week.
True, but so what? If voters turn down another tax hike and RTD finds itself billions of dollars short, the agency is going to have to start saying “no” to constituents. What better place to start than with southwest and southeast metro Denver (where I live, by the way), much of which has enjoyed rail service for years?
Incidentally, FasTracks isn’t at risk only because voters could balk at a tax hike. The project also depends on other uncertain funding sources, namely $1 billion in federal grants and $900 million in private financing. If those figures come in lower than expected, FasTracks will be squeezed even more.
Consider the worst case: no tax hike, disappointing federal grants and private financing, and anemic sales-tax collections. If those stars align, FasTracks construction could grind to a halt after the completion of the West Corridor (now well underway) and lines to DIA and to Arvada/Wheat Ridge.
Plan B — no matter what it is — might hardly matter.
“Without an additional tax, it’s my understanding, based on discussions with RTD staff, that at least half of the lines won’t get built within the next 30 or 40 years,” Aurora Mayor Ed Tauer recently told me. That’s why Tauer is more concerned about extracting guarantees for how RTD will spend its money if voters pass another tax hike than if they turn one down. He wants any new revenue stream divvied up and earmarked for the remaining corridors. And if that means pushing back the timelines for some or all lines, so be it, he says. At least the I-225 corridor through his city would get something.
In a rational world, RTD would have reassessed the scope of FasTracks as soon as it realized the project couldn’t be built with existing resources. Doesn’t the definition of political insanity include the continued pursuit of a rail line whose estimated cost per rider jumped from $16 to more than $60 in little more than four years? Not only does the Northwest train to Boulder and Longmont fit that description, the $60 estimate (from last November) includes many riders who already take mass transit.
The Northwest line made little sense even at its original price, given plans for Bus Rapid Transit from Denver to Boulder, too. But rail’s cost in that corridor has since become grotesque. Isn’t it odd, for that matter, that two of the only three rail lines that may get built for many years under FasTracks — the West Corridor and the Gold line to Arvada/Wheat Ridge — run parallel to each other, while the north and I-225 corridors go begging?
Politics doesn’t operate in a rational world, of course. That’s why RTD originally promised something for everyone without regard to the probable cost. It’s also why the agency may now be poised to take the first steps of what could become a long and painful retreat.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
