Local government leaders are beginning to coalesce around the stance of asking voters in metro Denver to approve a 0.2 percent sales-tax increase for bailing out RTD’s financially troubled FasTracks program.
At a meeting of the FasTracks task force of the Metro Mayors Caucus on Thursday, a straw poll of the mayors in attendance showed a majority favored the 0.2 percent hike.
Similarly, at a separate meeting of mayors and county commissioners from the U.S. 36 corridor earlier in the day in Superior, elected officials unveiled a “position statement” for completing FasTracks that also promoted a 0.2 percent tax increase.
Officials in both cases propose to package the increase as a request to convert the current 0.1 percent Metropolitan Football Stadium District sales tax, which is due to expire at the end of next year, into a FasTracks levy, and add another 0.1 percent to the old stadium tax so that the increase totals 0.2 percent.
The stadium tax, which will raise about $38 million this year, has been in place for more than a decade to pay for the construction of Invesco Field at Mile High.
For weeks, Regional Transportation District officials have asked local government and business officials to consider asking voters next November to approve a sales and use tax increase for FasTracks of either 0.1 percent, 0.2 percent, 0.3 percent or 0.4 percent.
The transit-expansion project is short more than $2 billion of what is needed to build all the train lines promised to voters when they approved the original 0.4 percent FasTracks tax in 2004. RTD blames the shortfall principally on sales-tax collections that now, because of the recession, are forecast to come in far lower than originally predicted.
A hike of 0.4 percent would get the whole project completed by 2018, RTD says in its latest analysis. But at the mayors’ task force meeting Thursday, the consensus was that voters would reject a doubling of the tax.
A tax increase of 0.2 percent would enable RTD to complete 65 percent of the currently unfunded FasTracks projects by 2020 and complete the balance by 2027, according to RTD’s analysis.
Without a tax increase of some size, it could be at least three decades before RTD would be able to complete major FasTracks rail lines, including the Northwest train to Boulder/Longmont, the North Metro train to Northglenn/Thornton and the Interstate 225 light-rail line that is to serve central Aurora and the Fitzsimons medical complex.
