Less than two years ago, when RTD commissioned a poll that claimed 64 percent of voters were prepared to support another massive sales tax hike of 0.4 percent to finish FasTracks, I figured the fix was in.
In no time, I assumed, metro mayors and other local leaders would be bleating about our civic duty to complete this revenue-sucking boondoggle on schedule, no matter the cost.
But 23 months of lousy economic news later, I stand corrected. Our civic leaders still believe we should finish the FasTracks boondoggle, but not necessarily according to the original schedule and not by giving RTD a blank check.
Now that’s progress, if not quite enough of it.
As Jeffrey Leib reported in a recent Denver Post article, although the Metro Mayors Caucus failed to meet RTD’s Dec. 17 deadline for offering a formal recommendation on a new FasTracks tax, a straw poll a few days earlier revealed a majority of mayors favoring a levy of 0.2 percent. Yet that’s only half of what RTD says it needs to complete the project on schedule.
Even more encouraging, half of the 0.2 percent levy would not be a new tax at all but rather an extension of the Metropolitan Football Stadium District tax, which conveniently expires in a year unless it’s redirected.
Even a citizens advisory committee appointed by RTD has come out for boosting the FasTracks tax by less than the full amount needed to finish the project “on time.” Why, if these sober concessions to political reality and taxpayer welfare keep up, the next thing you know, former RTD general manager Cal Marsella will emerge from retirement and confess to bungling the agency’s original revenue projections for FasTracks and pledge to return a portion of his outsized pension in an act of remorse.
No, you’re right: That’s about as likely to happen as Al Gore lobbying for Peabody Coal.
Still, why give RTD any new tax? Why not ask voters to redirect the stadium tax to FasTracks and leave it at that?
Transit investment in metro Denver already easily exceeds all state and federal spending on highways and roads. It makes little sense to increase that imbalance at a time when voters may well be facing other tax proposals, both local and state, to boost faltering government budgets, and when their own incomes have stagnated.
Even at full build-out, FasTracks was never expected to account for more than a small percentage of total daily metro trips, even during peak commuting periods.
Redirecting the stadium tax to FasTracks would still allow completion by 2020 of 35 percent of the project’s unfunded elements, according to the agency — probably enough to provide the northern suburbs with a rail line if RTD concentrated its funds.
Meanwhile, limiting RTD to the stadium tax would force a long- overdue downsizing of FasTracks. It could mean, among other things, abandoning the Northwest train to Boulder and Longmont, whose projected cost per rider — and let’s not even discuss the cost per new transit rider — is indefensible except as an expression of political pork.
Six years ago, our civic leaders sold the voting public on an overly ambitious, bloated, multibillion-dollar transit scheme. They succeeded by exaggerating its potential to relieve traffic congestion and transform land-use patterns while paying scant attention to warning signs that it might be underfunded.
As evidence grew of a gargantuan shortfall, metro mayors — as if suffering from collective delusion — continued right into 2008 to insist that the project proceed as planned.
It’s too late to go back to the drawing board, of course. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re stuck with fulfilling the original plan.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
