The legislature is still out of session, but I'm on the Transportation Legislative Review Committee which meets during the interim.  We just had two days of hearings.  Here's the report on those and some other issues:

Highways to Hell

When you’re sitting in traffic do you think to yourself: “I sure hope we can keep traffic this bad over the next 25 years?”  Colorado’s transportation planners do.

In fact, keeping traffic constant is their dream; the reality they’re predicting is more of a nightmare.  Here’s why.  Every year we have more people in Colorado traveling more miles.  Just to keep pace, and keep congestion constant, we’d have to add more roads, more lanes and more mass transit.  That means spending more money, but the money’s not there.

Here are the numbers: maintaining the current transportation system until 2030, without any improvements, will cost $123 billion.  We have $64 billion.  (CDOT’s plan for actually improving transportation in Colorado would cost more than $167 billion).

This information comes from Colorado Department of Transportation’s 2030 Transportation Plan that’s just been released for public comment.  You can read it at http://www.dot.state.co.us/StatewidePlanning/PlansStudies/2030Plan.htm. Go ahead.  It’s a chance to experience road rage in the comfort of your own home.

CDOT predicts more parents missing meals with the family because they’re stuck in traffic; more skiers skipping the slopes because driving I-70 is like snowplowing down the bunny hill; higher prices in stores because truckers have to detour around worn out bridges with weight limits; and more people packed onto overcrowded busses and trains.

An obvious question is “why doesn’t Colorado have enough money to maintain its transportation system?”  The answer has two parts. 

First, most of the money we spend on transportation comes from Colorado’s gas tax.  The tax is a flat fee per gallon.  That means the amount of money we get from it doesn’t go up as gas prices rise.  The only way we get more revenue is by selling more gallons of gas.  Even with SUVs, fuel efficiency is wiping out the kind of gains we would need to pay for better transportation.

Second, to get more money we would have to dip into the state’s general fund.  Unfortunately, the general fund is tapped out because the state’s expenses keep rising, but TABOR, the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, is shrinking the budget relative to the economy.  In fact, our general fund will likely have a $370B deficit over the next two years.  Nobody knows how to pay that down, let alone transfer money to the transportation fund.

Greenspan

Back when we were actually trying to fix the budget crisis, Gov. Owens demanded that any solution combine cuts in money for schools with more spending on highways.  Coincidentally, that is a concept Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (a Republican first appointed by President Reagan) addressed directly during testimony before the U.S. House.  A representative asked Greenspan if higher investment in education or transportation might help to reduce the deficit in the long run by promoting faster economic growth.

His reply: 'I think education is probably more important than infrastructure if I were to have to choose between the two. I trust that that does not occur (yeah, right), but this is an increasingly idea-related economy, and there are less physical things involved in the value added that we are involved in. So I would put education at the top.'  Is Colorado taking his advice”?  No way.  We’re not going to invest in education or infrastructure.  In fact, we’re not even going to pay off the deficit – we’re just going to keep begging, borrowing and stealing money to finance it until the next generation takes over.

Speaking of Borrowing and Stealing

You may have noticed that our governor is getting sued for transferring money from cash funds to the general fund.   Sounds like technical gibberish, but what it means is that he raised taxes, but did it in a way that the thought no one would notice.  Ironic since he’s back in New York this week regaling conservatives with his no tax philosophy.

What he (and we in the legislature) did has to do with the definition of taxes and cash funds.  Taxes are levied on people in general.  The legislature and the governor can spend them on pretty much anything we want.  For instance, we collect the income tax and can spend the money on schools, courts, transportation, etc.  Taxes and the revenue they generate are regulated by TABOR.

Cash funds are collected from fees on a specific group of people and the money should only be spent on a service related to those people.  For instance, real estate agents pay a fee that goes into a fund to repay people who are burned in bad real estate deals.  The money in the cash funds comes from user fees and they are not regulated by TABOR.

When Colorado went broke, the legislature, with the governor’s encouragement, transferred money from various cash funds into the general fund.  Get the picture?  We took money we can raise without regard to TABOR and turned it into money that’s supposed to be regulated by TABOR. 

Is that illegal?  Stay tuned.  But if it is, that $370M deficit I mentioned earlier swells to $770M. 

Notes

If the top of this message says something like “Dear RTMG_56” it’s probably because I didn’t get your name when I got your email address.  If you’d like to fix it, just click on 'Update My Profile' below.

Rep. Jack Pommer

Colorado House District 11