November 18, 2009 10:11 PM UTC

FasTracks Needs Backup

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

If Denver-area voters do not approve a sales-tax hike and if the federal government fails to contribute $1 billion for the FasTracks public-private partnership, RTD will only be able to build one more rail line – the train to DIA, agency planners told area mayors Tuesday.

RTD planning chief Bill Van Meter outlined the scenario in response to a question from Arvada Mayor Bob Frie, as mayors and RTD staff members discussed options for moving the $7 billion FasTracks project forward.

FasTracks needs an additional $2.3 billion if the Regional Transportation District is to stay on schedule for building its planned total of six new rail lines, three rail extensions to existing lines, and other transit elements by 2017.

So far, the West Corridor light-rail line to Lakewood and Golden is the only FasTracks line under construction…

RTD’s board of directors will decide early next year whether to ask voters next November to back the tax hike or wait until later.

The voter-approved FasTracks plan has been hit with a double whammy in the last few years: first came the huge spike in commodity prices just before the economy imploded–and then there was the implosion, which cratered the sales tax revenue slated to pay for light rail. Metro-area voters are going to have to make a choice to complete the system as originally envisioned, or scale back the project to what reduced resources can pay for–but keep the criticism reality-based.

Don’t tell any of this to the Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara, of course. FasTracks has become Caldara’s favorite example of a “boondoggle” that he would like nothing more than to see abandoned, and the facts outlined above are regularly abused by Caldara and his ‘transportation expert’ Randy O’Toole. Don’t trouble him with talk about commodity prices, and of course tax revenue going down can only be a good thing to Jon Caldara. Caldara also only seems to care about endangered birds when they hit wind power turbines, but that’s for another blog post.