February 04, 2009 05:23 AM UTC

FASTER Plan Needs Progressives On Board

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• by: Colorado Pols

The centerpiece of Governor Bill Ritter’s transportation plan, Senate Bill 108, faces a crucial test in the Senate tomorrow.

The bill is facing significant opposition led by Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, and Republicans are expected to come in fairly solidly against the bill–but the key focus for proponents now has turned not to cracking the GOP minority, rather to winning over three solidly liberal Democrats: Sens. Morgan Carroll, Lois Tochtrop and Paula Sandoval.

We are familiar with some of the objections to the FASTER plan from the left, and we accept some of them as legitimate. What FASTER proponents point to in response, while acknowledging concern about higher fees, toll roads, and (potentially, it’s just a study) regressive mileage taxes, is the GOP alternative, reported by the Colorado Statesman in mid-January:

[State Rep. Frank] McNulty said Republicans are not flatly against new fees, but said the Legislature should do more to find existing revenue to fund transportation before asking residents to pay more. When asked where he might cut existing money from a largely hamstrung state budget, McNulty gave a few suggestions.

“The Governor’s Energy Office (is one place), and then we could roll into the expanded entitlement programs – welfare programs – that have been expanded in the last two years,” McNulty said. “There are things that we can do to roll back government and instead use the money to fund transportation priorities.”

Look, everybody knows the transportation funding crisis is real and won’t be solved long-term by the federal stimulus package–it’s just a question of how the state will respond. We think it’s a cogent argument that anyone who values all the stuff in the budget besides transportation should try to preserve a funding channel from transportation-related sources, like the FASTER plan tries to do.

The alternative seems uncomfortably close to servicing the aims of guys like McNulty, who would be perfectly happy to solve Colorado’s transportation woes by taking a jackhammer to everything else good progressives care about.