This November, Colorado voters may see a ballot measure to change the way highway funding is spent, always a source of controversy and heated debate. For all but the most inner-city urban voters, though, the issue is a no-brainer if ever there was such a thing. Initiative 175, for which signatures are being collected, amends the state Constitution to ensure dollars collected for highways actually go where intended.
Building, fixing, and maintaining the roads was the founding issue – 76 years ago – of Club 20, the voice of the Western Slope ever since. It remains a major reason that organization still holds together the diverse communities west of the Continental Divide, and it’s an issue that continues to unite people in all the rural parts of the state and most of the suburbs.
Regional and state leaders have devoted their careers to making sure rural roads are not ignored by a state increasingly dominated by Front Range cities.
The Noble Bill
Generations have benefitted from the vision, statesmanship, and determination of people whose names are mostly forgotten now: Preston Walker, Lyman Thomas, Stan Dodson, and perhaps especially Dan Noble of Norwood, once the state senate majority leader and sponsor of what became known as the “Noble Bill.”
Passed in 1979, the Noble bill addressed a desperate shortage of highway funds by dedicating the revenue from sales and use taxes on motor vehicles, batteries, tires, parts, and accessories to the highway trust fund. That added millions to the revenue generated by gas taxes. Even more significant, the Noble Bill specified that the entire fund had to be used for “construction, maintenance, and supervision of the highways, roads, and streets of the state…” Thousands of miles of roads were improved as a result, but it didn’t last a decade and when Dan Noble retired the legislature repealed it. Ever since, millions have been syphoned off every year for mass transit and non-road projects like bike trails, sound barriers, landscaping, and other “amenities.”
Many legislators are sympathetic to the national anti-automobile movement and have continuously diverted money, including sales tax revenue on auto-related purchases, to non-highway purposes, hoping drivers will give up their cars and ride trains, buses, or bikes instead. They won’t. And in large spread-out states like Colorado, they can’t.
A new study by economist Wendell Cox, based on Census Bureau data, shows that even in the Denver metro area, only 1.26 percent of commuters can get to work in 30 minutes any way other than by car. And ridership on the RTD system, as a share of total commutes, has fallen 51.2 percent since the light rail system was built. Funding goes up every year, but not ridership, in Denver or any other city.
New York City has over 36 percent of the mass transit commuters in America and gets the lion’s share of federal transit funding. Yet even there, over half the jobs are in suburbs, where only 3.5 percent of commuters use public transportation. Federal transit funding has increased 564 percent since 1960, while transit’s share of commuters has plummeted 71 percent. It simply isn’t how Americans get to work.
Road dollar sleight of hand
In Colorado, the state Constitution requires the highway trust fund to be used exclusively for the construction, maintenance, and supervision of public highways. That includes revenue from vehicle registrations, licenses, and fuel taxes, but that isn’t all vehicle drivers pay. Hence, the Noble Bill adding sales taxes on vehicle-related items, too. Its repeal in 1987 allowed legislatures to use that money for other purposes for years, while roads and bridges crumbled. They couldn’t change the constitution, so they just stopped putting that sales tax money into the highway fund in the first place. Instead, they reclassified those dollars as General Fund or cash-fund revenues, and then appropriated them for transit and other purposes. Highway funding has been difficult ever since, both because of the loss of those funds, and because more fuel-efficient vehicles generate less gas tax money, even as people drive more miles than ever.
The Noble Bill protected road and bridge funds against legislative mischief, but it was merely a statute, which legislators could and did change. It may be time for voters to learn from that mistake, pass a constitutional amendment, and protect highway funds from activist agendas.
Initiative 175 says those funds – paid entirely by car and truck drivers – could only be used on “road transportation,” defined to include building and fixing roads and bridges, improving driver safety, covering related planning and engineering costs, and funding for the Colorado State Patrol.
That would not stop planners from pushing the hairbrained $14 billion Front Range commuter train project (they think if California can have a bullet train to nowhere Colorado should, too). But it would make transit riders pay for it, while drivers pay for the roads they actually use.
Greg Walcher is former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, and a Western Slope resident.
