PUEBLO–As part of the fallout from hundreds of thousand of Colorado voters receiving incorrect ballots, the effort to raise the sales tax along Colorado’s Front Range to fund passenger rail has replaced its embattled election official just weeks before the November 3 election.
The Front Range Passenger Rail District’s (FRPRD) board voted this week to make Pam Anderson the new designated election official for Ballot Issue 7A, the Denver Post reported. Anderson, who previously served as the elected clerk & recorder for Jefferson County, replaces Brent E. Butzin, a Denver-based consultant and partner at the law firm Nossaman LLP, who resigned on October 13.
A ballot debacle
Ballot Issue 7A asks voters in the taxing district spanning 13 Front Range counties whether the sales tax should increase by 0.333% – totaling $295 million annually – to fund the Colorado Connector (CoCo) rail project, planned to run from Fort Collins to Pueblo.
The measure erroneously appeared on over 800,000 ballots sent to voters who don’t live within the rail district after FRPRD failed to “adequately communicate” to county clerks recent boundary changes. While Secretary of State Jena Griswold claims only voters living within the correct district boundaries will have their votes on Ballot Issue 7A tabulated, the massive mishap has created issues for clerks in Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas, and Weld counties.
According to reporting from the Denver Gazette, Butzin sent a letter about the error to the four county clerks saying that since the district is a “unique creation under state law, the new boundaries were not communicated through the usual channels your offices rely on.”
The letter added that the district backed a new law changing the boundaries as a way to “ease the County Clerks’ burden in administering the District’s elections by tying the District’s boundaries directly to the boundaries of the municipalities most directly benefiting from the District’s services, and to provide for more uniform administration by allowing the Secretary of State’s Office to certify the District’s ballot content.”
“In hindsight, as a best practice, we should have informed each of you directly of these changes. We regret that this was not effectively communicated to each of you,” Butzin said in the letter, according to the Gazette.
Butzin’s questionable track record
This is not Butzin’s first brush with controversy consulting for tax-funded, high-dollar rail projects.
Nossaman, the firm where Butzin works, in September was named as one of four consulting firms that received reimbursements from the California High-Speed Rail Authority for “unallowable” travel expenses, a California Office of Inspector General report found.
Cost projections for California’s high-speed rail project have ballooned to $126 billion, almost four times more than the initial amount estimated in 2008.
CBS California confirmed that Butzin is the Nossaman consultant alleged in the OIG report to have expensed Lyft rides and last-minute flights, among other questionable expenses.
“The High-Speed Rail Authority also paid the Denver-based consultant approximately $86,500 in hourly travel pay, totaling over a quarter of a million dollars when combined with reimbursed expenses,” CBS California reported, noting a $937 flight to Sacramento and a $587 hotel room among the expenses.
Butzin also “pushed back” when a contract manager sought more details on some trip expenses, according to documents from the investigation.
Randal O’Toole, director of the Transportation Policy Center at Independence Institute*, told Complete Colorado that a “fundamental problem” with rail projects like California’s is that “few people know how to do them so agencies end up hiring lots of consultants, who also don’t know how to do them but they know how to bill big bucks for them.”
An uphill push
An analysis of Ballot Issue 7A that appeared previously on Complete Colorado found that if the sales tax increase passes, 13 cities within the rail district would be taxed at or above 9%. Another analysis by the Common Sense Institute projected the increased sales tax would result in $1.23 billion in cumulative losses to gross domestic product through 2036, as well as a $528 million hit to personal income and over 400 fewer jobs.
O’Toole added that “taxpayers shouldn’t trust the district.”
“The ballot screw-up isn’t even the main reason why not,” he said. “Everything CoCo advocates are doing replicates what RTD did in the 2004 FasTracks election, and look how that turned out: 80 percent cost overruns and transit ridership was increased by 2.5 percent while auto commuting grew by 33 percent.”
“CoCo has absolutely no chance of relieving congestion and those who say it will are just plain liars,” O’Toole said.
*Independence Institute is publisher of Complete Colorado.
