Dems react to panel’s call to spend $1.5 billion
DENVER - An upcoming report proposing that Colorado spend $1.5 billion more a year on transportation has some lawmakers asking if something can be done to reduce the miles Coloradans drive.
The report by the governor appointed Blue Ribbon Transportation Panel will suggest putting $562 million more toward mobility needs, $538 million to maintenance and safety efforts, $293 million to local roads and $107 million to transit, bike, environmental and pedestrian needs. Compiled after eight months of study, it recommends raising several statewide taxes and greatly increasing fees on vehicle registrations to fund the needs.
Though the eye-popping number — the state spends about $1 billion a year on transportation — was the first thing that caught many legislators’ attention, a number of Democrats soon began to ask if there were other ways to cut congestion. Rep. Jack Pommer, a member of the powerful Joint Budget Committee, questioned last month whether the panel did any out-of-the box thinking, and Rep. Claire Levy proposed a bill this month to place a priority on sending road money to pedestrian- and transit-oriented communities.
I turns out that the transportation panel did look at ways to reduce the amount of driving we do. The report we got focused on the financial part of the proposal; a smaller plan to increase funding $500 million/year for highway repairs and maintenance and a larger plan to increase funding by $1.5 billion/year. That second plan is the one that the commission will probably recommend, and it includes better public transportation.
Outside of the money part of the plans, Boulder County Commissioner Will Toor tells me that the committee will recommend making it easier for us to get around without driving. Will is on the panel.
Though their approaches were different — Levy did not criticize the report directly — both reflected an underlying sentiment among the majority party: Transportation funding and environmental and growth concerns should be linked.
A September report by Smart Growth America and the Urban Land Institute stated that despite efforts to produce alternative-fuel or more fuel-efficient vehicles, carbon emissions from vehicles would continue to rise unless the number of vehicle miles traveled is reduced. With zoning policies encouraging low-density development farther from city cores and transportation policies putting money into roads rather than transit, that is unlikely to happen, the report said.
Policies must encourage inner-city development that allows people to work, shop and play without jumping into a car, said Michael Leccese, executive director of the Colorado District Council of the Urban Land Institute.
“Unfortunately, land use has not been part of the climate-change discussion at most levels of government,” Leccese said.
Transportation accounts for the second-largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and those numbers are growing faster than any other sector of greenhouse gas producers, according to the ULI report. Vehicle miles traveled increased three times faster than the U.S. population over the past 15 years, and in Colorado they grew 114 percent from 1980 to 2005, from 22 billion miles a year to 47 billion miles.
Even if fuel-efficiency standards are increased to 35 miles per gallon and fuel carbon content is reduced by 10 percent by 2030, according to the report, transportation emissions will be 40 percent above 1990 levels. Many scientists have called for cutting emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
The pollution problem is even more pressing here along the Front Range. We're creating so much ozone in our air that it's violating federal law. Poisoning ourselves is bad enough, but violating the Clean Air Act also brings down some harsh sanctions from the federal government.
Levy, D-Boulder, hasn’t determined the specific criteria she wants to use in her bill, but said she wants to reward good growth policies with transportation funding so cities and counties can’t get money for expansion without producing “smart growth” plans. She also has proposed a measure that would assess a fee on the least fuel-efficient vehicles and put the revenues to a state office of smart growth.
Pommer, also of Boulder, did not mention a specific plan to cut vehicle miles, but said any recommendation from the Blue Ribbon panel should include one.
The panel’s members, who are writing their final report after agreeing to the recommendations at a November meeting, maintain there are a number of efforts in their plans to move people out of single-occupancy vehicles.
Panel co-chairman Doug Aden noted that of the $562 million suggested for mobility projects, $251 million is for transit projects such as buses and trains that would run between cities. An additional $72 million is recommended for urban and rural transit within communities, and $10 million for bike and pedestrian improvements — areas on which the Department of Transportation has never focused, he said.
Also, a policy statement in the report will call for looking for ways to slow the increase in vehicle miles traveled, Aden said.
The problem is that the idea of cutting these miles while the state’s population grows is harder than just committing to do so, said Aden, who is also chairman of the Colorado Transportation Commission. It gets into the issue of the state determining land use allowances, which has been the prerogative of local cities and counties.
The biggest point the blue ribbon committee will be making is that we don't have enough money to even maintain our current transportation system. Cities and counties fight hard to protect their prerogatives on local land use, then they fight hard to get state and federal tax money to clean up the transportation mess they make.
At some point, they're going to realize that there isn't enough money from the state or federal government to cover their costs. Then they'll have to ask their own taxpayers to pay the entire bill. At that point, I think the real cost of continual sprawl will sink in.
There is also the question of whether pushing growth away from suburbs and into urban areas will cause housing prices in the cities to skyrocket, as they have in some other parts of the country.
“I think the challenge you have in that scenario is for local governments to work with developers to find ways to make that housing affordable,” said Aden, a retired banker. “Development is taking place further and further north and further and further south (along the Front Range) because of affordability.”
The panel’s final report is expected to be published around Jan. 1
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