Props. 109, 110 present two divergent roads

DENVER — Whether baseball sage Yogi Berra actually said “When you come to a fork in the road, take it” remains a subject for intense debate.

But what’s not debatable is that Colorado voters will face a major fork in the road on their Nov. 6 ballot — and they could choose either direction, both or neither.

At issue is Colorado’s pressing need for upgrades to its transportation improvements in the face of a growing population. Two issues on the ballot take vastly divergent routes to address the issue.

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Proposition 109, dubbed “Fix Our Damn Roads,” would authorize the state Legislature to sell $3.5 billion in bonds to expand state highways and require it to repay those bonds with $350 million a year from the state’s general fund.

Meanwhile, Proposition 110 would raise the statewide sales and use tax by 0.62 cents for the next 20 years — that’s 6 cents on a $10 purchase — to pay for a $6 billion bond sale for highways, generate $9.8 billion for local roads and $3.3 billion for m

ulti-modal projects including public transit, sidewalks and bike paths. Revenue from the tax would be divided, with 45 percent going to the Colorado Department of Transportation, 40 percent to local governments and 15 percent for multimodal projects.

Support for those multimodal transportation options is part of why U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, the Democratic candidate for governor, opposes Prop. 109, contending that “bonding without revenue” would take general-fund money away from higher education and other state needs and would leave the state vulnerable in the event of a recession. He’s neutral on Prop. 110, citing the possibility of developing other revenue streams. His Republican opponent, state treasurer Walker Stapleton, leans more toward the 109 solution because it prioritizes roads and bridges, and has suggested sports betting as a funding solution.

Prop. 110, which calls for the sales-tax hike, was originated by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and has drawn vocal support from business sources including other chambers of commerce and the Colorado Municipal League. Top funders include the Colorado Construction Industry Coalition, economic-development groups, convention and visitors bureaus, homebuilders and Vail Resorts.

Prop. 109’s advocacy and financial backing has come almost exclusively from the Golden-based Independence Institute, a free-market think tank that usually opposes tax increases, frequently has solicited funds from the road-building industry and whose leader, Jon Caldara, has disparaged the Regional Transportation District’s FasTracks rail system as too-costly “choo-choo trains.”

The Boulder Chamber has endorsed Prop. 110, while the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce likes both 110 and 109.

Caldara’s Prop. 109 specifically designates funding 66 state road projects. Along the northern Front Range, they include adding a lane in each direction to Interstate 25 between Colorado Highways 7 and 14, improvements to the intersection of U.S. Highways 34 and 85 in the Greeley area, widening of Colorado Highways 66 and 119 in Boulder and Weld counties, and improvements to the Interstate 76-Colorado Highway 52 interchange in Hudson.

A project list developed by CDOT that would be tapped should Proposition 110 pass includes those projects plus bus rapid transit, bikeways and managed lanes on Colorado 7 between Boulder and Brighton, Colorado 42 in the Louisville-Lafayette area and U.S. 287 between Longmont and Broomfield; replacing the I-25-Colorado 7 interchange with a “diverging diamond mobility hub” similar to the Superior interchange on U.S. 36; and improvements to U.S. 36 and Colorado 93 in and near Boulder.

Morgan Cullen, a legislative and policy advocate for the Municipal League, said that organization backs 110 and opposes 109 partly because 109 just focuses on state projects while “all excursions begin or end on a city or county road.” Cullen said the League, which speaks for city and town governments, conducted a survey that identified about $3 billion in infrastructure needs and $750 million in maintenance needs” in cities and towns alone.

“Prop. 109 doesn’t provide any new funding and has no multimodal component,” Cullen said. “We have a 22-cent-a-gallon gas tax that has not increased since 1991,” he said. “Since then because of inflation, rising construction costs and the advent of hybrid and electric vehicles, and better fuel economy overall, we’re getting about half as much of that gas-tax revenue as we did 27 years ago.”

Caldara has told various media outlets that because the state Legislature has let the transportation backlog get out of hand, Prop. 109 takes the decision-making process away from lawmakers who he says have had plenty of money for road-related projects but have “frittered it away.”

If neither proposition passes, state lawmakers plan to ask voters in 2019 to bond about $2 billion for transportation projects.

If both 109 and 110 pass, Cullen said, “probably you’d just take the greater of the two.” He said Senate Bill 1, passed by the Legislature last spring, “contemplated both scenarios and figured out a funding solution they figured would fit.

“If both ballot issues were to pass,” CDOT spokeswoman Tracy Trulove told Grand Junction television stations KKCO and KJCT, “we would have quite the challenge ahead of getting to all these projects in the amount of time we have to do them, but definitely it would be saying yes to funding transportation and important projects across the state.”