The Regional Transportation District (RTD) is one of the worst-managed agencies in Colorado, and its solution it to tax you more. RTD’s elected board of directors referred a tax hike to the November ballot for the agency’s eight county-wide taxing jurisdiction. Ballot Issue 7A will appear in front of voters in all of Boulder, Broomfield, Denver and Jefferson counties, parts of Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties, and a slice of Weld County.
The measure eliminates revenue restrictions under Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), meaning that moving forward, RTD would be able to permanently keep and spend overcollected tax revenues that otherwise get refunded back to taxpayers. That’s more money in RTD’s coffers and less in taxpayers’ pockets. RTD won’t say it, but that’s a tax increase.
Here’s why voters should reject 7A.
In 2004, RTD promised voters that if they agreed to pay more taxes, it would greatly relieve congestion by building six new rail lines costing less than $3 billion. At the time, 4.8 percent of workers in the Denver metro area took transit to work.
Fifteen years later, RTD had spent $6.5 billion on rail projects and, due to cost overruns, wasn’t able to finish the line to Longmont. All this spending did nothing to relieve congestion, as the share of Denver metro area workers taking transit to work in 2019 remained 4.8 percent.
Rail critics pointed out that buses can move more people, faster, in greater comfort, to more destinations than rail. But RTD got greedy and wanted to build expensive, obsolete transit rather than rely on economical modern buses.
RTD’s real problem was a transit system that focused on downtown Denver. That would have made sense in 1904, when most jobs were downtown, but it doesn’t make sense today, when less than 10 percent of Denver-area jobs are located downtown.
Before the pandemic, 22 percent of workers in downtown Denver commuted by transit, but only 2.6 percent of workers in the rest of the metro area took transit to work. RTD’s downtown-centric transit system simply doesn’t work for 97 percent of people who don’t work downtown. Rather than fix this problem by rerouting its bus system, RTD spent billions on trains that did little for people not going to or from downtown.
COVID-19 was bad news for RTD’s model as downtown workers are more likely than most to be able to work from home. The latest data indicate that only about 67 percent as many people go to downtown Denver on a typical day as before the pandemic. Not coincidentally, the latest ridership data indicate that RTD is carrying about 65 percent as many people as it did before the pandemic and only about 3 percent of Denver urban area workers take transit to work.
Even though taxpayers already paid 75 percent of RTD’s operating costs before the pandemic, the loss of riders represents a loss of non-tax revenue for RTD.
Now RTD wants to be able to raise taxes to make up for this loss. In other words, it wants to be paid more for doing less.
Voters shouldn’t reward RTD for running an inefficient transportation system that poorly serves more than 90 percent of the people in the region.
Randal O’Toole is the director of the Transportation Center at the Independence Institute and author of Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need.
