Photo: RTD No. 4018 A Line train on Track 2 at Union Station Train Hall, Denver.
This story by Chase Woodruff appeared on Colorado Newsline on April 1, 2024.
A panel of state and local officials will decide later this month whether it’s full steam ahead on a 2024 ballot measure that would ask voters to fund a new passenger rail service along the Front Range with a small sales tax hike — or to hit the brakes and wait until 2026.
The 17 voting members of the Front Range Passenger Rail District weighed the question at a series of meetings in March. Under the law that created the district three years ago, its board is authorized to refer a tax measure of its choosing for approval by voters across the district, which encompasses all or part of 13 counties along the Interstate 25 corridor.
Despite hopes that the board would settle on the size and timing of that tax measure last month, board members instead agreed on Friday on another round of consultation and polling before coming to a final decision in a matter of weeks.
“I think where we are is, we have affirmatively decided that the answer is not No,” said Chris Nevitt, a transportation manager for the City and County of Denver who serves as the FRPR’s board chair. “And we need to move with all haste, effort and resources to answer the remaining questions, to decide if the answer is yes.”
Polling conducted on the district’s behalf this year showed strong support for Front Range Passenger Rail among Colorado voters, with 73% of respondents saying they favored the project. Pollsters found that 61% of voters said they would back the proposal if it meant a sales tax increase, regardless of whether it was a 0.3% or 0.5% hike — in other words, three or five cents added to a ten-dollar purchase.
The former would raise about $325 million annually for the district, while the second would raise $600 million. The cost to build and operate the service depends heavily on factors like the selected route, frequency of service and other details, which are being finalized as part of the district’s service development plan.
But according to a financial analysis presented to the board last month, even a smaller sales tax increase of less than 0.2%, if coupled with a $500 million federal grant by the end of 2026, would be enough to fund a phased approach that envisions a “starter service” of three trains per day between Denver and Fort Collins by 2029, expanding to six trains per day between Fort Collins and Pueblo by 2035.
Multiple board members at Friday’s meeting spoke in favor of what Claire Levy, a Boulder County commissioner appointed to the board by Gov. Jared Polis, called a “go big or go home” approach. They want more information about how the service plan could be enhanced with the additional funding from the full 0.5% sales tax hike, such as by extending service to Cheyenne to the north, or to Trinidad or New Mexico to the south, or by building more double-tracked segments along the corridor to enable faster and more frequent service.
“While we don’t know exactly what we could do, we know we could do a hell of a lot more,” Nevitt said.
“We can get a very broad scenario sketched out for you,” Andy Karsian, the district’s general manager, told board members. “Any number that we come up with, it will be illustrative, and it will help you all on a decision … but we need to take it with a lot of contingency and a lot of assumptions.”
Polis and other state leaders have made a push in recent months to promote FRPR and other passenger rail projects as Colorado competes with other states around the country for a share of the $66 billion in rail funding allocated by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. Lawmakers at the Capitol are advancing a bill to raise $57 million a year in state funding for rail and other transit projects through a rental car fee, and believe FRPR could serve as a catalyst for the completion of another long-anticipated rail line, the Regional Transportation District’s commuter-rail B Line between Denver and Boulder.
Under a contract approved by board members Friday, the rail district will conduct additional polling to “truth-test” its findings at the request of the governor’s office, Nevitt said.
“The governor’s office was really asking … ‘Can we test in some additional ways or get some more detail on how open to the proposition the public is?’” he said. “(The contract) is working with the governor’s office to get additional polling, to answer that question more to the satisfaction of the governor, who is a very important ally of this enterprise.”