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The Daily Sentinel was off track in its March 10 editorial criticizing the ecommendations made by Gov. Bill Ritter’s Transportation Funding Panel. In questioning why taxpayers statewide should be expected to help pay for transportation construction projects on the Front Range, the Sentinel seems to be suggesting that citizens should only be responsible for paying for those projects which are in their own backyard.
This “user pay” approach sounds nice, except that in rural Colorado, we simply don’t have enough users to pay the cost of maintaining our expansive transportation system. The fact is that a mile of highway on the Front Range costs the same to build as a mile of highway on the Western Slope, but there are exponentially more people per mile to pay for that cost on the Front Range.
Transportation advocates on the Front Range have long advocated for a user-pay approach because they have 70 percent of the population and fewer miles of highway, and they are very capable of paying for the transportation infrastructure in their own backyard. After all, why should they care about paying for the cost of maintaining the highways to Grand Junction, Durango, Lamar and Sterling?
The reason that our urban cousins should care is because we all benefit from a statewide transportation system that serves both the state’s metropolitan hub as well as the rural spokes which support that hub. If we followed the Sentinel’s logic of Balkanizing the state into locally-funded transportation regions, then the Front Range could afford an almost unlimited transportation budget, while the rest of the state would be left behind.
This same logic applies to other public benefits which the rural areas rely on statewide support for, such as telecommunications infrastructure, health care, and education. Gov. Ritter is to be commended for his leadership in supporting the Transportation Panel’s statewide funding recommendations.
REEVES BROWN
Executive Director
Club 20
Grand Junction
2 Responses to “Highway funding should be statewide effort”
Posted March 14th, 2008 at 8:28 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Nice letter Reeves, but your assertion that a mile there costs the same as a mile here is so far from the realities that it’s not even laughable.
Here, we don’t spend an extra two or three million dollars for pretty noise abatement walls.
If the transportation department quit worrying about people having something pretty to look at while driving, and stop decorating the sides of the roadways with pretty, artistic renditions of mountain ranges cast in concrete, perhaps the drivers would be more inclined to pay attention to the other vehicles.
Just think of the possibilities.
Less taxpayer dollars spent on things that serve no purpose other than to distract drivers, and fewer accidents caused by those distraction.
Shucks Reeves, they might even find a few extra dollars to send over here.
Posted May 11th, 2008 at 4:44 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
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