U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and Federal Transit Administration Administrator Peter Rogoff are in Arvada today to announce a major funding agreement for the RTD FasTracks lines to Denver International Airport and to Arvada and Wheat Ridge.

The grant is expected to be in the range of $1 billion, as first reported in The Colorado Independent in July. Also attending the ceremony will be Gov. John Hickenlooper, Congresswoman Diana DeGette, Congressman Ed Perlmutter, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and various RTD and city and county representatives.

“It’s estimated that every $1 invested in transit infrastructure translates into a $4 return on investment in the local economy over a 20-year period. That’s an investment we all benefit from for years to come. Rebuilding and expanding America’s transportation infrastructure is a key element to our nation’s economic recovery. And with this unique long-term public-private partnership, the Denver region will continue to lead the nation with innovative and outside-the-box solutions to meet our transportation needs,” Perlmutter said in a prepared statement.

The grant is expected to be the largest transit grant yet awarded by the Obama administration. Festivities in Olde Town Arvada will begin at around 2:30.

Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff announced in a speech this morning that he plans to move forward with grants for FasTracks and other major transit projects, despite budget uncertainty.

“Bottom line: This is a crucial investment in the Denver metro region’s economy and quality of life – it will create jobs, provide a solution to traffic backups and help workers and visitors get across town quickly,” Udall said in a press release. “Denver-area voters spoke up when they supported FasTracks. The federal government’s partnership is critical to ensure that RTD can keep moving forward on schedule. I want to thank Administrator Rogoff for acknowledging how important keeping FasTracks on schedule is to the metro region.”

“This investment will help expand job opportunities, ease commutes and improve travel to and from the airport for visitors and residents in the Denver metro region,” Bennet said. “I’m glad the Federal Transportation Administration is honoring its commitment to help RTD with these vital commuter and light rail lines. I look forward to continuing to work with Administrator Rogoff and RTD to ensure these projects are completed on schedule.”

With that kind of competition helping the government run things — the kind of competition businesses make sure to obliterate in phone-book-size contracts– why wouldn’t we want to look to the private sector to fix the healthcare system?

A report released last week by Penn State law professor Ellen Dannin presents the real costs of road privatization. She looks closely at the the 2007 Northwest Parkway contract Colorado signed with Brisa/CCR as a typically problematic case. Brisa wrote into the deal every right to object to new or improved roads and mass transit systems that might compete with the Parkway. Yet no lawmaker or citizen could object to the lopsided contract because the terms were not released until after the deal was signed. Crazy! But again, as Dannin points out, typical.

Some excerpts of Dannin’s readable and damning study:

The issues missing from public discussion and scrutiny are terms that make government the insurer of the private contractor’s financial success and that cede power over public decisions to private entities. In other words, infrastructure contract terms control far more than just tolls or turnpikes, and their effects will be felt long after the contracts end.

Destroying competition would seem to undermine the basic argument for private operation. The theory is that consumer choice among competitors in the free market spurs better performance and drives down costs. Noncompete provisions forbid competition and consumer choice and eliminate these spurs to better performance and lower cost. Yet, standard infrastructure privatization agreements forbid building or improving competing infrastructure in order to leave no alternative but using the privatized infrastructure and guaranteeing the contractor’s revenues.

[…]

[R]equiring government to insure the contractor’s income complicates – and even eliminates – options for addressing important public issues for the life of the contract, such as reducing air pollution, environmental degradation, and urban and suburban congestion; promoting public health; and tackling other problems related to car-focused transportation. Recall that the Northwest Parkway contract penalized building or improving mass transit.

Market magic from the mouths of politicians is often more like illusion– a poker game voters are asked to join only after the cards have been dealt.

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Denver is updating its 50-year-old zoning code to further stem suburban sprawl, like this scene in Colorado Springs. (Photo/Ryan Ludwig, Flickr)

The Denver Community Planning and Development Department will begin to introduce its proposed zoning code to officials and area residents this month, a process that will continue through the fall and that will include public meetings and presentations in neighborhoods throughout the city.

The new code, called “Blueprint Denver,” aims to reinvent the city in a way that increases density and efficiency while fostering the kind of collaborative activity that will nurture the region’s economy for the future, according to drafters.

“The present code doesn’t support our vision,” Peter Park, planning department manager and public face of the new code, said in an interview. “We’re refocused on the city center in an effort to reinvigorate it.”

Blueprint Denver would replace the patchwork of city ordinances stitched together over the years since the last major revision was completed in the mid-1950s. Then, planning principles encouraged lower-density building and a suburban lifestyle.

“The emerging suburban sensibility simply didn’t value the city,” Park said. “The idea then, of course, was to move out of the city.”

Passing the new code would be a first step to implementing a vision expressed in the Comprehensive Plan of 2000, which was drawn up by planning experts, public officials and city residents and encouraged increased urban population density. The new code would divide the city into “areas of stability” and “areas of change,” with planners aiming to maintain the character of residential neighborhoods while reworking mixed-use areas to attract more residents, businesses and investment.

“We’re talking about integrated land use as opposed to the old model, where you had separate use, where you lived in one place and worked in another and shopped in another. That’s a model that may have worked for a while, but it also had dramatic [negative] effects.”

Encouraging a ‘spiky’ Denver
Park, who is also an associate professor in the University of Colorado’s College of Architecture and Planning and the head of its urban design program, is part of a growing class of planners and analysts who see a more developed urban geography as fundamental to future prosperity.

And he agrees with analysts who view the Denver-Boulder area as one of the country’s post-industrial “spiky” regions — a metro area where there’s a critical mass of educated and creative people who help drive urban growth.

Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Denver increased by roughly 90,000 residents, or 19 percent. By 2020, the city’s population is projected to increase by one and a half times that amount.

But the current city zoning regulations can’t support that kind of growth, Park said, except haphazardly.

“I was shocked when I first saw the code Denver was operating under. It was one of the most complicated codes I had ever seen, all negotiated on a transactional basis. That [approach] erodes what zoning does. There’s no overall vision or plan.

“But now we have a plan,” Park said, adding that Blueprint Denver is remarkable in its ambition and scope. And moving from the vision for Denver’s 2000 plan to introducing a new citywide zoning code is something the city should be proud of, he said.

Selling the plan
Park said that in introducing Denver’s new city code, his department is following the lead of successful rollouts in other cities.

“We’re being deliberate. You have to be incremental. You address questions and edit the document based on responses. You have to do outreach, assemble people who know what they’re talking about — developers, architects, brokers, residents … because the fact is everyone has a stake in it.”

“If by August City Council members aren’t invested in the plan,” said Park, “it won’t pass.”

The Community Planning and Development department is launching an interactive map of the new city code and relevant links in the coming days.

Still, Democratic U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette Thursday was quick to hail the government’s release of Colorado’s share of the transit-funding pie, which some critics have charged is far too small in comparison to stimulus funds directed to highway expansion, maintenance and repairs.

Federal Transit Administration funding for Colorado, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, totals $103.4 million, with $12.4 directed to public transit in small towns and the rest headed to urban areas.

“These transit funds will immediately help stabilize our economy in Denver and throughout Colorado,” DeGette said in a release.. “Colorado has many transit projects ready-to-go that will create and save thousands of jobs while reducing congestion and providing residents with green transportation options. With this funding, we can purchase and repair buses, continue expanding Denver’s light rail system, and get our economy moving.”

But according to RTD, FasTracks, funded by a sales tax increase approved in a 2004 metro-area election, is $2.1 billion short of the $7.9 billion needed to build out the system promised to voters.

RTD is weighing a sales-tax increase to fund the system, and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recently broached the idea of a toll on Pena Boulevard, the main route to Denver International Airport, to fund FasTracks. That is feasible now under a local tolling provision in the recently passed FASTER bill that raises vehicle registration fees to pay for road and bridge repairs.

Denver's historic Union Station. (Photo/Bettinche, Flickr)

During Tuesday’s visit to Denver with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden said the federal stimulus bill will be a big boost to mass transit in the United States, with funding impacts for commuter rail projects from Colorado to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.

“We should have the best transportation system in the world, and we don’t,” said Biden.

But many mass transit advocates are disappointed with the funding disparity between the money pegged for bridge and road repairs ($29 billion) and the funds for passenger rail and other mass-transit improvements ($17.7 billion). To break it down, that means $8.4 billion for transit, $8 billion for high-speed rail and $1.3 billion for Amtrak.

Colorado’s Front Range and the Denver metro area were used as shining examples of the “New Energy Economy” during Tuesday’s event. But the stimulus legislation’s funding realities mean that only $103.5 million will be coming to state’s way for transit projects.

How the money is spent remains to be seen, but it’s clearly not enough to meet the needs of the Regional Transportation District’s FasTracks light and commuter rail network, funded by a sales tax increase in 2004. The network is now $2.1 billion short of the $7.9 billion needed to build the system promised to voters.

RTD is weighing taking another sales tax hike to the voters, and metro area mayors – feeling shortchanged by service reductions – are looking for assurances RTD will deliver this time if it gets another sales tax bump. Some political analysts, though, citing the same economic collapse that’s hitting RTD and transit systems nationwide, say this is the worst possible time to ask voters for more money.

Of the $103.5 million in transit stimulus funds coming to Colorado — with 90 percent of it dedicated to the Front Range and the Denver metro area — it’s clear a huge chunk of it will go to the RTD, which submitted a $274 million list of “shovel-ready’ projects, according to RTD FasTracks spokeswoman Pauletta Tonilas. What’s unclear is how the stimulus money will be divvied up.

“The short story really about the stimulus funds is that it’s just really too early for us to tell what we’ll get, how much money we’ll get and what can be applied specifically to FasTracks and Denver Union Station,” Tonilas said, referring to the renovation of Denver’s historic downtown rail station, which is being touted as the central hub of the FasTracks network.

One of the most expensive aspects of Union Station’s redevelopment, which includes condos, restaurants and retail, is the FasTrack plan to build an intermodal bus station beneath the complex.

“We submitted a request specifically for Denver Union Station to DRCOG (the Denver Regional Council of Governments) for $18.6 million that would be part of the [stimulus] funds that get dispersed to DRCOG,” Tonilas said.

Overall, though, the governor’s blue-ribbon panel on transportation has recommended the state increase its transportation funding for all projects, including roads, bridges and mass transit, by $1.5 billion a year.

State lawmakers are currently wrangling over increasing vehicle registration fees, a move that could provide about $250 million a year in emergency road and bridge fixes, but a statewide vote on tax increases to create a permanent funding source looms on the horizon.

Though it is unlikely in the current economic climate, most state lawmakers say such a tax increase is inevitable given declining gas taxes to fund road projects.

“Unlike the federal government that prints money, all of this stuff costs money, too, so eventually Colorado voters will be asked to say, ‘Hey, would you be willing to support this or that for Colorado?’” said State Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, sponsor of the FASTER vehicle registration bill currently in the House.

Although he’s particularly troubled by periodic gridlock on Interstate 70 between Denver and the Western Slope, Gibbs said any discussion of expanding passenger rail beyond the Denver metro area needs to include the Front Range.

“We need to have a statewide perspective, because if it’s just on I-70, folks in Denver or Colorado Springs will say, ‘Hey, what do I get out of this?’” Gibbs said.

“We’re doing what we can do at the state level with FASTER, and I would say this is just a small step in the right direction as far as what our real needs are, but then all of you will have the opportunity to vote on the future of transportation and transit in Colorado.”

Stimulus dollars will have virtually no impact on a long-term fix for I-70 aside from some repaving and bridge repairs, said Flo Raitano, executive director of the intergovernmental I-70 Coalition, because final long-term plans are years away from being realized. However, Raitano said rail along I-70 needs local transit to supplement it, and some of those agencies could see stimulus dollars for new buses and other infrastructure.

“[Stimulus] will help ultimately the transportation solution for the corridor because we’re looking at the stimulus having some benefit for our local transportation authorities,” Raitano said, but which local transit agencies will see funding remains a question mark.

The Rocky Mountain Rail Authority, another intergovernmental organization, is currently conducting a $1.5 million high-speed rail study for both the I-70 and I-25 corridors. Funding for that study, slated to be completed in June, came from the Colorado Department of Transportation and local governments along both corridors.

Harry Dale, a Clear Creek County commissioner and executive director of the rail authority, said many of the questions about capital costs, potential routes, ridership and funding will be addressed at a Feb. 27 steering committee meeting in Golden.

“It will answer some of the questions that are coming up with regards to sharing rights of way with freight railroads and highway improvements that we assume will happen within the study period and what that means in terms of what kind of travel demand will be met or will be left unmet that we can accommodate,” Dale said.

The rail study envisions high-speed trains along the I-25 corridor from the southern border with New Mexico to the northern border with Wyoming, as well as along I-70 from the eastern border with Kansas to the western border with Utah. Its price tag would be in the billions.

“You talk about it being statewide, and what’s nice is the RMRA is an I-25 and I-70 corridor solution,” said Vail Town Councilman Mark Gordon, who sits on the authority. “It will go from state border to state border on all four sides.”