Where did the road money go?: Examining Colorado transportation claims

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

HB26-1430 (see the first link below for some earlier context) is the Colorado Democrats’ measure to kneecap Initiative 175, the measure that would enforce that road dollars actually go to building roads.

The measure passed the legislature with some last-minute fussing, and included some new amendments. The Sum and Substance article linked second below details how things went down in the last days of the legislative session.

The purpose of this post is not to look at HB26-1430 in its final form or how that will affect (or not) Initiative 175. There’s more coming in the saga and I’ll hold off on updates til something concrete pops up.

No, I wanted to share a couple of quotes from Democrat politicians appearing in the Sum and Substance article that made me furrow my brow when reading them. The first quote to appear in the article is one by Senator Lindstedt. Because it’s simpler, I will reserve it for the “Related” content below.

Rep. Boesenecker’s thoughts require a little more space to fully digest so I will spend the remainder of the post on that. Let’s start with what Boesenecker said. To save space, I attached his comments as screenshot 1. If you want to follow the link in this quote, you can do so through the Sum and Substance article.

It’s tempting sometimes to be amazed by numbers, especially when those numbers are in the millions and spoken with the emphatic tone that Boesenecker has here, the voice of authority telling you how it is.

Numbers don’t lie, but they do need context, and this is what is sorely missing from Boesenecker’s quote (noteworthy also that reporter Sealover didn’t bother to check up on it either).

We’ll do the looking ourselves. The third link below is to the state’s budget explorer tool. Great one to keep handy; the legislative council staff has done a marvelous job breaking down a complex budget into terms accessible by the layman.

Screenshot 2 is from that page and shows the state operating budget, for all funding sources, vs. year. The bar heights have all been normalized to percentages for comparison across years. I highlighted the transportation color.

The normalizing of the budget numbers means that the height of the various bars shows you an increase or decrease in the share of our state’s budget. By clicking on the various funding categories you can highlight to bring into bold relief who grows and who didn’t.

Screenshot 3 shows a side by side I did with Health Care and Transportation.

This really puts Boesenecker’s boast into perspective. Transportation funding has stayed relatively constant (as a percent) while health care has grown considerably.

In the last year of the graph, our state put 4.7% of all its revenue into transportation. Going back a decade puts transportation at 5.2% of all revenue. In that same time, health care increased from 32.2% in fiscal year 2014-15 to 36.6% in the last fiscal year.

Politicians like Boesenecker frequently raise the specter of cuts to education and health care as a rationale for stopping things like Initiative 175. This was mentioned more than once in the podcast episode linked in the Sum and Substance article. If thoughtless or duped voters decide to put transportation money into roads, old people will die and children will sit in darkened rooms learning nothing.

It’s not in the quote I copied, but it is an ancillary claim made by the likes of Boesenecker, and thus worth examination. Obviously health care has not, in any way, suffered in this state. Looking at the graphs it is the largest area of budgetary growth over time (see earlier newsletters on Medicaid expansion and bloat in Colorado since 2014 and Obamacare).

If the claim is that healthcare would suffer should Initiative 175 pass, I have to say this isn’t likely. What suffering it did have would be merely a cut to a ballooning budget item.

By contrast, there is a budget category that has been losing out over time. Education. Screenshot 4 attached shows how, despite the scare tactics about education losing out if Initiative 175 passes, you can see that education has already lost money over time. I tossed in Human Services as another budget item where it’s easy to see a loss.

Further down in the budget explorer tool, you come across a section specific to transportation. I have a couple more graphs to show you from this section.

Screenshot 5 shows the state’s various funding sources for our state’s transportation network.

The highlighted parts of the bars are (navy blue sections) are transfers from the state’s general fund. Compare this with what Boesenecker says in the quote: “The General Assembly has put an average of $465 million in new money from the general fund into transportation each year for the past decade, which the vast majority going to roads and bridges rather than to transit, he said.”

I doubt the word “average” has been asked to carry so much in the past. My, what a lot of detail is hiding in Boesenecker’s average!

If you look at the part circled in red, you’ll see a burst of funding from the general fund (after what could reasonably be called a drought). This relief was short-lived, however. The general fund monies end rather abruptly.

With the exception of fiscal year 21-22, there is little to no general fund money for transportation. The state diverts ARPA (federal money) to replace some of their lack and then stops entirely in 22-23. In case you wondered, the slivers on top of the bars beyond that year are actually bond revenue.

Screenshot 6 is our final one, this time showing you where the money goes. By far and away, most of our state’s money goes to road construction and maintenance. I labeled the state contribution (“S”) and the federal (“F”).

In that sense, Boesenecker’s claim that the state ignores roads holds some water. We put the bulk of what money we do spend into roads and construction.

That doesn’t give the whole picture: equally important to note are the bars immediately below that one. Note how our state puts just as much into “Other” as it does into Bridges and Tunnels. The enterprises under “Other” fund all the social engineering put in SB21-260. This would be things like EVs, electric semis, electrifying transit, etc.

While we may spend the bulk on roads, we spend as much on social engineering as we do on bridges and tunnels.

Don’t let numbers, especially those bandied about by politicians, blind you to reality. Our state may have “on average” put money into transportation, but we’re putting more into other priorities. The politicians running things might try to frighten you with cuts to education or health care if you demand that money for roads go to roads (weird, I know), but the reality is that they’ve been keeping transportation money flat for a long time while at the same time decreasing education funding. All this in the service of other priorities at the capitol.

Their attempts to knock down a measure you might have the audacity to vote for are more about control than they are about budget.

They don’t want you telling them what to do. They don’t want you demanding that money for roads be spent on roads.

https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/and-the-winner-seems-to-be-decreasing?utm_source=publication-search

https://tsscolorado.com/compromise-proposal-adds-twist-to-transportation-funding-showdown/

https://content.leg.colorado.gov/explorebudget/

Related:

As promised, a rundown on Senator Lindstedt’s quote from the Sum and Substance article linked in the post above.

It’s attached as a screenshot. If you want to follow the links in the quote, go to the article link and open it.

Yes, Senator Lindstedt, consensus was reached by governor-appointed boards. Kinda hard not to if you get to pick the people who make the decision, no?

It’s worth noting that one of Lindstedt’s own examples, the RTD board he references, came to quite a consensus indeed!

They reached the consensus that you don’t need to have a fully elected board anymore with SB26-150; you don’t need an entirely elected taxing authority, what you need is a mixed board with “experts” (read political cronies) to help make things run better according to the people who know better than you do.

Your voice doesn’t really need to carry much weight, the consensus reached by the governor-appointed board was that your voice needed dilution.

You’ll pardon me if I don’t have high hopes for the governor appointed board on transportation given what we’ve just seen!

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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