The $3M campaign behind Colorado’s CoCo rail tax proposal

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

The Colorado Department of Transportation had options when describing what $3 million in state transportation funds would buy. Public education. A feasibility study. Community engagement.

It called it a Ballot Access Plan.

That language — “develop a Ballot Access Plan and Implementation of the Plan” — sits in the purpose clause of a contract which took effect on March 26, 2026 between CDOT and the Front Range Passenger Rail District, the latter established by the legislature in 2021 to plan and eventually build passenger rail along the I-25 corridor. RMV obtained the contract through a public records request.

If voters approve a sales tax increase this November, the district would use those funds — along with money from state transportation accounts and the Regional Transportation District — to run trains between Denver and Fort Collins by 2029. District officials have described the tax as roughly a quarter to a third of a cent per dollar.

The $3 million contract pays for polling, coalition building, 40 to 50 town halls across two waves, a digital engagement platform called “Friends of Front Range Rail” and branding development for a service that hasn’t been built yet. All of it runs through November 2026.

What the non-advocacy clause does and doesn’t do

Colorado law draws a specific line around public money and ballot campaigns. 

The Fair Campaign Practices Act, C.R.S. § 1-45-117, prohibits government entities from spending “any monies from any source” to urge voters to support or oppose a ballot issue — including measures that would direct more public funds to those same entities.

The contract includes a clause in Section 7.3 acknowledging that line: “no funds provided under this Scope of Work may be used for advocacy, persuasion, or campaign activity, and all outputs must be strictly informational in accordance with the Fair Campaign Practices Act.”

A Colorado attorney with expertise in campaign finance law reviewed the contract at RMV’s request. The attorney said the non-advocacy clause might help show FRPRD was thinking about compliance but does not by itself determine whether the law was followed. What determines compliance is the conduct — how the funds are actually used. The attorney said the funding route from CDOT to FRPRD does not change the analysis because both entities are covered under the statute.

Two deliverables drew scrutiny.

Task 3.6.1 requires FRPRD to launch the “Friends of Front Range Rail” platform — a digital dashboard named for supporters. That platform is now live at coloradoconnector.com, where visitors are greeted with “Take Action: It’s Time to Get Colorado Moving” and invited to submit their contact information, attend townhalls, record advocacy videos and share pre-written social media posts.

Task 3.6.2 requires the district to contract engagement partners across business, labor, environmental and veterans sectors with no corresponding outreach to critics or opponents described anywhere in the contract.

The attorney said the Friends of Front Range Rail platform appears to raise one-sided advocacy concerns. The coalition-building task likely does as well, though the attorney cautioned that each activity would need to be evaluated on its own facts. The contract itself is not necessarily a violation, the attorney said — the outcome depends on what the district actually does with the funding.

The first products

Eleven days after the contract took effect, Gov. Jared Polis gathered officials at Denver Union Station to announce a name chosen by more than 25,000 public votes: the Colorado Connector, or CoCo for short. The name was already in the works — but the ceremony marked a branded identity for a service that has no track, no trains and no voter-approved funding.

Twenty-five days after the contract took effect, a bill appeared at the Capitol.

Introduced April 20, SB26-172 would redraw the district’s boundaries. Who votes on the November sales tax measure — and who pays if it passes — is determined by where those lines fall.

The current district covers 13 counties along the I-25 corridor, including rural and unincorporated areas. Under the bill, the district narrows to 30 specific municipalities — shedding roughly 40 percent of its current population. That would leave out communities including Castle Rock, Lone Tree and Monument, as well as most unincorporated areas.

The district’s current boundaries before the changes proposed in SB26-172. (Front Range Passenger Rail District)

The bill requires that at least 20 percent of a municipality’s population live within five miles of a planned station stop. That is a station-level demographic analysis. It is also a line item in the contract.

Task 3.3.1 of the contract’s Scope of Work was due February 2026 — two months before the bill was introduced. It required FRPRD to “analyze demographic, economic, and mobility patterns at the precinct level to evaluate whether existing District boundaries appropriately reflect the communities served by the finalized alignment.”

Task 3.4.1 required the district to “support legislative adjustments to add or remove precincts to ensure the District footprint accurately reflects the service corridor.”

SB26-172 does what those two tasks describe.

FRPRD General Manager Sal Pace signed the contract. It took effect on March 26, 2026.

Testifying before the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee on Monday, he told lawmakers the boundary methodology came from county clerks who wanted to avoid drawing lines through precincts and managing multiple ballot styles. The contract he signed calls for a precinct-level demographic analysis to evaluate whether district boundaries reflect the communities the rail line will serve.

RMV asked FRPRD whether the Task 3.3.1 precinct analysis formed the basis for SB26-172 and whether CDOT grant funds were used to produce it. The district did not respond before publication.

Section 3 of the bill gives the FRPRD board authority to create subdistricts with independent taxing power and their own ballot questions.

If the November vote fails, the board could run a separate tax measure in a smaller geography. Section 5 makes the bill effective immediately upon the governor’s signature, bypassing the standard August effective date. The contract requires a ballot referral decision by late July.

The clock

The $3 million moves in two installments. The first $1.5 million was released when the contract took effect.

The second requires FRPRD to meet five benchmarks — among them completion of the precinct-level boundary analysis, a financial framework and a formal board vote to proceed to what the contract calls “Public Engagement and Ballot Preparation.” The second $1.5 million covers the second round of polling and town halls and a completed “Ballot Resolution Package prepared in a way that allows for Board action.”

Tuesday the Regional Transportation District’s board convened in a closed special session on “potential joint service for the Northwest Rail corridor,” citing state statutes allowing executive sessions for negotiating positions and legal advice. No public vote was held. RTD District A board director Chris Nicholson had described an anticipated vote to RMV as “the signal.”

That corridor carries its own history.

The Northwest Rail corridor is the same line Denver-metro voters were promised in 2004 when they approved the FasTracks sales tax. Commuter rail from Union Station to Boulder and Longmont was supposed to open by 2017. It has not been built.

RTD’s own board chair, Patrick O’Keefe, said at a February 2026 board retreat the agency can’t deliver on the original promise. “We don’t have enough money to build it. That’s just a fact,” he said. RTD created the FasTracks Internal Savings Account (FISA) for those unfinished projects. It is that account — carrying roughly $190 million — that RTD staff proposed drawing from to fund CoCo’s design phase.

In an April 21 Finance and Planning Committee packet, staff warned the board that the proposed $5.58 million FISA expenditure combined with the agency’s structural deficit means “current forecasts indicate that RTD will fall below restricted cash thresholds in 2028” — the year before CoCo is scheduled to begin service.

RTD confirmed it could locate no internal financial analysis of that commitment from its Finance Division.

The Senate Transportation and Energy Committee advanced SB26-172 on Monday with an 8-1 favorable recommendation to Appropriations. Before the vote, the committee adopted an amendment removing Northglenn from the list of included municipalities — over the sponsors’ objection.

The lone no vote on final passage came from Sen. Mark Baisley, who said “this is going to be an extremely expensive project” with cost overruns and delays, and argued the state’s priority should be roads.

Two pools of public money are now committed to CoCo before voters have cast a single ballot on the tax. One is $3 million from a state transportation fund to run the campaign. The other is $5.58 million from voter-approved FasTracks savings earmarked for design work on the project itself.

The contract runs through November. The ballot question it’s designed to support hasn’t been written yet.

Editor’s Note: SB26-172 is scheduled for a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, April 30.