By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
For months, two transportation questions were headed toward the same November ballot, pulling against each other. One would have locked specified vehicle and fuel revenue to roads. The other would raise a new tax to build a train. Within 24 hours, backers moved to pull one as the district referred the other.
On Aug. 27, Restore Our Roads announced it would withdraw Initiative 175, the construction-industry measure that would have amended the state constitution to reserve specified vehicle and fuel taxes and fees for roads.
The next day, the Front Range Passenger Rail District board voted 14-1 at the Transportation Technology Center near Pueblo to send its own funding question to voters. It asks for a 0.333% sales and use tax to build the Colorado Connector, the intercity rail line branded CoCo.
Initiative 175 was a statewide constitutional amendment. The CoCo tax goes only to voters inside the rail district. Their ballots would have overlapped this November. The rivalry also ran to money: 175’s text could have swept in the fees financing CoCo’s first trains, a reach the withdrawal now leaves untested.
What 175 would have done
Initiative 175 would have required that specified taxes and fees on motor vehicles and motor vehicle fuel, along with two-thirds of state sales and use taxes on vehicle parts affixed to a vehicle, be spent on roads, bridges, safety, and the State Patrol.
Nonpartisan legislative analysts projected the measure would redirect $264.4 million from the general fund in the 2026-27 fiscal year and $538.9 million the year after.
Democrats wrote HB26-1430 to blunt that.
If voters passed 175, the bill would temporarily cut the gas tax, fuel taxes, registration fees, and road usage fees, limiting how much general fund money the initiative could force into road-only spending. Bill sponsors framed it as protecting education, health care, and higher education from cuts.
The money behind CoCo’s starter service was within 175’s reach. RMV reported in May that the district’s $176 million contribution from the Colorado Transportation Investment Office is financed with revenue from SB24-184, the 2024 law that imposed a congestion impact fee on short-term vehicle rentals.
The District’s financing plan, a working draft published Aug. 24, names the same SB24-184 revenue, collected through the investment office, as a source for the Denver-to-Fort Collins service.
The text of Initiative 175 defined the revenue it would capture as all state sales, use, and excise taxes “or fees imposed and collected by the state on motor vehicles.” That language is sweeping, and it names no exception for fees collected by a state enterprise. On its wording, it could reach the congestion impact fee funding CoCo.
But the fee sits in a category the text does not address.
Colorado Transportation Investment Office (CTIO) is an enterprise under Article X, Section 20 of the state constitution, the TABOR provision that lets enterprises charge fees outside the limits that govern ordinary state revenue.
That separate status is the reason the fee could be created in 2024 without a vote. Whether an enterprise charge counts as a fee “imposed and collected by the state” for 175’s purposes is the question the initiative’s language leaves open.
Lawmakers appear to have believed 175 could reach it.
The enacted version of HB26-1430 added a clause, Section 43-4-219, taking effect only if 175 passed, stating that captured revenue “does not include fee revenue resulting from a fee imposed by any enterprise.”
Writing that exclusion into the counter-measure suggests its drafters expected the initiative would otherwise sweep in enterprise fees, including the one funding CoCo.
Whether it actually would have, and whether a statute could have narrowed a constitutional amendment that way, are moot the moment 175 comes off the ballot.
The deal, and what isn’t in it
Restore Our Roads said it reached the agreement with Attorney General Phil Weiser, the Democrat nominee for governor, and two Democrat lawmakers, Rep. Andy Boesenecker of Fort Collins and Sen. Judy Amabile of Boulder. Both were among the four prime sponsors of HB26-1430, the measure written to blunt 175 by temporarily cutting the gas tax, fuel taxes, registration fees, and road usage fees if the initiative passed.
That bill is already law, but its tax and fee cuts were contingent on 175 passing. If the initiative is withdrawn, they never take effect.
The group did not release the terms.
Co-chair Jeff Keller told Colorado Newsline that the funding plan goes beyond what the ballot measure would have delivered. Boesenecker told reporters lawmakers had committed to passing a bill next session that would earmark up to $120 million for road maintenance, likely from enterprise funds rather than the general fund.
Weiser, quoted in the campaign’s own release rather than a statement from his office, said the path forward would produce a future ballot measure “that we can all get behind.” Its text is not public.
Gov. Jared Polis welcomed the deal in a joint statement with CDOT Director Shoshana Lew, saying 175 “would have been devastating to Colorado’s budget.” He also claimed a record. Legislation he signed, he said, “is investing more than $600 million in our roads in FY27 alone.” His office’s own release puts a finer point on the figure. The more than $600 million is transportation spending, of which 54% is dedicated to highway improvements.
The withdrawal has been announced but not recorded. As of Sept. 1, the Secretary of State’s title board page for Initiative 175 showed no withdrawal filing, and Restore Our Roads’ own site still said the group “will withdraw” the measure. Only that filing would confirm 175 is off the ballot for good.
What the rail district is asking for
As 175 came down, the rail district put its own measure up. The board’s Resolution No. 2026-32, adopted Aug. 28, sets the ballot question that General Counsel Brent Butzin is directed to certify to the Secretary of State by Sept. 4.
It asks voters to raise district taxes by $295 million annually and to increase its debt by $580 million, with a repayment cost of $785 million.
The tax is a 0.333% sales and use tax, one third of a penny on a dollar, with exemptions for gasoline, food, residential electricity and gas, prescription drugs, and medical supplies.
The question names the communities the line would connect, from Pueblo north through Colorado Springs, Denver, and Boulder to Fort Collins. Only voters in the district would decide it. Its boundaries were redrawn this year under SB26-172, which cut the district from 13 counties to 30 municipalities along the route, as RMV reported in May.
The debt authorization is new since RMV’s earlier reporting on CoCo.
The financing plan assumes the District will issue $398 million in bonds in 2030, at an assumed 5.75% interest, carrying $29 million in annual debt service. The lone no vote came from board member Cory Applegate, who is also an El Paso County commissioner.
The plan also spells out who is behind the wheel. Amtrak is expected to operate the starter service and lease the trains, and the District says it is in discussions with Amtrak about its new Airo trainsets. The operator for later phases is not settled.
The financing plan names the Governor’s Office as a member of the Joint Service Executive Oversight Committee, the interagency body running the first phase alongside the District, the Colorado Department of Transportation, RTD, the Clean Transit Enterprise, and the Colorado Transportation Investment Office.
That is the same committee whose founding agreement the Governor and those agencies entered into to govern the Denver-to-Fort Collins starter service.
At the same Aug. 28 meeting, the board adopted a separate policy governing compliance with the Fair Campaign Practices Act, barring the use of public money to promote the measure after the referral vote.
RMV reported in April that CDOT had already paid the district $3 million under a ballot access contract for polling, town halls and coalition building before the referral.
Not everyone at the meeting was sold.
Natalie Menten, a former RTD board member, told the board the rail service would be no different from RTD, where the many pay for the few who ride. She objected that some communities were written into the tax while others were left out, and said she opposed paying daily for a train she would rarely use.
Her dissent will not change the timeline. The rail district’s certification, due by Sept. 4, will fix the final ballot language, and in November the district’s voters decide.