Colorado CDOT to Expand I-70 - Decides Constitutional Rights Not Important
by Lewis DerkinsMay 30th, 2008, 6:17 pm
I just beat up on Colorado yesterday, but I’m going to have to do it again today. A Colorado Department of Transportation sponsored panel made a recommendation today to expand I-70 and build commuter rail to help alleviate congestion between Denver and Summit County.
Now I’m all in favor of easing congestion and expanding services. But this recommendation is moronic.
The CDOT panel was named Collaborative Effort. They were a group of 25 stakeholders from CDOT, the Federal Transit Administration, the Colorado Environmental Coalition, the Federal Highway Administration, the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority, local governments, private citizens groups and others.
The panel was commissioned in October of last year. These clowns sat around a discussed the “alternatives” to alleviate congestion on I-70 and just made their recommendation.
How many alternatives do you suppose there are? … If it took you longer than two seconds to think of the answer three, you have serious problems.
The competing alternatives are construction of commuter rail or expansion of the interstate, the other option is both. Of course, a fourth option is neither, but that’s not really an option since we’re paying these clowns, we need to get something for that money besides the happiness of knowing that our government servants went home to food on the table.
That’s it, three options, and it took 25 people 8 months to decide which one to go with?
Now I’m willing to bet that CDOT can tell you pretty accurately what the cost to build a mile of road is in Colorado and how long it takes. They’re familiar with the terrain, weather, conditions of the existing roads and everything else – it’s not like you’re asking the Government of Hawaii to tell you how to build a road here.
I’m also willing to bet that Denver and CDOT have a pretty good indication how much it costs to build a mile of rail line and how long that takes since they have commuter rail in Denver and it has been expanded recently – and also in conjunction with the interstate, as it would be here – see yesterday’s reference to the T-REX project.
We aren’t forging a new trail here – I-70 is already there, so we don’t have to bulldoze a huge cut through a mountain. The state can probably give you a pretty good indication how much it is willing to spend on a project. So you have all the info you need at your fingertips for the asking.
In fact:
CDOT has been studying potential fixes to the congested mountain corridor for eight years.
So, these 25 people knew what the costs and time constraints were, they had all the information that had been compiled after 8 years of study, all they had to do was decide, and it took that long? Were these people being put up at the nicest hotel in Denver for their troubles? Was there some other incentive that explains how such a simple decision – one that should take no more than two weeks of good debate, tops, to resolve – took 7 months to reach?
And the kicker is that they went with option three, build both.
What’s interesting about option three is that the citizens of Colorado apparently don’t want it.
In 2001, Colorado voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have allocated $50 million for a pilot project in Pueblo to test whether a high-speed monorail could help ease I-70 congestion.
The citizens of Colorado have already been offered the opportunity to expand rail service here, and they rejected it. Why is a group of 25 social engineers allowed to override the democratic will of the voters of Colorado?
Colorado Department of Transportation Executive Director Russ George said the two solutions were proposed to satisfy two camps within the group: one that favored rail service and another that favored roadway expansion.
With groups on the panel like the Sierra Club and the Colorado Environmental coalition, I wonder who was proposing the rail alternative? So basically a democratically voter-decided issue was overturned by less than 25 people.
Colorado has a population of 4.3 million people. A majority of them rejected this rail proposal – and 25 people came along and changed that.
That is the kind of thing that we rebelled against when we became a new nation. That is essentially taxation without representation.
I can hear my critics already – “but Lewis, this is just a recommendation, this doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.” Yeah, well let me tell you something, smart people - when CDOT has already spent eight years studying this and tasks a group to “find a solution”, you had better bet that’s what they’re going to go with. You don’t waste eight years of study and eight months of discussion and all that money to just disregard it. And if it wasn’t on the table, it wouldn’t have been on the table for the panel to choose.
The CDOT executive director basically acquiesced to this solution in the article. You watch. Unless this blog post becomes the most famous in the world overnight, and generates a huge groundswell of negative publicity that spawns angry voter riots, they’re going to move forward with this, and at that point the social engineers will have a fait accompli.
Now, I will admit, that I don’t necessarily have a problem with the rail service. Nor do I think that voters always know what’s best for them. But if we’re going to override the democratic will of the people – the very essence that this nation is founded upon – then the Government of Colorado needs to have a little more courage than to delegate a decision like this to an obscure panel without a single elected representative from the state legislature serving on it.
The politicians in Denver should have the moral courage to stand up and tell us we might not like our lumps, but we’re going to take them because they know what’s good for us. Then we could sort it out at the voting booths. Maybe the government is right and the voters would forgive them. Maybe they create a giant boondoggle and would get hammered for it.
That would be the appropriate solution here. What isn’t appropriate is allowing a small tyranny of do-gooder social engineers to impose their visionary ideal on an unsuspecting populace.
The citizens of Colorado better wake up, their constitutional rights are about to get kicked in the teeth.
Captain Weak-Ass says: Hey weary travelers! Did you realize that your elected officials just fed you a steaming load of poo? I recommend an old fashioned cattle drive straight down I-70 and all the way to the Colorado State capitol steps. Let your herd relieve themselves on the lawn to return the favor! Don’t forget not to piss off Judd and Lewis! Till next time, I’ll still suck!
Posted in Government Workers, Highways, Light Rail, Politics |
Wow, are you all wet on this one. Just a novel thought, but why don’t you get the facts before your write an article? To someone that has been intimately involved in the I-70 mountain corrridor improvement debate for the past 7 years in Colorado, you are completely ignorant of the real issues. You have no idea of the complexity of the problems and the politics involved over many years and several Colorado administrations in regard to an I-70 solution. The real threat to the voters of Colorado has nothing to do with the 25 stakeholders in the I-70 Collaborative Effort process, but with the outright and nearly criminal manipulation of a NEPA process by the Owens Administration. Of course, you don’t mention any of that, but you obviously don’t know or want to understand the real history.
The 2001 Colorado ballot initiaitve you are referring to was for a $50 million test facility in Pueblo to develop a monorail technology that may or may not have ever been used anywhere. It was purely a set aside for research and development in Pueblo. The voters did reject it, but again they were not being asked to fund a rail alternative for the I-70 corridor, but just to develop a test facility in Pueblo. Contrary to your belief, these are two very different topics.
In addition, a few things have changed in Colorado since 2001. The RTD Fastracks initiative passed in 2004 which was a sales tax increase to fund light rail in Metro Denver. If you look at 2006 public surveys in Colorado, the overwheming majority support light rail as their number 1 priority action for reducing congestion. I can propvide you with this survey if you would like me to. Where is your refrence to any Colorado polls in more recent years or do you think that a ballot initiaitive in 2001 would not change in 2008? What was the price of gas in 2001 and what is it in 2008?
The 25 members of the I-70 Collaborative Effort were representatives from all the stakeholders affected by I-70 congestion and potentially affected by I-70 improvements. They came together with a consensus agreement which is significant under any circumstance. You can mock such an activity, but in Colorado, this is somewhat historic. All dissenting parties over the 8 year Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement process agreed on a solution of a number of significant highway improvements in the bottleneck areas and to begin working on an advanced guideay transit solution for the corridor. I can send you a copy of the consensus agreement if you would like.
This process should be a national example of how to break a NEPA Study stalemate and gridlock and actually get something Done, but you mock it as a complete failure to represent voters’ interests. I credit CDOT Executive Director Russel George and Governor Bill Ritter for having the courage to put all dissenting stakeholders in a room and tell them to work out a solution. Had this been done back in 2000, we would already be constructing the I-70 solution today.
I would suggest that the Colorado voters really need to wake up and lookout for uninformed reporters such as yourself, who perhaps even unintentionally grossly distort the truth.