A vocal GOP critic of the Democrat transportation bill that just passed the Senate says the massive spending plan is "only limping along"--having lost even a couple of Democrat votes--because it expands tolling, significantly hikes fees and shows little fiscal discipline.
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"The expensive and overreaching transportation package narrowly approved by the state Senate ... is a far cry from the bipartisan mandate that its Democrat sponsors had hoped for," Republican Sen. Scott Renfroe, of Greeley, says in a new Capitol Update video posted on YouTub. "By the time debate on the bill was over, the majority party couldn’t even count all of its own Senate members as supporters."
Among the factors Renfroe cites in the video for why he believes the bill has "
little broad-based backing in the legislature," are wide-ranging fee hikes that raise annual registration fees for the typical passenger car by $30 to $40 and by more than $700 for some commercial trucks. He also points to a tolling provision that could allow cities or other local jurisdictions to set up tolling booths on existing highway lanes--something Renfroe called, "double-taxation."
"How would you like to pay a toll on I-25 or I-70 every time you drive through Denver?" Renfroe says.
Like other members of the Senate GOP, Renfroe also chides the bill's authors and backers for failing to impose greater budget discipline on the state government even as it seeks to exact a lot more money from the motoring public.
"It ... does not allocate one additional penny—not one—from the existing state budget to fix roads or even the bridges that are most urgently in need of repair," he says.
Renfroe holds out the hope that "some common sense can be injected" into the initiative on the legislative road ahead. However, he indicates there needs to be a major shift in focus behind the measure.
"Transportation funding must be made a higher—and permanent—priority in our state’s budget," Renfroe says. "We cannot expect ordinary Coloradans to dig even deeper into their pockets for transportation when so many of their elected leaders refuse to rethink how they spend the tax dollars they already receive."