Denver’s RTD Makes the Case for Lying

Denver RTD Makes the Case for Public-Private Funding, says Progressive Railroading. In fact, Denver’s Regional Transit District is making the case for lying to the voters about everything possible in order to get as much of their money as possible.

The first lie was that FasTracks, Denver’s rail transit plan that Progressive Railroading calls “one of the largest transit expansion programs in the country,” would cost $4.7 billion. Soon after the election, RTD admitted the real cost would be $7.9 billion. Thanks to the recession, the cost has supposedly fallen to $6.9 billion, but none of these estimates include interest and other finance charges.

The second lie was that RTD would build six new light-rail or other rail lines. In order to get the support of all of the suburban mayors in the region, RTD had to promise to build all the lines at once, as mayors realized that any that were deferred to later would probably never be built. Today, RTD realizes that the Northwest line to Boulder and Longmont is just far too expensive and will carry too few riders to be worthwhile. But that applies to the rest of them too, it’s just that RTD doesn’t have enough money to build them all.

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Public-private partnership to the rescue! The private partner borrows the money and RTD signs a contract to pay the private partner an annual fee to “manage” the project. That annual fee just happens to be enough to repay the debt that doesn’t show up on RTD’s books. The voter-imposed debt limit is circumvented, which means taxpayers will effectively have to pay that much more in interest than if RTD had truly kept to the lower debt limit. That doesn’t matter to RTD, which will keep collecting high sales taxes forever to repay those debt and maintain and operate the rail lines.

There are a whole slew of other lies behind the Progressive Railroading report, such as the journal’s repeated use of the term “transit” when what they mean is “rail transit.” It is as if Denver had no transit system at all until it built rail lines. Rail advocates want to get voters into that mode of thinking to soften them up for funding expensive rail projects.

All of the rail lines being built by RTD could have been adequately served by buses, often at faster speeds and greater comfort for passengers, at a far lower cost. FasTracks was simply about spending a lot of money, a “WPA program for Denver contractors,” as one told me. Positive articles like the one in Progressive Railroading teach transit agencies across the country the virtues of lying to their constituents.