RTD survey: 63% support tax hike to finish FasTracks in 8 years
Published by Denver Business Journal
— January 29, 2009 — A phone survey of 700 likely voters in metro Denver, conducted Jan. 6-12, found 63 percent would support paying more taxes to get FasTracks done by 2017, the original time frame, the Regional Transportation District said Monday.
Respondents said they’d “generally support” increasing sales tax for RTD by up to 0.4 percent — or 4 cents on a $10 purchase, according to the RTD-commissioned poll.
That would double the amount of taxes metro-area residents currently pay for FasTracks.
Voters in 2004 approved paying an extra 0.4 percent to build FasTracks, which then had a $4.7 billion budget and a 12-year construction timeline to build more than 100 miles of rail lines throughout metro Denver, redevelop Denver Union Station and improve bus service.
Since then, skyrocketing construction costs have ballooned the budget to $7.9 billion even as the recession has shrunk RTD’s sales tax revenues to pay for the project — creating a roughly $2 billion shortfall on the project.
RTD’s board of directors is expected to make a decision this spring on what to do in the face of higher costs and lower revenues. Options on the table include shortening the transit lines, extending the time frame of the project by decades, or asking voters for more money.
That said, respondents told pollsters they thought approving FasTracks in 2004 was still a good decision, despite the budget problems that have cropped up since then.
About 83 percent of respondents said it was a good decision in the 2009 poll, compared to 79 percent with the same answer in RTD’s 2007 poll.
About 53 percent of respondents thought RTD could deliver the full FasTracks project with the current budget problems.
The poll was done for RTD by The Kenney Group.
The margin of error for the poll was plus or minus 3.7 percent.
