The Regional Transportation District on Tuesday recommitted to completing the Northwest Corridor segment of the FasTracks rail service and possibly implementing an interim plan sooner than full service can be achieved.
The special taxing district covering the Denver metropolitan area passed a resolution Tuesday night “expressing its continued commitment” to completing each of four unfinished corridors of the rail system.
Of the four — which also includes the North Metro, Central and Southwest corridors — the Northwest Rail segment, which would bring rail service from Denver to Boulder, Longmont and in between, at 35 miles has the most track to be completed to provide what district voters were promised in 2004. Voters approved a tax to fund FasTracks that year.
Despite the resolution’s passage, there have been no more funds committed to construction on the segment in the next decade, RTD spokesperson Tina Jaquez said.
“The action was brought forward by the RTD Board of Directors to reaffirm and formalize our commitment to completing the FasTracks program,” Jaquez said.
The resolution also said RTD would consider how to implement an “interim commuter startup service” — known as the Peak Service Plan along the Northwest corridor — “as a means of providing service to the corridor in the quickest manner possible.”
Jaquez said the resolution directed RTD staff to research cost-saving and creative funding mechanisms, and follow up with the board in two months.
The Peak Service Plan would provide rush hour service to the presently unfinished portion of the Northwest Corridor, from Westminster to Longmont, with three trains from Longmont to Denver in the morning and three trains from Denver to Longmont in the evening, the resolution said.
Gov. Jared Polis wrote a letter to the board recommending the board focus on the Northwest Rail corridor and implementing the Peak Service Plan, if possible.
“We urge RTD to thoroughly and speedily investigate the viability of this interim plan and to expedite the construction and operation of the plan if further analysis deems it practical and beneficial,” Polis stated in the letter. “… It could reduce costs significantly compared to a full-service plan, and thus be implemented in a much shorter time frame.”
By 2020, about 70 percent of the entire FasTracks mileage, not specifically the Northwest Rail corridor, will be completed — the intended completion date was 2017.
The resolution blamed the delay in completing the four unfinished corridors on a “variety of factors” that have arisen since voters passed the funding, including requirements for new technology, signal systems and commuter rail cars.
Also contributing to the setbacks, according to the resolution, were an increase in right-of-way acquisition costs, the decision that all but one of the trains be electric rather than diesel-fueled, significant hikes in construction material costs and the 2008 economic recession.
Longmont, Boulder County and regional officials in Times-Call opinion pages last year actively discouraged local voters’ to not let their disappointment with the results of RTD’s FasTracks program stop them from voting “yes” on Proposition 110, the statewide transportation tax increase initiative, in November’s election.
The measure failed, despite that none of the money it would have raised would have gone to RTD, but to the state Department of Transportation to help resolve its $1 billion backlog in unfunded projects; some of the money also would have been allocated to local governments.
Longmont last year led another effort to get nearby municipalities on board to again pressure RTD to proceed with providing some level of passenger rail service. Some of the jurisdictions along or near the would-be Northwest Rail route discussed contributing their shares of revenue from the statewide transportation tax increase, had it passed.
Longmont Mayor Brian Bagley said Longmont-area taxpayers as of August had paid more than $50 million into RTD’s sales tax collections that were supposed to go toward the Northwest Rail and other metro-area transit improvements.
“Our current financial plan reaches out to 2040,” Jaquez said. “We don’t have a (Northwest Rail) construction date identified within that timeframe because we don’t have funds identified. If funds become available we will reassess the situation.”
Sam Lounsberry: 303-473-1322, slounsberry@prairiemountainmedia.com and twitter.com/samlounz.
