A couplet on Front Range Rail: what can we learn from FasTracks and when is an auspicious time to reach into your pocket? Colorado's Clean Slate Act goes into effect.
If the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, I have some predictions about Front Range Rail.
It will not come anywhere near paying for itself (you'll be making that up) and it will be expensive as hell.
That's if it's ever fully finished.
The conservative-leaning Common Sense Institute study on RTD and FasTracks is linked first below and is an interesting read in its own right. If you are interested in a look under the hood on their operations, it's worth a read.
For my part, the things that stuck out to me about the report are highlighted with boxes in screenshot 1.
--FasTracks rail cost $72 million per mile of track.
--Taxpayers (Federal and those in the district) give about 91% of the revenue needed to run RTD, fares from riders account for about 4.4%.
--Barring an increase in ridership, expect that subsidy to go up.
--If you live in Denver and like riding the trains and buses, great. You're paying about $275 per year in addition to your fares. Don't ride them but live in Denver? Don't worry, you pay the same $275.
Now, following the maxim above, let's turn to Front Range Rail. I wrote a quick breakdown of a presentation they'd done recently (see the second link below) which talked about their financials.
If you look at screenshot 2 from that breakdown, you'll see a yellow line which has been highlighted. The bars on this graph show operating costs for this rail district. The yellow line is fares.
Just like with RTD and FasTracks, they predict ridership will come nowhere near to paying for this. Just like with RTD and FasTracks, you'll note those costs just seem to go up and up (the bars go higher) while that yellow line stays flat (fare revenue doesn't go up).
Doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to follow this up with thinking that perhaps other aspects of RTD's "success" will be repeated here too.
Can we expect high costs per mile?
Can we expect that we'll all pay a lot and not many will be using it?
I think you know where I'd lay my money if I had to bet.
https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/fork-in-the-railroad-rtds-ridership-dilemma/
The Front Range Passenger Rail District doesn't want to ask you for money now.
They want to come to you with a more complete package. Read: they want more time.
Time to perhaps not put their tax increase on a 2024 ballot that will likely have lots of tax policy on it.
Time for more political outreach.
Time to help people wash the bad taste of FasTracks out of their minds. To wit, the quote from the article linked below:
“'Emotions are too high right now to vote for this,' added Longmont Mayor Joan Peck [a member of the board of the taxing district for Front Range Rail], citing consternation she’s heard from local officials about a potential sales tax increase. Some of that worry can be traced to the Regional Transportation District’s 2004 FasTracks program that raised taxes to build rail — and is still not complete."
Golly, I guess I could really see how asking for more money to build rail after taking and taking from Coloradans, after spending millions per mile of track and STILL having nothing to show for it, would be kind of classless.
Don't worry, though, they'll work on their outreach and be back with their hands out (their main type of reaching out) soon enough.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/05/21/front-range-rail-vote-delayed/
The first round of criminal records will start getting sealed as Colorado's Clean Slate Act goes into effect.
According to the article linked first below, a 2022 law (linked second below) will soon go into effect and the first of what will be many criminal records will be automatically sealed.** July 1st 2024 to be precise. This law builds upon a 2021 law that automatically sealed some criminal records for drug offenses.
When I read the article, I saw lots and lots of "oh don't worry" by some of the folks who sought this legislation. I like to look into things myself, so I went and pawed through the fiscal note.
I noted some things of interest to me and attached (with highlights) as screenshots 1 - 4.
--I like that the bill specifically excludes violent felonies, felonies involving harm to a child, and the like.
--I like that DA's get vetoes in certain circumstances.
--I would have liked to have seen a waiting period after a diversion program to seal a record. Diversion (e.g. sending someone to counseling instead of jail) can be a good thing, but it's no guarantee that someone has turned themselves around.
--Not requiring someone to clear all their fines and costs and etc. prior to sealing? Gosh, I don't see any bad consequences from that. This should have been removed.
This bill strikes me as a pretty mild version of the Democrat's (House Democrats especially) desire to lower criminal penalties. Will it work? Will it allow for more crime?
I think the answer to both is a shrug. Insofar as a giving a deserving individual, who has done the work to restore themselves to the moral community, a hand up, I'm good. Insofar as letting people skirt some of the consequences of their decisions and/or perhaps hide relevant information from, say, a landlord, I'm not.
One way or another, I guess we'll get a chance to see come July 1.
**A note: sealing a criminal record doesn't make it go away. Completely removing the record would be expungement, a different animal. From the article:
"'Expungement would be if they totally wiped your record. But with sealing, the government can still see your record, so government agencies can see it,' said Abbey Moffitt, a criminal defense attorney and one of the founders of Expunge Colorado. 'If you seal a record in Colorado, it means that it no longer appears on public record background searches. So if employers or landlords are pulling a background check, they're not going to see it anymore.'”
https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/colorados-clean-slate-act-will-seal-hundreds-of-thousands-of-records-in-july
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb22-099