The “Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery Act of 2009” better known as FASTER has quickly become a significant political liability for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter who was already struggling at the polls with only a 44 percent approval rating before the FASTER controversy. What has citizens up in arms is the drastic increase in car registration fees and large late fee fines. The measure is expecting to gouge over $250,000,000 from the car-owning taxpayers in Colorado. The outcry has centered on the new requirement to register annually trailers and up to $100 fine for registering late. The fees exceed the value of many of the seldom-used trailers in Colorado.

The usually politically tone deaf governor quickly stated that next year he will ask that the $100 late fee for boat trailers and other non-motorized vehicles be modified. But the anger is not simply about the trailers, but the massive increase in automobile registration and the same large fines for being late. The raising of $250,000,000 in fees every year from the economically challenged citizens of the state may sink Ritter’s re-election chances. Such massive increased burdens on automobile owners have lost governors their elected positions in many other states from New Jersey to Virginia.

The primary sponsor of the legislation in the House was Representative Joe Rice, a Democrat and the former Mayor of Glendale. His district in Littleton leans Republican and the unpopularity of FASTER assures him of a difficult fight to retain his representative seat in the legislature.

But as disliked as FASTER already is, very few voters have read the whole bill and know what is in store for them under this behemoth piece of legislation which is 67 pages long. The bill was not pushed as advertised to simply rebuild decaying roads and bridges. SWEEP, one of many environmental groups who pushed the legislation, correctly identified its real aim as “reducing greenhouse gas admissions … by giving drivers an incentive to choose alternatives to single occupant vehicle travel.” That is to say they are going to make it prohibitively expensive for all but the very rich to be able to own and travel in a car.

How are they going to achieve this goal? The mechanism has been put in place to establish user fees on existing major highways. Anyone who has recently used E470 to DIA knows there is new technology which simply by photo radar captures the license plate and in the mail comes a bill which normally gives one sticker shock. It is estimated that FASTER can extract well in excess of $1.5 billion a year from the taxpayers of Colorado which is the supposed high end cost of fixing every road and bridge in the state.

In our guest editorial section Arapahoe County Clerk Nancy Doty points out that by calling this massive new burden on the taxpayers a “fee” and not a “tax,” Governor Ritter avoided having to bring this measure to a vote of citizens as required under TABOR. However the highly politicized Colorado Supreme Court in the case of Barber v. Ritter obliterated any distinction between the two and as long as the money is not headed toward the general fund the voters are out of luck.

Back in 2004, we were the only paper in metropolitan Denver that predicted that the FasTrack proposal would end up to be a financial quagmire with the cost being far in excess of what was predicted and the services far less. While that prognostication proved true, at least the financial burden was approved by the voters and was limited in scope to about $7 billion until the next time RTD looks to the voters for more money, i.e. next year.

FASTER is and will be the most expensive and burdensome legislation ever borne by the citizens of Colorado without their approval. The pain of FASTER is just beginning.

— Editorial Board