Transportation

Key Responsibilities

CDOT's official mission is "To provide the best multi-modal transportation system for Colorado that most effectively moves people, goods, and information." To do that, the Department:

• Builds, operates and maintains operates Colorado's highway system

• 9,134 miles of highway
• 3,775 bridges
• 28 billion miles/year of vehicle travel

• Helps local local transit systems
• Manages the state’s Highway Safety Plan, including:
• combating drunk driving
• encouraging people to wear seatbelts
• enforcing speed limits
• reducing traffic deaths
• Maintains and manages some funding of the statewide aviation system
• supports aviation safety at local airports
• distributes aviation fuel tax revenue
• makes grants to local airports
  

Factors Driving the Transportation Budget

Colorado's budget for transportation doesn't even come close to meeting the state's transportation needs. For the period between 2007 and 2035, CDOT expects to have $123 billion for transportation. To sustain the current level of service during that period, CDOT says, would cost at least $176 billion. That leaves us $53 billion short of maintaining the current system over the next 30 years.

There are a few key factors that contribute to the shortfall:

• The fuel taxes Colorado historically relied on to pay for transportation are no longer keeping pace with our transportation funding needs.
• Starting in 2000, the state sold $1.5 billion in bonds to pay for TREX and other transportation projects; we're now spending a lot of our transportation money to pay off the bonds
• The legislature in 1999 and 2000 cut taxes that would have brought in revenue to fund transportation
• The federal government is cutting the amount of money it distributes to states
  

Fuel Taxes

For decades Colorado (and the federal government) paid for the transportation using revenue from fuels taxes. It was essentially a user fee, and it worked pretty well: as people drove more, they bought more fuel, which means they paid more fuel tax, which paid for expanding and maintaining the system. Then we got green and started driving fuel-efficient vehicles. That meant people could drive more and buy less fuel.

Keep in mind that our fuel taxes are excise taxes; you pay a fixed amount of tax per gallon (e.g. 22 cents per gallon of gasoline), not a percentage of the price like a sales tax. That means the state collects the same amount of tax on a gallon of gas whether that gallon costs $1.50 or $3.50.

The result of all that has undermined our user-fee-like system for funding the transportation system. (And it's had the same effect on federal transportation funding, but we'll get to that later).

TRANs Bonds

In 1999 the state came up with a plan to quickly complete some "strategic" transportation projects across the state, the so-called 7th Pot projects. It asked for and got voter approval to sell $1.5 billion worth of Transportation Revenue Anticipation Notes (TRANs). The plan was to pay off the bonds using anticipated revenue from the federal government and SB1. Selling the bonds swelled transportation revenue for a few years and let the state complete some big projects like TREX south of Denver.

In 2005 transportation funding took a double hit: all the bonds had been sold, cutting off that stream of revenue, and the state had to start making payments to bond holders. That cut the amount of money we had for transportation from $1.2 billion to $800 million.

We'll be making payments of about $168 million a year through FY 2016-17. The revenue the legislature anticipated would be available to pay off the bonds isn't what they projected. For the next few years we probably won't have any SB1 revenue, and the federal government is cutting its distribution to the state.

Tax Cuts

In 1997 the legislature passed SB97-1, know known as SB1, divert about $250 million a year to transportation. The money was supposed to be above the 6% GF spending limit and below the TABOR revenue limit.

During the 1999 and 2000 sessions the legislature passed 24 bills permanently cutting taxes. They totaled up to about $550 million at the time, which would be more than $850 million this year. The legislature's intention was to eliminate the TABOR surplus (above the TABOR revenue limit), but presumably not the money that flowed into SB1 and HB1310. Just after the tax cuts, the economy dipped. The combination of the tax cuts, the recession and TABOR ratcheted state revenue down by about a billion dollars.

That's money that would be flowing through SB1 and into transportation; it's also part of the money the legislature anticipated would be available to pay back the TRANSs bonds.

Federal Funding Cuts

The federal government is cutting it's transportation funding, including money it indicated it would distribute to Colorado. They're having the same problem with fuels taxes that we are. And they're not managing it any better. In fact, the last time Congress reauthorized the bill that distributes money to state, the sponsors missed the deadline by two years. By then, they were so desperate to pass something, that thay promised all kinds of projects to anyone who would vote "yes." (Alaska's "bridge to nowhere" was just the tip of the iceberg). Within a couple of years it became clear that Congress has promised more than the federal highway fund could afford. Now

Regional Centers

The Regional Centers serve people who can't live in the community, even with support. In general, they serve people with developmental disabilities who also have:

• a history of sex offenses
• severe behavioral or psychological issues
• severe medical problems
  

Many of the people in the RCs would otherwise be in prison.

The Regional Centers

Colorado has 3 regional centers. They're in:

• Grand Junction
• Wheat Ridge
• Pueblo

The Regional Centers offer two kinds of services:

• Institutional services called Intermediate Care Facilities for the Mentally Retarded (ICFs/MR)
• state-operated group homes that serve 4-6 people

All three of the centers have state-operated group homes. Grand Junction and Wheat Ridge also have institutional ICF/MR facilities.

High-needs Patients

The Department measures capacity, the number of people it can serve in Regional Services, in "beds." For licensing purposes, the beds in Regional Centers fall into different categories:

• Home- and Community-Based Medicaid waiver (HCBS-DD) (295 of these beds)
• Intermediate Care Facility for the Mentally Retarded (ICF/MR) (108 beds)

Over the past few years, the level of services required for people at the centers has gone up. That's forcing the Departent to adjust its staffing ratio (the number of staff per patient) to the more severe patients.

No one knows for sure why we suddenly have so many people with severe problems. It spiked in the Spring of 2007 and has stayed high ever since. It may just be a statistical anomaly.

They're concentrated at the Regional Centers partially because it's hard to keep them in the community and partially because of changes in policy:

• Since April 2003, the regional centers have used the following admissions criteria:

• extremely high needs requiring very specialized professional medical support services
• extremely high needs due to challenging behaviors
• pose significant community safety risks to others and require a secure setting

• Since April of 2008 the Regional Centers have required CCBs to remove someone from a center in order to send a new person in, which means the CCBs have been swapping lower-need patients for higher-need patients.

Regardless of the reasons, the Regional Centers have a larger number of people who need intensive services. Normal staffing is 3-to-1; three patients per employee. Some high-need patients require 1-to-1 supervision 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

One-to-one staffing for one patient requires 5.4 full time employees; that's 3 people per 24-hour day over 7 days, plus reserve staff to cover sick/vacation days.

Adjusting the Staffing Ratio

The Regional Centers are trying to adjust their staffing ratios to match the new needs. They're doing it in three ways:

• increasing the number of staff
• reducing the number of patients
• converting existing beds to ICF/MR and building new ICF/MR facilities
  

This year the Department is asking for 43 new employees. Over five years, it intends to reduce the number of patients in the Regional Centers from 403 to 307.

Opposition to the Plan

The ARC of Colorado says effects of the Department's plan are "intolerable.

Increasing the staffing level at the Regional Centers by reducing the number of patients they accept means turning away people. That leads to an obvious question: what's happening to people who would otherwise be in the regional centers?

Prison is one obvious alternative. The ARC of Colorado says at least a dozen people are behind bars because they can't get into a regional center. People with behavioral problems often break the law, repeatedly. Without proper care, they wind up in a cycle of increasingly-long stints in jail or prison. It's an uncomfortable fact the putting high-need disabled people in prison is cheaper than caring for them in a regional center.

Others will wind up in hospitals. The ARC says it knows about two such cases already. That's not a good situation for the people with disabilities, and it puts unnecessary pressure on the health care system.

DHS says to get the right staffing ratio while keeping the same number of beds available would take 200 new employees. That would cost -- ballpark -- about $7 million.

The Governor is recommending that we spend $6 million this year to reduce the DD wait list. We could put some, or all, of that money into staffing the regional centers. It's a tough choice. Spending themoney on community services adds services to hundreds of people; spending it on regional centers would help far fewer.