DENVER --- If traffic congestion has become an economic emergency, Denver's first responders have a head start in dealing with it.
Business leaders in Atlanta and some other highly congested regions have warned for years that traffic is sapping jobs, growth and quality of life. But in Georgia, after finally convincing the Legislature that new funding was necessary, advocates found the issue stuck for years on square one: Where should a tax be levied?
Statewide? In metro regions? Should a county be able to opt out of a group tax?
The questions were political grenades, and they blew up negotiations time after time until former Gov. Sonny Perdue backed one side (regional, no county opt-out), pushed it through and signed the bill last year. According to that law, in 2012 the 10-county Atlanta region will vote on a 10-year tax to fund roads, mass transit and pedestrian projects.
Meanwhile, a legislative committee couldn't agree last year on how to form a new regional mass transit authority. When the group creates one, as it promises to do next year, it seems likely to retain much of the current patchwork approach.
It is a different picture in Denver. When advocates wanted more transit funding in 1997, 1999 and 2004, the question of where was already answered: The Denver Regional Transportation District, ratified by voters in 1973, now comprising parts of eight counties.
Advocates for a new tax or borrowing skipped right to the questions of how much and what exactly for, and to trying to convince voters.
In forming the RTD, Denver faced many of the same obstacles as Georgia. Forming a regional district means you can do big things, funding projects no county or city could hope to do on its own. But the trade-off is losing local control.
Denver lobbyist Roger Walton headed the effort to form the district for local business groups. As he recalls it, the turning point in the long-simmering issue was a multiple-alarm fire decades ago. As a lumber yard in Arapahoe County, Colo., burned to the ground, a line of fire trucks sat parked across the street --- because the fire trucks belonged to Denver County, and the street was the county line.
"My recollection is, I think, 10 of them, back to back to back, on one side of the street while this huge fire is going on the other side, " Walton said. No one was seriously hurt, he recalled. "But it pointed out, this is stupid."
Legislation for broader regional governance passed, Walton said, but never got used. Legislation specifically for transit --- bailing out Denver's bus company, which also served the suburbs but didn't tax them --- was a different story, Walton said. It passed the Colorado Legislature in 1969, setting up the RTD for a probationary period, to be considered by voters in a 1973 referendum.
Walton doesn't think legislators ever expected the referendum to pass. Rather, he believes, legislators thought, "We'll look as if we've done something, the voters said no, so the [heck] with it."
"In some respects it was a fluke, " he said. But the referendum did pass, with far-reaching consequences.
Fast-forward to 2004 and an effort to fund a massive mass transit expansion called FasTracks through a regional referendum. The Colorado governor opposed it. Unified by the RTD, the region's mayors went up against the state and won. Denver voters passed FasTracks by large margins, bringing the total sales tax paid within the RTD to 1 percent.
The Denver mayor who led that effort, John Hickenlooper, is now governor of Colorado. Without the existence of the RTD, Hickenlooper said, he doesn't know whether FasTracks would have happened.
Areas can opt in or out of the RTD by referendum. The town of Castle Rock, at the edge of the district, voted to opt out, and the town of Lone Tree opted in.
Trading away local control hasn't worked for everybody. When the FasTracks financial plan unexpectedly had a funding gap, northern suburbs got the short end of the stick. With current revenues their projects are delayed 25 years, but they're paying the full tax all the while.
That's the larger issue that metro Atlanta voters are concerned about, said Charlotte Nash, chairwoman of the Gwinnett County Commission. "It's local control, it's how are decisions going to be made about the money, " Nash said. She said those concerns have "a very strong history and tradition" in this region.
The results are pervasive. Roads, rain, thirst and fires don't stop at government borders, but the services that deal with them often do.
"I think the fact that our region has changed so rapidly at so many levels complicates it here, " said Nash, who still lives on part of her grandfather's farm. In Gwinnett, for example, the population has more than doubled since voters rejected MARTA in 1990. Many of those 1990 voters are still there, but they are joined by big-city transplants as well as migrant laborers, all in huge numbers, all with different ideas of how they want to get around.
The legislation that created the 2012 transportation referendum also got the ball rolling to create a transit district for metro Atlanta, but at the moment it doesn't look as if it will be as powerful as Denver's. Legislators seem headed toward a model like Chicago's. MARTA and other county-based agencies would continue to administer their own services, but an umbrella agency would be created over them that could administer state or regional money.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed conceded that's a far cry from one unified district, but said the region needs a stepping-stone to get to something as ambitious as a Denver's standard. Getting regional agreement, he said, is "the hardest thing I've seen done in Georgia politically."
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