City fails to win OK to pay roadway engineering staff

The city of Colorado Springs failed Thursday to win approval to pay a portion of its roadway engineering staff with money raised by the one-cent sales tax that funds the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority.

The authority’s nine-member board, with one absent, failed to reach a consensus on the city’s unprecedented request to use $1.7 million in road and bridge capital improvement money for one year only to pay staff salaries, raising the specter the city could lay off nearly all the people who oversee RTA transportation projects in the city and halt work on more than a half-dozen road and bridge projects scheduled in 2010.

The sales tax was approved by voters in 2004 and is intended to fund capital projects, road maintenance and transit operations in the region.

City Engineer Cam McNair said the $1.7 million would be used only to pay for the time city staffers spend overseeing RTA capital projects. He said the money would fund the equivalent of 20.5 full-time workers. The city now absorbs that cost, and the RTA pays about $975,000 a year to an outside consultant to help supplement the oversight of RTA capital projects.

The city, facing a budget shortfall of about $30 million, has tentatively cut more than $2 million and 26 positions from City Engineering and six more positions from Traffic Engineering. McNair said without the money from the RTA, the city cannot move ahead on any capital projects in the coming year, excluding the widening of Woodmen Road, which is being funded by federal stimulus money.

The RTA board, composed of elected officials from Colorado Springs, El Paso County, Manitou Springs, Green Mountain Falls and Ramah, split about down the middle on the request, although no formal vote was taken.
County Commissioner Wayne Williams said voters were promised the money would be spent on building roads, not funding government bureaucracy. He said if the RTA broke its word and helped cover the cost of government workers, it could make it impossible to get voter approval to extend the capital portion of the tax when it sunsets in 2014.

City Councilman Larry Small, however, said city staffers have done a great job shepherding through many large capital projects, and he feared that oversight would be lost and costs would rise if city engineers were laid off and the city has to hire outside consultants to do their jobs.

He said a one-year reprieve would allow the city to investigate ways to ease its budget crisis.

In the end, no clear consensus was reached. The RTA board will approve its budget in December, after the city is supposed to make final decisions on its budget. It’s unclear now if the city will restore funding to city engineering and traffic, layoff those employees and use RTA funds to hire consultants or ask the RTA board for a special meeting to again consider the request.