What really is remarkable is that this project has been on almost the same timeline as Denver's
doomed FasTracks project, and if you took a soundbite from either side of this debate without context, you could literally swap it in from one transit project to the other.
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"I'd be shocked if we don't all know that there is not enough money to finish FasTracks. And I think we need to stop even indicating that that's a possibility. We'll never build FasTracks. Shocker, right?” [said O’Keefe]
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“This is a promise that we made to the voters. So I think that's not something we take lightly,” Little said. “I was part of a bill a few years ago to provide funding for FasTracks, and I'm very proud of that. So, I reject the idea and would like to dig in a little bit more about where he's coming from and why he actually said that.”
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“It was promised. It was promised to me. I voted for it. I voted for it in 2004. I'm as mad as they are,” he said. “But it doesn't change the fact that we don't have enough money to build it. That's just a fact. And so, what we need to stop doing as an agency or a transit community is pretending like somehow there's a magic point when all these assets are built. We have a budget problem at RTD right now that exists even without FasTrack.”
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The dollar values under discussion are orders of magnitude different ($5-$10 billion for Denver's commuter rail versus the $135 billion estimate for CHSR), but it's shocking how similar the conversation is. Turns out, you can't actually build the things that were promised when the cost has escalated or you otherwise just don't have the money. Shocking, I know - you can't pay contractors with IOUs.
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