At last, the end of road for fee
Putting brakes on $10 add-on to register car is “worth celebrating”
Thousands of residents across three metro-Denver counties are about to see the end of a longtime government fee because the goal that brought it into existence has been achieved.
People who drive in Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties will keep $10 per vehicle annually. In three decades, the fee generated more than $200 million to help fund construction of E-470.
For others, though, it’s about more. “It is unusual for any government to stop a fee,” said Jon Caldara, the president of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute. “It is worth celebrating.”
According to the Tax Foundation, the American tax code is littered
with anachronistic levies that were never rescinded even though their original reasons for being have long elapsed.
There’s the 3 percent tax on longdistance calls to pay for the SpanishAmerican War — fought in 1898 — that wasn’t lifted until 2006. The foundation also points to Pennsylvania, where a 10 percent tax on alcohol meant to fund recovery efforts after the Johnstown Flood of 1936 continues to be levied more than 80 years after the waters ran.
“Who knows how many other taxes and fees that should have gone away already are still dragging around?” Caldara said.
As for the $10 fee set to disappear this fall, said Greenwood Village Mayor Ron Rakowsky, it’s a matter of government keeping its word.
“There was a promise made in 1988, and people on this (E470 Public Highway Authority) board remembered that promise,” Rakowsky said. “When the bonds were paid off, they would eliminate the fee.”
The bonds issued to pay for the 47mile E470, officials said, will be paid off by Sept. 1, eight years earlier than first projected.
That’s because the vehicleregistration fee is no longer needed, said Heidi Williams, the chair of the E470 board of directors and Thornton’s mayor.
“We know that the voters wanted us to uphold our promises,” she said of the authority’s April 12 vote to kill the fee. “It was the right thing to do.”
Rakowsky can’t remember many instances of governments abandoning fees or taxes once they’ve been put in place. One prominent exception was the tolls for the Boulder Turnpike between Denver and Boulder, which opened as a toll road in 1951 but went tollfree in the late 1960s because bonds to finance the highway were paid off early.
“It easily could have gone the other way,” Rakowsky said, noting that the E470 board could have conceivably shifted the proceeds from the registration fee to other expenses associated with the $1.5 billion highway that makes up the eastern half of the metro area’s beltway.
The fee — charged in 2017, for example, to owners of 1.1 million vehicles in Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties — has brought in more than $210 million since it went into effect in 1989. It generated $10.5 million in 2017. The fee was the only source of money to pay for initial construction of the highway in the early 1990s, said Tim Stewart, the executive director of the E470 Public Highway Authority.
“The fee was vitally important in the early years because we had no revenue at all,” Stewart said. “It’s the seed money that helped seed the process for building the road.”
E470, which is not a state or federally funded highway, relies on toll revenues to operate. It broke ground in 1991, and its final segment was completed 12 years later.
The road now gets heavy use as development continues to drop rooftops and retail outlets along E470, in line with longheld plans by Aurora, Parker, Commerce City and Thornton to make the highway a robust economic corridor.
E470 brought in $213.8 million in tolls from more than 83 million transactions last year, up from $192.8 million in tolls and 80 million transactions in 2016.
“We are seeing ridership on that road increasing every year,” said Williams. “We have to provide customer service out there.”
While some motorists have criticized the expense to ride the full extent of E470 one way — it costs $14.25 for ExpressToll customers and $21.80 through licenseplate billing — Stewart said the authority plans to not increase tolls for the next three years.
And last month’s decision to drop the vehicleregistration fee wasn’t the first time E470 phased out a charge. Last summer, the authority voted to do away with a development fee charged on all new construction within 1.5 miles of either side of E470.
“We know people have a choice of roads to take,” Stewart said. “We’re trying to serve our customers and make sure they are having a good, reliable trip.”
The E470 Public Highway Authority will work with Douglas, Arapahoe and Adams counties this fall to figure out how to “unwind” the fee and set a date certain for that to happen, he said.