While Colorado state Senate District 8 has seen some very nasty political attacks in recent years – sometimes even bitter, red-on-red Republican infighting in this mostly conservative rural region – nothing gets people more riled up in these parts than transportation funding shortfalls.

Voters who have been stuck for six hours on Interstate 70 when a car with bald tires starts a chain-reaction pileup in a snowstorm will turn a bright shade of red telling you about it, even if they’re the bluest of blue Democrats. And after all, former Mayor Bill McNichols was ousted in the early 80s in part because he failed to clear a massive blizzard from the streets of Denver.

Breckenridge resident, educator and longtime civil servant Emily Tracy, a Democrat, thinks incumbent SD8 Republican Sen. Randy Baumgardner, who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee, is equally vulnerable for how he’s handled – or in her opinion failed to handle -transportation issues along the I-70 corridor and across the entire state.

“I drive over Vail Pass a lot, and before we even get into winter weather, Vail Pass is in terrible shape.” Tracy said. “That road is falling apart. It’s a mess. It’s just a perfect example of how our roads are falling apart under our current funding scheme.”

That funding scheme relies mostly on state and federal gas taxes that haven’t been increased since the early 90s. After that it’s a patchwork of other state funding sources that can vary year to year and don’t come close to bridging the $1-billion-a-year shortfall Colorado Department of Transportation officials say they’re facing for basic maintenance and expanding capacity.

Baumgardner places the blame squarely at the feet of Democrats who control the House and have refused to pass highway bond bills he’s introduced and passed in the Republican-controlled Senate the past two legislative sessions.

“All we hear is we’re falling a billion dollars behind every year in transportation infrastructure,” Baumgardner said. “Well, let’s put these construction companies to work the next seven years. Let’s fix these projects that … have been targeted as the most critical transportation projects in the state.”

Democrats say they haven’t passed Baumgardner’s bills because he hasn’t identified state revenue sources to pay off the bonds. They’d like to reclassify the Hospital Provider Fee as an enterprise fund and therefore exempt it from triggering tax refunds under the Taxpayers Bill of Rights – a move proponents say would free up hundreds of millions for education and transportation and possibly provide a source of funds to bond against.

“Club 20, which is pretty conservative, one of their positions is that they support the concept of transportation bonds but only if there’s a specific source of funding identified to pay those bonds,” Tracy said, noting that as recently as the Club 20 debate in Grand Junction on Sept. 10 her opponent was still questioning the constitutionality of reclassifying the Hospital Provider Fee even though the Republican attorney general has signed off on it.

“We had the funding source,” Baumgardner said of his highway bonding bills. “We were going to go back to Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 1310 that basically designated a certain amount of the general fund for transportation, and we were going to do away with Senate Bill 228, where $200 million a year got put back for five years. That never worked out just right. We’re still not sure how that’s supposed to work. They thought it was a great idea, and it’s not a great idea.”

Tracy decries an overall lack of political leadership needed to educate the public about the necessity of putting a state gas-tax increase on the ballot, but she particularly singles out Baumgardner, a ranch manager from Hot Sulphur Springs she says won’t meet with public officials to discuss basic transportation problems and fails to pass even the most common-sense legislative fixes.

She points to an I-70 traction bill that proponents argued would have given CDOT greater authority to impose chain-law restrictions on passenger vehicles. Tracy says that after the bipartisan bill passed the House and headed to the Senate, Baumgardner failed to chair his own committee meeting and did not listen to the testimony of backers ranging from CDOT to the Colorado State Patrol to the Colorado Motor Carriers Association to elected officials.

“I don’t understand why Sen. Baumgardner killed that bill; why he felt that bill wasn’t needed,” Tracy said. “We just have to do whatever we can. It’s foolish to be a state like Colorado where you have the highest elevation highways anywhere in the country, if we don’t have laws to address the needs on those highways in the winter. We’re fooling ourselves.”

Baumgardner’s answer is simple: “All they said is this codifies what’s already in statute. So it’s already in statute. It doesn’t need to be codified.”

But, House sponsor Diane Mitsch Bush, a Steamboat Springs Democrat, wrote that it would have done a lot more than just codify existing law. It would have allowed CDOT to require “adequate tires, chains, or alternate traction devices” for passenger vehicles without having to wait until conditions deteriorated enough for a “Code 15? (passenger vehicle chain law).

Baumgardner scoffs at state estimates that lengthy I-70 closures cost up to $800,000 in lost revenue to state and local economies.

“She talks about the $800,000 a day that it was costing when these things happen, so on that very day that we had that [committee] debate there was a triathlon on Loveland Pass,” Baumgardner said. “They shut the trucks down and they couldn’t use Loveland Pass. They had to wait at the top for an hour to get through the tunnel. What does that cost when that happens?”

Now back to the political nastiness. Tracy already challenged Baumgardner the first time he won his four-year seat in 2012, and she lost rather handily by a margin of 51.1 percent (34,187 votes) to 44.3 percent (29,688). However, Libertarian candidate Sacha Weis siphoned off 4.6 percent of the votes (3,079), and there is no third-party candidate this time. Plus, Tracy says SD8 Republican voter registration had dropped from 40 percent in 2012 to 35 percent in 2016.

On top of that, Tracy has the political backing of two Republicans who used to hold Baumgardner’s seat – popular Hayden GOP members Al and Jean White, who clearly are still smarting from the 2012 primary in which Jean White was attacked by fliers that accused her of pursuing a “homosexual agenda” for her vote in favor of civil unions. Al White was elected to the seat but turned it over to his wife when he was named head of the Colorado Tourism Office.

Al White briefly ran as an unaffiliated candidate this spring but dropped out because of the difficulties fundraising without party backing, and he subsequently endorsed Tracy.

Baumgardner was also the subject of some nastiness in 2012 for allowing a convicted sex offender to live on his ranch after voting against revisions to state sex-offender laws. And now he’s facing another round of opposition digging into past actions as an 11-year employee of CDOT who left the state agency in 2011, although his wife Lori still works there.

Results of a Colorado Open Records Act request filed with CDOT in the spring and obtained by the Colorado Statesman this week reveal the Baumgardners were rebuked by CDOT three different times for personal use of state property – once for improper use of a fuel card personal identification number in 2009, once for dumping CDOT sand on their ranch in 2014, and earlier this year for using CDOT office photocopy machines to duplicate their tax returns.

“Politics is politics, and they can try to make anything out of anything or nothing, so yeah, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t know what they said,” Baumgardner said when asked about the emails from CDOT officials obtained in the CORA request.

Tracy, who previously worked for the judicial branch for four years as a program administrator in the office of dispute resolution and also for a police department, took a dim view of the information.

“When you work directly in those kinds of systems, you just have a greater appreciation for the rule of law, and why we have a stable country and how it works,” Tracy said. “It works through the rule of law, and if we don’t adhere to that and we think it’s OK to just take things for our own personal benefit, then we’re disrupting that system in a way that’s very damaging.”