Any legislation that addresses the state’s transportation needs should take the entire state of Colorado into account and is “a long time coming,” freshman state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, D-Arvada, said in an interview with the Transit Alliance.

The Denver-based group is a public-advocacy organization that started in 1997 and works to help citizens to “lead the transformation of Colorado’s mobility future.”

Zenzinger is a 2008 graduate of the group’s Citizen’s Academy and spoke to Transit Alliance Program Manager Jamie Perkins in her office shortly before the start of the legislative session. Here is some of that interview:

I asked Sen. Zenzinger what she hopes will come before the transportation committee this session:

“We’re looking at doing a bill (probably a referred measure) to create a revenue stream to address our transportation needs in the state. It’s been a long time coming. How that particular measure looks is undetermined at the moment, because we have a lot of different policy considerations to look at. We need to think about how we’re going to address our aging infrastructure, which is then tied to our economy, and how are we going to make sure that we increase transit options so that our system will go further, work more efficiently, and provide more options to people.”

“I’m very interested in lots of transportation concepts, in particular the idea of investing money from the Volkswagen settlement into infrastructure that would help electric vehicles in our state. I’m very interested in that…I’m also interested in conversations around driver-less cars. It’s a new area, and it’s something that we’re just starting to grapple with. It’s been a concept that [we] thought was in the future. Well, the future is now. The future is here, we have driver-less cars. We’re going to have to think about what the policy considerations are around that. How’s that going to impact state policy? I’m excited about that.”

Sen. Zenzinger was adamant that any transportation funding bill must address the needs of the whole state, not just the Front Range:

“We need to make sure that this referred measure applies to all Coloradans and not just those people who live on the Front Range. That means that we need to be thinking of the needs of people who live in our rural communities across the state and we need to have a vision to make sure that they’re included.

“Ultimately, because of population growth, we need to make sure that whatever we’re doing with our transportation dollars, we’re taking into consideration how we relieve congestion, and we address some of the impacts that come with population growth…There are a lot of stakeholders and a lot of conversations to be had and people have very different ideas about [the] different policy considerations, so we need to make sure that we’re listening…We also have to think about the taxpayer and what they can do and what they’re willing to do…I think we need to be innovative and creative as much as possible and put in lots of different ideas so that we’re not putting all of our eggs in one basket.”

We shifted our discussion to the adjustment from local to state politics (Zenzinger served on the Arvada City Council from 2009-13 and as mayor pro tem from 2011-13):

“The biggest adjustment is the partisanship. When I served on (the Denver Regional Council of Governments), I saw different politicians with the different paradigms and ways of looking at things. Some had ‘R’s after their names, some had ‘D’s after their names, and some had ‘U’s after their names, but they came together to do regional planning, think about what’s good for our state and our region, and how we could support one another. Even though it was highly competitive and everyone was trying to get their piece of the pie, we were able to do it in such a way where we thought about policy first and thought about projects second.

“That’s not the way that things work here. It’s partisan first and policy second. That’s really hard. Extremely hard. It gets in the way of getting things done, in my view. It creates a lot of pressure on both sides. There’s pressure from your own side to do one thing and if you think differently or think your community needs something else, they put a lot of pressure on you to fold or to bend, because you’re the one person holding up a particular position. And then the partisanship from the opposite side doesn’t even allow good ideas to come to the table just because it’s coming from you. The don’t even look at the policy to see if it’s a good idea, just refuse to look at it. Just kill it right away because of who’s carrying it. That’s extremely frustrating.”