Tom Petty was right. The waiting is the hardest part.

Dozens of legislators, a press corps, an army of lobbyists, a legion of contractors and a stupendous volume of Colorado motorists are waiting. In traffic.

Senate President Kevin Grantham, House Speaker Crisanta Duran, Senate Democratic Leader Lucia Guzman and House Republican Leader Patrick Neville are hammering out a plan to steer billions of dollars into making Colorado roads wider, safer and less-crowded.

These negotiations will refer a question to the ballot in November. I guarantee you that. Voters could be asked to add a sales tax or maybe a gas tax, or maybe raise some kind of fee. Some way or another, somebody is going to pay.

They might propose taking away the cheap license plate fee for cars and trucks 10 years and older, a sweet tax break if you can get it, but a sitting duck in the money-hungry headlights. Your beater uses the roads just like my 4-year-old Jeep does, but you could also argue we’re targeting the poor to pay for roads.

I don’t know what they’ll do. Unless your name is Grantham, Duran, Guzman or Neville, you do probably don’t either. That has to change pretty soon. At a certain point, chances of getting the best deal possible get slimmer with each passing day. You can’t blame them for being cautious to get something that will pass. If this bus crashes, it has four drivers.

Others disagree about negotiating, but my long experience covering transportation bonanzas and busts tells me that a slow burn in the Capitol’s open air always forges a better deal.

A boondoggle always starts in the dark. In 1992, Santa Rosa County, Fla., had a transportation desire on par with what Colorado has today.

People on Santa Rosa Island needed a faster hurricane evacuation route. The backwater county seat wanted to get closer to the beaches, Florida’s Golden Goose. As much as anything, landlocked Santa Rosans were tired of sitting in Pensacola traffic to get their toes in the sand.

I covered the Santa Rosa County Commission. I recall a dozen folks at a workshop when developers first pitched the idea of the Garcon Point Bridge. I recall legions waiting for the state legislature to help out.

No one worried, though. Florida House Speaker Bo Johnson, a son of Santa Rosa County, was in the driver’s seat. And by the time the deals were public, they were all but done. Thanks, Bo.

Everybody called him Bo. His real name is Bolley. His father was Leroy Johnson, an Old South “road commissioner,” meaning asphalt followed friendship. While he was trying to win back his seat on the county commission in 1984, Leroy Johnson was busted in a $10,000 murder-for-hire plot against a smart-mouthed local AM radio host, Ben Henry Pooley. Ben Henry later told me he was flattered Johnson was willing to pay so much. He said it proved his point: Leroy couldn’t make a good deal.

Bo could make a deal. His lawyers said he was forgetful, though. He forgot to pay taxes on the $1.6 million in “consulting fees” from companies, including road-builders, at the same time he was wheeling and dealing on the Garcon Point Bridge. The week the bridge opened in 1999, Bo was taken to prison.

It’s too perfect that Santa Rosa County is divided by the Blackwater River, which flows from the Blackwater Swamp to Blackwater Bay. Things can get murky in a place like that.

The fat alligators and Spanish moss are a long way from Colorado’s snow-capped Rockies and traffic-jammed skiers. But when one option is signed, sealed and delivered as the only option, I get the Blackwater willies.

Wednesday marks a month since the 120-day session commenced. Three months is still plenty of time, but under the gold dome in Denver, however, time slips away like a pickpocket.

So we wait.