House Republicans aren’t taking a tax hike lightly. Since before the session began two months ago, House Minority Leader Patrick Neville said lawmakers should be reshuffling the existing budget to put money into transportation instead of figuring out a way to sell a tax hike to voters.

Instead, the House GOP got House Bill 1242 this week. The proposal would put $667 million a year into roads. The deal calls for a 0.62 percent increase  to the state’s 2.9 percent sales tax.

Mass transit, which gets under fiscal conservatives’ skin, would get $100 million annually.

“I’m not sure that’s a great deal for the taxpayers,” Rep. Paul Lundeen, R-Monument, said Friday in the House Republicans’ weekly YouTube message standing alongside Interstate 25.

He added, “I’m not saying it’s an easy conversation.  And I don’t know if we can solve the transportation problem within the existing budget, but we need to have the conversation about prioritizing the money we’re already collecting from you, the taxpayers, before we take the easy way out and ask for a sales tax increase.”

Senate President Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City, and House Speaker Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, worked with their transportation committee chairs to draft the bill.

Grantham joked that it was the product of arm-wrestling sessions in which Duran won. He cautioned critics of the plan that the bill dropped last week will go through many revisions if it makes it to the governor’s desk by the end of the session on May 10.

House Republicans aren’t laughing.

“We wanted to make sure the work we’ve done up to this point gets put in front of the 96 other legislators and before the people of Colorado,” Grantham said. “From this point on this is going to be as open and transparent as possible for everyone to get their feedback in.

“We’re still working on things, but we’ve laid the groundwork here for what I’m sure is going to be a very vibrant discussion.”

Duran said it takes something else to try a bipartisan solution to solve a major problem such as transportation.

“It takes courage,” she told reporters last week. “It takes courage to do something other than the status quo.”