Update:

Kelly Brough, president and CEO of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, provided Colorado Politics a statement Friday morning:

“We know transportation is already costing Coloradans billions of dollars a year – $6.8 billion to be exact. That’s what we lose to our deficient roads in lost time, damage to vehicles and lost gas efficiency as a state. If Colorado is going to be competitive in the future, we cannot continue to waste our time and money sitting in traffic. We must invest in our roads to continue our economic success, and that means we have to provide a revenue stream to fund statewide transportation investment like many other states have done,” said

The original post:

Wait, what? Apparently a plan to raise taxes to fund transportation priorities isn’t dead yet.

Colorado House Democrats applauded the little-known information that Colorado business groups are still considering a ballot question, similar to House Bill 1242 in the last legislative session. Lawmakers, however, couldn’t agree on raising taxes versus digging into the existing state budget.

The legislation would have asked voters to raise the statewide sales tax to repay $3.5 billion in bonds to pay for high-priority projects, including widening Interstate 25 between Monument and Castle Rock, as well as between Denver and Fort Collins, sites of daily, sometimes hourly, traffic jams.

Lawmakers also have been trying, in vain, to find money to deal with ski traffic and other tie-ups on I-70 in the Colorado high country.

The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Colorado Contractors Association are negotiating with other groups and they haven’t yet come up with the language for the measure.

The proposal would run in 2018, at the soonest, since to get on the ballot any idea to raise taxes would need signatures from 98,492 registered Colorado voters, including at least 2,300 from each of the 35 state Senate districts.

Senate Republicans killed House Bill 1242  to refer the question to the ballot this year, because of the proposed tax hike instead of finding money within the existing $28.5 billion state budget.

House Bill 1242 was sponsored by House Speaker Crisanta Duran and House transportation committee chairwoman Diane Mitsch Bush, two Democrats. In the Senate is was sponsored Senate President Kevin Grantham and transportation committee chairman Randy Baumgardner, two Republicans.

Besides state transportation priorities, such as the interstates and transit, it also would have steered money to local governments with matching dollars for their local projects, such as bus services and truck bypasses.

“I’m glad to see the business community moving forward with this effort to build a transportation network that meets the needs of our growing state,” Duran said in a statement. “The path to continued prosperity will not be travelled over potholed, traffic-choked roads.”

Mitsch Bush said Colorado is facing a transportation crisis.

“And it’s not just along the Front Range,” she said. “For the rural areas of our state, deteriorating roads and bridges and lack of public transit impose severe difficulties for business, agriculture, energy and people who must travel long distances to access health care.”