Dozens of people met Saturday at Lewis-Palmer High School in Monument to tell the Tri-Lakers on how its going with Interstate 25’s lane expansion called simple “the gap.”

Their trips north and back is a visible reminder of Colorado’s traffic problems, a double whammy of growth and neglect. The legislature hasn’t put much money into transportation for nearly a decade, leaving the job to gas taxes and user fees. Now the state needs about $20 billion in investment over the next two decades, without a compass on where to get that money.

The 17-mile gap from Monument to Castle Rock has two lanes in each direction, instead of four. The Colorado Department of Transportation plans to put an extra lane in each direction, but they don’t have $350 million the project is expected to cost. CDOT wants to put in a toll lane, but a lot of people aren’t happy about it. The toll lane, Colorado Politics told you last month, would siphon off traffic from the free lanes, give people who need to move a chance to pay for it, and lighten the load on other taxpayers in the process.

Similarly, CDOT aims to add express lanes on I-25 from Fort Collins to Johnstown, finalizing the contract in January with Kraemer/IHC to begin construction this summer. The project is expected to cost $248 million, funded in part by a federal grant.

The perpetually impeded Interstate 70 mountain corridor is a whole barrel of question marks on needs and funding.

A statewide coalition led by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce said last week it try to get on the ballot in November to ask voters for a sales tax between a half penny and a penny to pay for transportation. There are questions about the proposal, however, including Coloradans’ history of voting down statewide tax increases. Some  municipal leaders, including in Colorado Springs, worry that hiking the sales tax would begin to hurt their economy. Also, local governments tend turn to the hiking their sales tax locally to pay for transportation and other needs, as Colorado Springs has done.

Meanwhile. Senate Bill 1 pending in the legislature would take $300 million a year out of the state budget for transportation.

Besides traffic jams, the gap project is about public safety, CDOT spokeswoman Tamara Rollison told Fox21’s Alexa Mae Asperin Saturday.

“We have had two State Patrol officers die because they didn’t have the room that they needed to do their job safely, so by widening the shoulders, emergency personnel will have more room to do their jobs and also there will be more room to move disabled vehicles so you can keep traffic flowing,” she said.

Trooper Cody Donahue was struck and killed near Castle Rock in 2016, a year after Trooper Jaimie Jursevics was killed, also near Castle Rock.