A Republican legislator said he was pleasantly surprised on Wednesday when the state Senate’s transportation panel advanced a resolution brought to him by county commissioners urging the Colorado Department of Transportation to invest more money to fix roads.

Road maintenance is “probably the No. 1 issue” in his seven-county district, said Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling.

Morgan County’s transportation infrastructure is the worst, he added/

According to a 2023 CDOT assessment, 70% of the roads in the county are in the “red” for maintenance, meaning they’ll soon be undrivable. A Reason Foundation report ranked Colorado 47th in the nation for rural road conditions.

Pelton mentioned a 2021 funding legislation, Senate Bill 260, which he said included too small of an amount for rural road projects and nowhere near enough to cover Morgan County’s needs.

“I feel that Senate Bill 260 promised us a lot of things, but it did not fulfill those promises,” Pelton said.

Over the summer, Pelton gave The Denver Gazette a tour of his district’s crumbling roads as part of a series stories looking into the state government’s policies and decisions affecting rural Colorado.

“When they talk about the rural-urban divide, the conversation begins right with the roads,” he told The Denver Gazette.

A proposed ballot measure, which Pelton said is “very popular” in his district, would require the state to spend all revenue collected from transportation costs like vehicle registrations and retail delivery fees to go toward road and bridge maintenance projects. The measure is currently in the signature-collecting phase, with the petition due in May.

‘Something needs to be done’

The committee heard from Morgan County commissioners Tim Malone and Kelvin Bernhardt, who both noted the potential danger posed by poor road conditions to drivers in their community.

As a former law enforcement officer, Bernhardt said he had been on several calls in which concrete pieces fell from overpasses and hit cars, or drivers got into accidents after swerving to avoid a pothole.

One can always tell when crossing the border into another state, Bernhardt said, because the roads there suddenly improve.

“Something needs to be done,” he said. “We really need some more funding to help out with the highways in Morgan County. People are getting injured, people are getting killed, and I know that that is an issue statewide and some of it is their own fault, but some of it is poor highways.”

The resolution passed on a 6-3 vote, with all Republicans and three Democrats voting in favor. Sens. Lisa Cutter, D-Littleton, William Lindstedt, D-Broomfield, and Matt Ball, D-Denver, voted in opposition.

Pelton told Colorado Politics he was “absolutely surprised” that the resolution made it out of committee.

“I didn’t have a conversation with (committee members),” he said. “They’ve heard me complain about our roads for quite some time, but I just assumed that I was just bringing it to make sure to tell my colleagues this is what’s going on and listen to the county commissioners, but they must have been moved by the testimony from the county commissioners to vote ‘yes.’ Soo I appreciate their support.”

The resolution will next be heard on the Senate floor. If passed, it will be sent to the governor and CDOT Director Shoshana Lew.