Boulder, Colorado

TischlerBise’s transportation funding strategy has two primary objectives. First, assess new growth’s fair share of capital improvements to mitigate growth’s impacts on Boulder’s multimodal transportation system. The estimation of new growth’s fair share of capital infrastructure costs is then used to formulate impact fee or excise tax levels for different types of new residential and commercial developments. To do this, two draft studies have been developed, one using an impact fee approach, and one using an excise tax approach. The second objective is to analyze funding options to address on-going transportation operations and maintenance (O&M) costs of our multimodal transportation system.

As part of this effort, TischlerBise prepared three reports. The first is a report titled, Legal Guidelines and Best Practices for Multimodal Transportation Funding Solutions. This report focuses on opportunities and limitations related to Colorado law and evaluates the ways to approach multimodal transportation funding for both capital improvements and continued operations. This report outlines the foundation of “next generation” transportation funding solutions, and how to put next-generation impact fees into practice. The other two reports describe different approaches, an impact fee methodology and an excise tax methodology, based on the next-generation multimodal funding approach for estimating the fair share of capital improvements related to new growth. One report follows an impact fee methodology – and would result in the creation of a new transportation impact fee. The other report follows an excise tax approach and would utilize the existing transportation development excise tax. Both analyses use a similar methodology, but the key difference is the range of planned projects that can be covered by the two approaches. The impact fee analysis is more constrained due to impact fee legislation and includes capital projects under the Capital Improvement Program (CIP), while the excise tax analysis includes both the CIP and capital projects from the Action Plan Investment Program and is not constrained by the impact fee legislative requirements.