Prior to a well-attended meeting to consider creating a Regional Transit Authority for the Montrose, Ouray and San Miguel counties, Montrose County Manager Joe Kerby said he'd met a proponent of a plan to place a light rail line between his city and Telluride.
The plan would be to blast a tunnel through the mountains for the most direct route.
But before a magical monorail system can be built to transport the considerable working class population that spends each day driving up and down the mountains, representatives of each town have their own idea of what might be the first priority if such a RTA existed.
For the representatives at the exploratory meeting to discuss an RTA held last week in Ridgway, near where one of the rare intersections with a traffic light in three counties allows 7,000 cars to pass daily, the priorities differed based on their diverse economic realities.
"We are definitely interested in a ground transportation effort," San Miguel County Commissioner Elaine Fischer told officials from Gunnison, Crested Butte, Montrose, Ouray, Ridgway, Mountain Village and Telluride.
But while moving people about on the groun tends to be the focus and need for Ridgway, Ouray and Telluride, Montrose is more interested in finding a source of stable funding for its airline guarantee program.
In addition, the political and economic realities of each town creates a problematic situation for officials. Montrose County, for example, needs to upgrade its roads and bridges. Kerby said the county's current needs, after losing its ability to collect sales tax, might make it difficult to include an effort to support additional taxation that might result from the creation on an RTA.
"We have significant funding challenges at the city and county level," he said. "We would be looking at the RTA as a funding mechanism for infrastructure and road improvement.
This could mean that Montrose may not be a part of RTA at the beginning.
"What I'm hearing are different priorities," Fischer said. "Montrose may not be able to participate due to sales tax concerns."
The recent experience for Gunnison County, where a regional transit authority was recently formed, was shared by John Devore and Jim Schmidt, who spoke on behalf of the Gunnison/Crested Butte RTA. tTheir points on the effort were also supported by Telluride Town Manager Frank Bell, who worked for Crested Butte as the RTA effort reached various stages of development.
Devore said the Gunnison/Crested Butte effort began in earnest in 2002, when the area's airline guarantee program was floundering.
"All towns were present to take a leadership role and take posession of our own destiny," he said. "We wanted a more unified air program for the community."
Outlining the process, Devore said Gunnison and Crested Butte were able to take advantage state statutues to create both an RTA and a marketing district. The latter of which draws from a lodging tax to fund local marketing efforts. As a result of forming an RTA, the area has been able to buttress its airline guarantee program with one of the buzz phrases for the meeting, "permanent funding," as opposed to a reliance on pledges.
With an RTA board consisting of local elected officials so that new taxes can be waged to fund various projects, the Gunnison/Crested Butte effort has put 90 percent of its funds into the airline guarantee program and still have the rest left over to fund a public shuttle bus effort in the community for both the winter, and to a lesser extent, summer months.
Because each funding effort requires voter approval, the chances for political success in generating support for taxation needs rests on the ability of each community to communicate sucessfully with voters.
"The political hurdle is the importance of being able to convince the voters that we are all in this together," Bell said.
Also, he said, there is a need for focus early on, since an RTA, since it concerns a broad swathe of transportation needs for communities, the RTA has "tentacles" that extend to all aspect of civic endeavors.
"What needs to be managed politically is these things have tentacles because transportation is a common denominator," he said. It's critical, Bell added, to have a "narrow focus."
Prior to ending the meeting, those present agreed to meet again in coming months and in the meantime gather figures on what the economic benefit of an RTA might bring, looking at what might happen with various sales tax increases for the combined three counties.