During a Tuesday joint and House and Senate Transportation Committee hearing, Sen. Mike Kopp, R-Littleton, gets the head of the Colorado Department of Transportation to admit that revenue from the reviled car tax has yet to create a single job or repair a single bridge.
“It was an absolute farce…. It is a problem from a public trust standpoint,” Kopp said to the committee at the time. “The bill was positioned as a way to fix bridges that were in urgent need of repair and to create jobs.”
The car tax, dubbed FASTER and passed last session, raised vehicle registration fees to the tune of $250 million annually. It was pitched by Gov. Bill Ritter and legislative Democrats as a way create jobs and a last resort to fix Colorado's roads and 125 structurally deficient bridges. Seven months after the measure went into affect neither goal has been accomplished. 
Sen. Kopp
During questioning, CDOT chief Russ George admited that the first bridge to be funded by FASTER dollars doesn’t go into the ground until next month.
Kopp expressed outrage that legislative Democrats misled the public when passing the car tax by promising the public there would be “jobs by June,” a slogan Democrat lawmakers used early in the year to tout their economic development initiatives.
Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, who chairs the committee and sponsored FASTER, offered no rebuttal to Kopp’s remarks.
“Once again, we see that creating jobs starts with business activity in a profitable private sector, not with more government programs and promises,” Kopp said. “The Democrats kept promising we’d see ‘jobs by June,’ but that didn’t happen. Maybe they were talking about June of 2010.”
Click here to listen to audio from the hearing.