If you are not following Cory Gaines and the Colorado Accountability Project, you should be.
Cory is studied, well-read, down in the weeds, nerdy in the most useful way, and dangerously comfortable with graphs. In other words, he is exactly the sort of person politicians hate, because he commits the unforgivable sin of checking whether their claims survive contact with math.
In his latest piece, Cory looks at claims from Rep. Andy Boesenecker about road funding, transportation spending, and the ongoing fight over whether road dollars should actually go to roads. I know. Radical stuff. Next thing you know, someone will suggest water money should go to water, school money should go to schools, and “temporary fees” should not reproduce like rabbits in a committee room.
The core of Cory’s point is simple: numbers without context are how politicians launder spin.
Boesenecker’s claim, as Cory quotes it, is that the General Assembly has put an average of $465 million in new general fund money into transportation each year over the past decade, with most of it going to roads and bridges. That sounds impressive until Cory starts pulling apart what “average” is doing in that sentence. As he notes, transportation’s share of the state operating budget has stayed relatively flat, while health care has grown substantially. His charts show transportation at 5.2% of all revenue a decade ago and 4.7% in the most recent year shown, while health care rose from 32.2% to 36.6% over the same general period.
That is the kind of detail that ruins a perfectly good press release.
Cory also points out that general fund transfers into transportation appear to have come in bursts, not as some steady, heroic commitment to asphalt and bridges. In his discussion of the transportation funding chart, he notes a short-lived burst of general fund support, followed by little to no general fund money for transportation except for fiscal year 2021-22, with later slivers representing bond revenue rather than the kind of ongoing support politicians would like you to imagine.
That matters because voters are being asked to believe the Legislature has already been taking care of roads, and that any effort to make road money go to roads is somehow reckless, cruel, or budgetarily unsophisticated.
Translated from Capitol dialect: “Please do not take away our slush fund.”
Cory’s other useful point is that while most transportation money does go to road construction and maintenance, that still does not tell the whole story. He notes that the state puts as much into the “Other” transportation category, including enterprises tied to SB21-260 priorities like EVs, electric semis, and electrifying transit, as it does into bridges and tunnels. His conclusion is the one everyone outside the marble building already understands: the issue is not whether the state spends any money on roads. The issue is whether transportation money is being protected for transportation priorities people actually voted for and use every day.
And that is why Cory’s work matters.
He is not just yelling “roads good” into the void. He is showing the machinery. He is showing how the claim is built, where the context is missing, and how the argument changes when you stop being impressed by large numbers long enough to ask what they mean.
That is the whole game in Colorado government right now. Politicians create fees, enterprises, carve-outs, transfers, work groups, blue-ribbon commissions, stakeholder processes, and “consensus” panels, then act shocked when regular people suspect the money is not going where they were told it would go.
Cory also takes a quick swing at the favorite Capitol dodge: warning that if voters demand road money be spent on roads, education and health care will suffer. His response is worth reading because it cuts through the emotional hostage-taking. Health care has been one of the biggest areas of budget growth, while education has already lost share over time. So when politicians suddenly discover children and old people whenever voters threaten to fence off road dollars, maybe a little skepticism is in order.
That is not budgeting.
That is a hostage video with pie charts.
I do not have much to add to Cory’s piece, which is a rare and blessed thing. Sometimes the best move is simply to point people toward someone who has already done the digging.
So go read Cory Gaines at the Colorado Accountability Project. Follow his work. Keep his charts handy. And the next time a politician waves around a big number like it should end the conversation, remember that context is not a luxury item.
It is the part where the truth usually hides.
Source: Colorado Accountability Project
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