By Kevin Flynn

FasTracks’ projected price tag has dropped to $6.9 billion, down $1 billion, but its revenues to pay for that have fallen to an estimated $4.7 billion — making its budget crisis worse, not better.

The new difference, $2.2 billion, is slightly more than the $2.1 billion budget gap that RTD has been working to close for the last eight months. RTD officials say that if they ask the public for a second sales-tax increase, it would take another four-tenths of a cent to close the gap for both capital construction costs and future operating costs. That’s the same tax rate that voters gave RTD in November 2004 to do the program.

I told you in my Rocky Mountain News blog almost two weeks ago that this was going to happen.

But now, these are the hard numbers on the conundrum that the Rocky first started telling you about two months ago, when RTD’s sales-tax reports began showing the nosedive that has accompanied the economic meltdown we are in. The Rocky’s closing means that I’m breaking this news here – first – as pro-bono journalism from home. I didn’t want to leave without telling you the new bottom line.

The biggest fall was in the estimated cost of the train to Denver International Airport. The East Corridor project fell $305.6 million, to $1.367 billion.

You can read the full report RTD staff made tonight to its elected board here.

The recession has hit construction hard enough to drop the prices of things such as steel, concrete and copper off the highs to which they’d spiked over the last few years.

But the recession also has cut consumer spending dramatically. RTD collected 1.3 percent less in sales taxes during 2008 than in 2007, mostly because of the last quarter and a half of the year, when the bottom fell out of the economy. That’s a trend felt by other governments, including the state.

RTD officials have been consulting with civic, business and political leaders for the last eight months. Among the solutions they’re looking at: cutting the program to what can be built by the scheduled end in 2017; extending the schedule and fully building all 10 transit corridors as revenues allow over later years; or building it all on time by getting more revenue, including asking voters for another sales-tax increase.

The FASTER bill signed Monday by Gov. Bill Ritter includes authority for RTD to go to the ballot without further permission from the legislature, as I reported a week ago. It sets wheels moving for voters to consider another tax increase in this fall’s balloting, a daunting thing to ask metro residents in the current state of the economy.

These constantly changing cost figures can be confusing to the public. FasTracks started out costing an estimated $4.7 billion in 2004. In 2007, after a few years of unprecedented inflation in construction prices, it went up to $6.1 billion. Last year, it jumped to $7.9 billion. Now it’s down. What gives?

Essentially, you’re dealing with a 12-year program with multiple projects, each in different stages of development. There are 10 rapid-transit corridor projects in FasTracks, including seven new ones and extensions of three existing ones. Union Station’s area is being redeveloped, including an underground bus terminal below the train platforms. Maintenance facilities need to be built. Each element has its own budget and schedule.

But most projects don’t even have their environmental clearances yet. Only West Corridor light rail and Union Station work have final OK, with two more soon to follow.

So the total program budget is based largely on early design work for which estimators take the current cost of things — steel, railroad ties, labor, etc. — multiply it by how much of each is needed for each project (miles of track, person-hours of carpentry, linear feet of bridges and tunnels) and then finally inflate all of those present-day costs by the calendar on which it is all scheduled to be done.

Estimating the cost of steel or an ironworker’s hourly wage and benefits in 2015 is an art as much as a science. With the wild swings in the world economy, RTD’s estimates are riding on choppy seas — like the Andrea Gail in Perfect Storm. Basing costs over 12 years on the previous 20 years of average ups and downs might have been prudent, but it proves inaccurate when the perfect storm hits.

I was chatting the other day with a project person, and I came up with the word “trajection” to describe the problem. With so many moving parts of the equation over time, the wrong “trajection” at the beginning can wildly throw off your arrival point at a solid projection of late-year costs.

Relatively speaking, little of FasTracks’ costs have been incurred at this point. The bulk of the spending comes starting in 2011, when more corridors get under heavy construction. It’s entirely possible that the trajectory of inflation will change the aim of projections many times before all of this is over. It won’t necessarily be downward again.

Reach Kevin Flynn at kevin.j.flynn@comcast.net