If you ever wanted the history of today’s version of the Roaring Fork Valley’s public bus transportation system, a long conversation with Dan Blankenship is a good place to start.
Be prepared, though …
You’ll want to have a full cup of coffee or other beverage of choice and a refresh or two as the longtime CEO of the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA) reflects on his 34-going-on-35 years with the organization and its predecessor, the Roaring Fork Transit Agency, including every complicated detail of how it all came into being.
Blankenship, 75, officially announced his planned retirement from RFTA late last year. The RFTA board of directors at its Jan. 11 meeting, named current Chief Operating Officer Kurt Ravenschlag as the sole finalist for the CEO position, with a targeted Sept. 1 transition date.
In the meantime, Blankenship will stay on to share his vast knowledge of the inner workings of the largest rural transit system in the U.S. — second-largest transit system in Colorado, smaller only to Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD).
History of RFTA
The predecessor of today’s RFTA began in 1983, when Aspen and Pitkin County joined forces to combine the local bus system into a regional service that had extended as far as El Jebel by the time Blankenship climbed on board in September of 1989.
At that time, RFTA had a contract management firm for which Blankenship and his predecessor, Bruce Abel, worked. Also with the organization then was longtime general legal counsel for RFTA, Paul Taddune.
“Bruce and Paul were great mentors for me, especially coming in cold to the area and into a new job,” Blankenship said. “They knew the organization, and knew the landscape politically, and so they really helped guide me through those early years.”
Blankenship grew up in Colorado and had previously worked with the local Area Agency on Aging in Colorado Springs and Durango, before landing his first public transportation job with the Durango Opportunity Bus in 1981.
Little did he know at the time, but that experience would play a part in some important state legislation many years later, known as the County Powers Act, which was crucial in the eventual formation of the intergovernmental RFTA organization that now serves three counties and eight municipalities.
While in Durango, the owner of the youth hostel where Blankenship resided also owned a local taxi company. When the Durango bus system was looking to expand services outside city limits, the taxi operator took it to court saying there was no authority for transit systems to operate outside municipal limits.
A few years later, after some time working with a public transit system in Wisconsin, Blankenship returned to Colorado, joined RFTA and, alongside Taddune, helped lobby for the County Powers Act that ultimately gave that authority. The Colorado Supreme Court also ruled in favor of the City of Durango in the taxi operator’s case, paving the way for the current organizational structure of RFTA.
It was anything but easy.
“We had to piecemeal it all together, and take the (intergovernmental agreement) around to all of the local jurisdictions, which meant sitting through a lot of long meetings,” Blankenship recalls.
Not to mention dealing with the political baggage and rifts between valley governments over the impacts of the growing resort-based economy in Aspen and a commuter workforce that was traveling from farther and farther west in Garfield County to jobs in Pitkin County.
“There were communication issues, and impacts on parking in places like Carbondale as this commuter culture was being created,” he said. “But, what we also created was a system of serving the interests of the whole more efficiently.”
It included the recognition that some local governments might not be able to contribute financially according to the true cost of their participation in a valleywide bus system, but what they could afford, Blankenship said.
“It’s now one of the truly regional organizations that has allowed elected officials from Aspen to New Castle to get together in the same room to develop programs and services that serve the best interests of the region, not just one community,” he said.
There were rough patches, including when the RFTA board agreed to the still-popular 50% discount punch passes that resulted in a major increase in bus ridership in the early ‘90s. To meet the demand, the agency acquired 10 new buses from a manufacturer that had never made buses before.
There were flaws, and Blankenship happened to be waiting for the bus himself one day when a rider was complaining to the bus driver about system reliability. The driver pointed to the man standing behind her and said, “He’s the manager, talk to him.”
“We had a very interesting conversation on the bus up valley that day,” Blankenship said.
Over the ensuing years, he helped navigate the many changes that came about, from extending service to Carbondale and Glenwood Springs and other major system upgrades throughout the 1990s; to a major fleet expansion when Aspen adopted paid parking in 1995; to a merger with the Roaring Fork Railroad Holding Authority and acquisition of the old Rio Grande railroad corridor (now the Rio Grande Trail) in 2001 and partnering on the Railroad Corridor Investment Study; creation of a regional transportation district and formation of the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority; and several efforts to address climate change through the use of alternative fuel buses, including compressed natural gas and now a fleet of electric buses.
“It was about 1998 that we were hitting a wall financially and were asking our downvalley jurisdictions to provide more funding,” said Blankenship, who around that same time was asked to become an employee of RFTA instead of maintaining the outside management contract.
At that time, local governments could only tap general fund dollars to pay for transit services. So, after a regional transportation roundtable was hosted by the former nonprofit Healthy Mountain Communities, then state Representative Russell George of Rifle and Sen. Jack Taylor of Routt County co-sponsored the Regional Transportation Authority Act.
It passed and, after much more local political wrangling, allowed for the formation of the transportation taxing authority that exists today. RFTA, through a series of sometimes contentious local sales tax ballot questions, was eventually able to add more funding beyond the dedicated tax funding in Pitkin County.
By 2005, New Castle had joined RFTA and a few years later bus service was extended as far as Rifle through an agreement with Garfield County to develop the Grand Hogback Route.
A result of the Railroad Corridor Investment Study was the determination that a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system would be somewhat less expensive than commuter rail. Additional funding approval from voters, plus major federal funding that came out of President Obama’s recession stimulus package, led to the BRT launch in 2016.
Today
More recent years saw the launch of RFTA’s Destination 2040 system upgrades, after the 2018 voter approval of a first-ever property tax to fund transit upgrades and trail system improvements. Among the projects that resulted from that effort is the 27th Street (South Glenwood station) pedestrian underpass project that’s under construction.
“That really gave RFTA the capability to be sustainable for the long term,” Blankenship said.
Federal relief funds during the COVID-19 pandemic helped RFTA navigate the challenges of providing bus services in a safety-conscious way, and ridership has continued to increase in the years since.
“Thirty-four years goes by pretty fast … it all seems like the blink of an eye,” Blankenship said in summary. “I think back to August of 1989 towing my tiny U-Haul trail up Highway 82, just hoping I could last longer than six months, and I thought to myself, ‘I’m either going to make it or I’m going to break it.’”
Looks like he made it.