Central 70, every dollar counted once

Central 70, every dollar counted once

How much money is behind the Central 70 Project, if each dollar is counted only once? The Whole Tab for Central 70 answers that question. It is a new kind of page on this site: it follows every layer of money behind one project.

The same dollars can sit in more than one budget. Federal money can appear in the federal budget and again in the budget of the regional council that passes it on. If you add every budget together, you count that money twice.

The page counts each dollar once, at the government that raised it. It also shows how much higher a plain sum of the budgets reads.

CDOT gives the total cost of the project as $1.2B. Each line on the page names its source and a grade for that source. Two amounts that no publisher prints are left blank.

Energy money paid to each county

How much did your county get this year from the state's energy funds? Budget and Payments lists it, county by county.

There are two funds. One is the state's severance tax on oil, gas, coal and minerals taken from the ground. The other is the state's share of federal mineral lease money, from drilling and mining on federal land.

The Department of Local Affairs pays each county once a year. We checked its tables against the state's payment ledger. Of the 128 county figures, 124 match to the cent, and the page explains the other four.

The same section shows the Highway Users Tax Fund payments to each county. Each county is its own row, and counties are never added together.

More to explore

Where does the I-270 rebuild stand? I-270 Corridor Improvements shows its cost, timeline and funding, and how its payments keep pace with its calendar. CDOT reports that construction is under way.

The rebuild includes the Vasquez Boulevard interchange. Vasquez Boulevard Improvements is a separate project with its own page.

How much does Colorado spend on each pupil? Education shows it year by year. FY 2025-26 is the first year of a new school funding formula. The chart does not join the old line to the new one.

Each city has its own week in this brief

See this week for one city: Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins or Lakewood.

The city view shows only what changed in that city's records, and the State items for the counties the city is in. The two are not added together.

Corrections

The corrections log lists each mistake we find on this site and what we did about it. It has three new entries for Colorado.

The crime charts on Results said each rate divides by a matched population. It divides by the population of the whole state or nation. No rate changed. The same section said the state's two violent-crime counts were both right. The count from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is the reliable one, and the page explains why the other runs higher.

Cost of Living gave the wrong last year for the electric-vehicle road fee schedule. The schedule in law ends in FY 2031-32.

The legislature is not in session

The General Assembly is between sessions. The next session starts on 11 January 2027.

The General Assembly recorded no votes between 16 October 2026 and 22 October 2026. Its most recent recorded vote was on 13 May 2026.

Every recorded vote since 2016 is at Bills and Laws.

Where these figures come from

Every figure above is one of two kinds, and this is which. FACT means a publisher printed the figure and we read it there. CALC means we worked it out from figures a publisher printed, and the arithmetic is on the methodology page. Nothing here is our own estimate.

• FACT CDOT project total: Central 70 — reconstruction of 10 miles of I-70 through Denver · 2017 · Colorado Department of Transportation, CDOT project announcements (codot.gov) Back to the sentence