$639,745 Snatched From MOST Fund

By Alicia McNally

Motorcycle safety took another financial hit in the 2009-2010 legislature.

HB-1316, which was signed in March, slashed more than $600,000 from the MOST (Motorcycle Operator Safety Training) program fund to balance Colorado’s looming $1billion shortfall for 2010-2012.

“Everyone had to get a haircut,” said Gov. Bill Ritter said at a business and legislative panel in downtown Denver on May 21. “I felt I didn’t have any options but to do it in a fair and balanced economy. The problem always was that any place we decided not to take money from, we had to take from education.”

The bill, which Governor Ritter signed on March 10, 2010, took $639,745 from the MOST fund. Similar actions have taken $704,425 from the MOST fund in 2009, and another $605,257 in 2008. These reallocations took place despite the fact that the statute creating the MOST fund, 43-5-504 C.R.S., clearly states that, “Moneys credited to the fund shall remain therein at the end of each fiscal year and shall not be transferred to any other fund.”

Rep. Marsha Looper, who fought for an audit of MOST that will begin this summer, said expenditures within the fund have increased by more than half a million dollars. This year’s audit for MOST will be its first in 15 years.

“I have questions of whether the program was working properly,” Looper said. “They cannot account for at least 35 percent of the funds. The other 65 percent went to a broad range of expenses, which I don’t think is the intent of the law.”

“The 2007 legislative report was very critical about how the program was run,” said Deborah Napier, an attorney and motorcycle lobbyist who also fought for an audit of the fund. “There’s never been an audit to see how those changes were implemented and how the money was being spent.”

Napier was present for the MOST annual meeting on February 1, 2010, and said the program was spending on unnecessary computer equipment and other IT services.

“In this instance, these are fees we pay for our fees and licenses,” Napier said. “We pay those fees that are set aside for the specific purpose of motorcycle safety. Some of these programs have no tie in motorcycling at all.”