The Colorado General Assembly just ended a reasonably good 120-day legislative session, but the legislators and the governor “kicked the can” down the highway on one major challenge. A major state highway financing bill failed to pass.

At the start of the session in January, there was considerable agreement that something had to be done about the crumbling roadways and clogged interstates that are the Colorado highway system. And several senior Democratic and Republican legislators came together to offer a compromise approach. Here’s what went wrong.

Governor Hickenlooper said action on jammed and disintegrating highways needed to be taken, and he gave some nice speeches around the state pointing out that Utah was doing a better job on highways than Colorado. But he did not send a well-worked out bill to the legislature with his name on it. He stood aside, which is his habit, and left the responsibility of writing the actual bill to the legislative leadership.

It is not the usual procedure in Colorado for the governor to send bills to the legislature. But the Colorado governor’s main strength is the “bully pulpit” – the ability to command the news media and draw attention to the state’s problems and the best ways to solve them.

Our popular governor, using the resources of the state’s highway engineers and the state’s fiscal experts, could have drawn up a bill that would have improved the state’s highways – and only the state’s highways – and paid for it with a sales tax increase. Then the governor could have “gone long,” as they say in the NFL (as Governors Romer and Owens occasionally did) and undertaken an emphatic media blitz calling for the legislature to pass the “Hickenlooper Highway Bill” and do it quickly.

The governor did not do that, so the legislative leadership, Democratic Speaker of the House Crisanta Duran and Republican President of the Senate Kevin Grantham, wrote the bill.

Inexplicably, they waited until 60 days of the 120-day session had gone by before presenting their bill, House Bill 1242, to the legislature.

Getting your bill in early so there is plenty of time is one of the first rules of legislative procedure. When the bill got in trouble in the Republican-controlled state Senate late in the session, there was no time left to save it.

There was another problem. Typical of legislators, Duran and Grantham wrote a long and complex bill that, instead of just fixing state highways, tried to deal with too many other projects. Their bill provided for repairing local roads as well as state highways. It added money for bike trails and mass transit (bus and passenger rail) or whatever a local government wanted.

The whole shebang was to be paid for with a 0.62 percent statewide sales tax increase that, under the TABOR amendment, would have to be approved by state voters in November 2017.

We appreciate Duran’s and Grantham’s efforts to get votes for the bill by loading it with extraneous vote-getting programs, but they would have done better to keep the bill on state highways – and only state highways – because that was where the critical problem is and where the interest lay in improvement.

Then providing money for local roads – rather than only for state highways – became a negative for the bill. The mayor of Colorado Springs, the El Paso County commissioners, the Douglas County Commissioners, and other local officials complained that their cities and counties had already raised the local sales tax to fix local roads.

They publicly opposed the bill because their citizens were going to be taxed twice for local road improvements and would not get back as much money in local highway funds as they were paying in increased state sales tax.

When Duran and Grantham first presented their bill to the legislature, news reports characterized Grantham as intimating “expect plenty of changes” and this is “not the final product.” Really? We prefer that legislative leaders announce bills – particularly bi-partisan bills – and call for “No amendments!” The reason for this is amendments generally tend to weaken bills and in many cases are secretly designed to serve special interests.

A negative amendment was quick in coming. The Senate Transportation Committee dropped the sales tax from 0.62 percent to 0.50 and offset the tax cut with $100 million from an already cut-to-the-bone existing state budget.

As expected, House Bill 1242 came to a sorry end. Three tax-increase opposing Republican senators voted it down in the state Senate Finance Committee, and the bill was dead.

The real problem was, because the bill involved a statewide sales tax increase, no one wanted to put their name on the state highway bill and be seen as avidly supporting it.

All actions seemed to be perfunctory, from the governor’s inadequate call for legislative action (but providing too little political muscle on his own part) to a legislative leader calling for amendments (as if to say I do not want to be associated with the final product). And instead of being about state highways, the bill had become a Christmas tree laden with too many ornaments of pork.

Everyone seemed to be hoping someone else would take the lead and accept the responsibility of getting a major sales tax increase to fix state highways through the legislature and on to the governor’s desk. When no one had the political courage to do that, the bill was doomed.

Three realities were at work. Colorado may be a semi-progressive purple state, yet it has long been averse to state tax hikes. Second, the base of the Colorado Republican Party is passionately anti-tax, even though many of their leaders know there are serious public policy needs. Finally, enigmatic Governor John Hickenlooper still harbors political ambitions, and he was apparently worried that this bill and referendum would be labeled the “Hickenlooper Highway Tax Hike.”

Paradoxically, our highways are jammed and deteriorating because traffic is way up due to our booming state economy. But instead of finding the money to invest in infrastructure – at a time we could afford to do so, with the state economy growing – the governor and the legislature fumbled the ball in the Red Zone. This was the way not to fix Colorado highways, and to shoot ourselves in the economic foot at the same time.

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Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy are political scientists at Colorado College.