Air Care Colorado, the state’s privately contracted vehicle emission testing program, tested its first vehicle on Jan. 2, 1995.

But since then, not much has changed in the program’s 30-year history, including the price of the test itself.

And that’s a problem, Air Care Colorado representative James Brandon told the Transportation Legislation Review Committee on Tuesday.

Envirotest, a private contractor, has been operating the Air Care Colorado program for the Colorado Department of Health and the Department of Revenue since 1994, according to the company’s website, overseeing the state’s network of 18 centralized inspection stations. 

Air Care Colorado tests more than a million cars annually, with an approximate failure rate of 10%. Although emission testing in Colorado is mandated by statute, it has not kept up with the technology in newer vehicles or with where Coloradans choose to live and work, explained Brandon, a former Colorado State Representative and Senator. 

The current emissions inspection program applies to most vehicles and locales in the Denver-metropolitan area and the North Front Range of the state. 

All-wheel drive vehicles, which weren’t mainstream at the time of the program’s inception, require special lanes for testing and tend to be limited in number at Air Care Colorado locations.

Testing stations were built years ago where officials thought the traffic patterns would be, and where people would move.

“Well, 30 years later, people didn’t move to where we thought they should move,” Brandon said. 

Parker’s only Air Care station has two testing lanes and should be replaced or expanded due to the area’s growing development, but Brandon said there is no room to expand.

Another testing facility in Commerce City was condemned in favor of a grocery store leaving the Northglenn location as the only option in the area, creating longer distances for motorists to travel.

Fewer test facilities and limited lanes result in backups, and motorists sit idle in their cars, releasing emissions back into the air. 

Over the years, remote-sensing devices, also known as RapidScreen, have helped, but Brandon says expanding traffic ways has curtailed their ability to effectively test cars as they work best when cars are accelerating, such as an on-ramp.

“CDOT’s attempt to move more traffic through the metro area has added more lanes to the interstates,” he said. “And they’ve put in traffic lights (at on-ramps) so we’ve lost a lot of our ability to test remotely.” 

More remote sensing devices are needed to be placed further away from the metro area, Brandon said. 

But that, along with additional lanes and testing stations all need capital funding. 

“We’re down to a matter of needing some capital,” Brandon told the TLR Committee. “We’ve had no fee increase since 1993 when the first statute pass passed, it was for $25. If you were to track inflation, that test should (now) be $55.”

Overall, Colorado’s emission testing program is stuck in time and it shows.

The Air Care Colorado program still uses most of the same technology it did in 1995, although many of the vendors are no longer in business.

“To update a program that is 30 years old, that the public is required to take we need to give them the most convenient test we can,” Brandon said. “And that means changing some of the ways we do things like building a kiosk that can be placed in a grocery store parking lot where you can test your own car.”

Brandon admits such a project would take “some work” with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Other ideas include large mobile testing vans that would move around the metro area where large numbers of vehicles accumulate, like business parking lots.

“These are just some of the things we’re looking at doing,” he said. “But we need some capital resources.”

SB24-095 introduced earlier this year, would have made $850 vouchers available to owners of high-emission vehicles, based on income and the age of the vehicle, to use at qualified repair facilities to bring their vehicles into compliance. The bill was postponed indefinitely by the House Committee on Finance.