The air quality planning agency for the Denver metropolitan area wants the state to raise the fee for vehicle emissions test by 40% — from $25 to $35 — for the more than one million cars getting tested annually in Colorado.

About 10% of those cars fail the test. 

Air Care Colorado, the state’s privately contracted vehicle emission testing program, hasn’t raised the price of a standard emission test in almost 30 years.

With close to a million new Coloradans projected to arrive in the next 25 years, officials from Regional Air Quality Council said they are looking for ways to improve and update vehicle emissions testing.

While the council hopes newer and cleaner vehicles would arrive with those new residents, the council still wants improvements to the state’s aging emission testing program, an official said. 

“In the previous session, there were proposals to allow for additional revenue to be brought into the program by raising the fee from $25 to $35 per emission test,” Regional Air Quality Council Director Mike Silverstein said. “Most of that money goes into the program to improve the existing measures, update, expand testing stations, reduce wait times, etc; and another 25 cents that would be taken from that $10-increase going into funding (to reduce and repair) high-emitting vehicles.”

Senate Bill 24-095, 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 measure didn’t make it out of the House Committee on Finance.

In July, James Brandon, a representative for Air Care Colorado, told the Transportation Legislation Review Committee that, while emissions testing is required by state law, the program has yet to keep pace with advancements in vehicle technology or the changing patterns of where Coloradans live and work. 

Additionally, the regional council wants to require drivers who register vehicles outside of the mandatory inspection areas but still drive substantially within the testing region to obtain an emissions test.

Silverstein said drivers from outside emission testing regions often spend more time driving within these regions than the residents who live there.

He also hopes the committee will consider tightening requirements for those failing to register out-of-state vehicles in a timely manner, as well as for those with expired plates or no plates at all.

“The testing program is a good program,” Silverstein said. “But it is an older program now, and there needs to be a lot of update and improvement to it, and additional resources, of course, are necessary.”

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

According to the company’s website, Envirotest, a private contractor, has operated the Air Care Colorado program for the Colorado Department of Health and the Colorado Department of Revenue since 1994. It oversees the state’s network of 18 centralized inspection stations.

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