Plans to change Met Council governance on hold

The chairs of the two legislative transportation committees have given up for now on changing how the Met Council is governed. The two Minneapolis DFLers haven’t, however, given up on changing how the regional government manages its biggest and most well-known projects.

Sen. Scott Dibble renewed his push to shift construction responsibility for future light rail and bus rapid transit projects from the Met Council to the state Department of Transportation. And Rep. Frank Hornstein is presiding over a committee push to restrict the council from spending any of the money from a new seven-county transportation sales tax on light rail projects. 

Both moves come after their failed push last fall and winter to significantly change how the Met Council is governed. The current council is made up of 17 part-time members appointed from the region by the governor. Hornstein had supported making the council members elected and Dibble had crafted a hybrid plan that combined an elected council and a council of governments made up of local elected officials from the seven-county region. No proposal had a majority of a special task force that met from August of 2023 to February.

While neither Dibble nor Hornstein has offered legislation related to the task force work, both indicated in an interview that their work this session does stem from their disappointment with the failure of the task force to reach agreement.

“The task force, if anything, put us further behind,” Dibble said this week. “It entrenched resistance to change. Everyone dug in further to the positions they brought into the conversation.

“The bottom line is we don’t have the votes in the Legislature,” he added. “We have to take it to the people. There has to be a political movement built up around the case for change.”

Hornstein said he thought the task force work was productive because it did discuss different ideas for running a regional agency like the Met Council. He said Dibble’s hybrid proposal for a combination of an elected council and a panel of local officials is the direction the region should go. It just didn’t lead to a consensus among the people appointed to the task force.

“Certainly, there are a lot of powerful interests that are fine with the status quo,” Hornstein said, adding that there was some agreement around the need for more transparency and accountability for the Met Council and its Metro Transit.

Both chairs believe Met Council staff improperly interfered with the workings of the task force. That conclusion is based partly on MinnPost reporting that showed contacts between council staff and task force members before they publicly accused a Met Council critic of a conflict of interest.

It was that report, as well as their own observations of Met Council staff’s interactions with sympathetic task force members, that contributed to Dibble’s decision to push for the removal of future construction work from the Met Council.

“The Met Council has vociferously defended its prerogative to be completely beyond the reach of any elected board or body or entity-active effort to undermine that policy idea,” Dibble told his committee last week. “So we’re not moving forward with that this year because they’ve been quite successful.”

The Met Council has denied that it acted improperly during the task force process with Chair Charlie Zelle saying his staff was responding to a request for information from a task force member who is also a state legislator. It has also defended itself from accusations and ethics complaints filed by task force member Myron Orfield.

Two proposals

The ban on using the new sales tax on light rail is contained in an amendment that will be presented to the House Transportation Committee by Rep. Fue Lee. The Minneapolis DFLer will seek to amend his own House File 5182, which would order the Met Council to submit an annual financial review to the Legislature that provides financial details about the council’s transportation budget, as well as its forecasted spending.

“That comes directly out of the task force discussion even though it’s not a governance change,” Hornstein said. 

One of the major provisions of last year’s transportation bill was a seven-county sales tax of 0.75%. The proceeds of nearly $500 million a year will be the first dedicated state-adopted tax revenue for transportation, with most going to transit.

“We want to make sure we really put some guardrails and some specifics about its use,” Hornstein said. “Without that kind of strong legislative oversight and direction, who knows. For example, I don’t think it should be used for light rail.

“This is the future of transit,” he added. “We have to make sure it is used for the purposes we outlined in the omnibus bill.”

An existing sales tax dedicated to transportation that is imposed by, and collected by, Ramsey and Hennepin Counties has been a major source of funding for light rail projects.

Terri Dresen, the director of communications for the Met Council, said the governing body would not comment on potential amendments until the committee formally considers them.

The transfer of authority for construction projects is in Senate File 1625, which Dibble held a hearing on last session but did not advance. He renewed the push last week.

“We can have the Department of Transportation build these massive construction projects that the Met Council cannot do,” Dibble told his committee April 3. “They are incompetent and incapable of it. They don’t have the experience, the culture. They have a record of failure.”

He cited reports that contractors building the Southwest Light Rail Transit project laid commuter tracks too close to existing freight rail tracks. “It’s never ending. It’s relentless,” Dibble said.

The Met Council did not testify on the bill, but Dresen said the council is interested in working with the Legislature on how projects are done.

“We also recognize the Legislature has the right to continually evaluate how the state’s major transit investments are overseen and delivered, and we will continue to work closely with all of our partners, including the Legislature, to share how we are improving our work to ensure the next project builds on lessons learned from the last,” Dresen said in response to questions about the Dibble bill.

Nancy Daubenberger, the commissioner of the state Department of Transportation, thanked Dibble for his confidence in the agency but opposed the bill. MnDOT has its hands full with the projects it already has, she said, and is having trouble filling its own jobs. Yet the SWLRT staff alone is equal to what MnDOT has in its Twin Cities region.

“The Met Council is the regional planning entity and operator of the transit system and has institutional knowledge related to this,” Daubenberger told the Senate Transportation Committee. “Therefore, the Met Council should manage the construction of their system as MnDOT manages construction of projects on our system.”

The GOP lead on the committee, Sen. John Jasinski of Faribault, agreed with Daubenberger’s concerns about staffing and said he was leery of the department being distracted from projects in Greater Minnesota to take on huge projects in the Twin Cities.

“We would be concerned about taking away what MnDOT is delivering to us in Greater Minnesota and the Metro to oversee some of these projects,” he said.

Dibble said that MnDOT would get the money now being spent by the Met Council and that some of the current staff could be absorbed by MnDOT.

“There’s a way to do this. I have faith in the Department of Transportation that we can figure this out,” he said. 

Dibble said later that “I’m encouraging the governor to support my bill. This is an opportunity to do something that is meaningful, that we are trying to address what is abundantly obvious.”

Gov. Tim Walz, who appoints the chair of the Met Council and the 16 other council members as well as Daubenberger, said Wednesday he is open to talking about the issue.

“Anything that moves toward more efficiency and better stewardship of projects and taxpayer dollars is smart,” Walz said. “MnDOT has a very, very good reputation on these things and the Met Council has delivered on some really great projects. Southwest Light Rail has been a little different animal so we’re open to hearing them.” 

He said he shared Daubenberger’s concerns about staffing.

“The experts at MnDOT say, ‘Quite honestly, we just don’t have the capacity,’” Walz said. He cited the recently approved $1.8 billion replacement of the Blatnik Bridge between Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin, as an example of some of the work ahead. “These big projects over multiple jurisdictions are a real challenge.”

Editor’s note: Peter Callaghan wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost.

This article first appeared on April 12 on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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