Transportation

[This story was originally published in the 4/21/08 issue of The Weekly Report.]
Once again, there's a perennial proposal (HF 2662/SF 2605) to create staggered Met Council terms (retaining some Council members after the Governor who appointed them leaves office), and all the functions of the Council seemed to be on the table at the House floor last Wednesday. Should its members be elected? Is it a villain, an unelected bureaucracy with unchecked taxing powers? Is it an instrument of socialized planning, or a pawn of a right-wing governor? For DFLers, whether or not Pawlenty's Council can advocate a regional transit system has become the key question; the Senate still has to confirm some members this session. The GOP's Council view seems to divide along regional lines.

PIM talked with several legislators looking critically at the Met Council, especially since what chairman Peter Bell called his "number one" priority, the St. Paul light rail line, got vetoed. Sen. Kathy Saltzman (DFL-Woodbury), Reps. Neil Peterson (R-Bloomington), Sandra Peterson (DFL-New Hope), Mark Buesgens (R-Jordan) and Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis) each gave PIM quite a different view about the generally overlooked metro super-agency. Saltzman and Sandra Peterson are carrying different versions of the staggered terms bill.

Who supports staggering? We heard support came from metro cities and counties, but mainly the cities. Saltzman said staggering would provide "a little independence" to work with local communities and the region. With more continuity between governorships, the Council could better focus on developing good regional policy. Saltzman's proposal enters effect in 2009, while the current House version starts after re-apportionment in 2013.

The Central Corridor "is too important to pawn," and everyone wants to be partners in getting it on track again, she said.

Her Council proposal has strong bipartisan support (GOP Sens. Chris Gerlach (R-Apple Valley) and Geoff Michel (R-Edina) have signed on), and it feels like a modest and responsible reform, she said. [Update 4/23: To clarify the above paragraph, Sen. Gerlach let PIM know that he is on board with Saltzman's Council proposal, but wanted to add that if anyone got the impression he's advocating the Central Corridor, that's "not the case."]

[Publisher's Note: Careful readers of Politics in Minnesota will note that the group, Progress in Motion, advertises in PIM publications. To be clear, that fact does not color this story. The truth is Progress in Motion has been a little ticked at your publisher. She has -- repeatedly in PIM and other venues -- predicted that the "Override Six" Republicans would stick with the Governor. She was wrong. There was much more about the Override Six in last Friday's PIM Weekly Report.]

The most overlooked group in the Minnesota story of the year so far -- passing a $6.6 billion transportation funding package into law despite GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto -- is the group that made it happen. That group is Progress in Motion. If there was a top ten list of best lobbying efforts in the last few decades, passing the transportation package this year would be near the top of the list.

Progress in Motion formed as an outgrowth of the successful 2006 "Vote Yes" effort that educated voters and got them to approve dedicating all of the sales tax on new and used cars to transportation. The group, a configuration of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, shepherded the effort in which many other groups participated to override the veto, including the Association of Minnesota Counties, the League of Minnesota Cities, individual highway contractors, transit groups, and eventually the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Besides these groups, however, were the various individuals around the state who lobbied specific members. These included local elected officials and key local business leaders.

While the Chamber's support was high profile, there was another sector of Minnesota's public affairs world that also deserves the spotlight, and that's agriculture. Both the Minnesota Farm Bureau and the Minnesota Farmers Union worked over legislators, as did many agricultural commodity groups. These groups delivered many of the election squeamish rural members, who know they will be supported in this fall's elections.

Herding cats does not begin to describe how much work was involved in keeping everyone together on the same bus to pass the bill and override the Governor. [Your publisher lobbied for the highway contractors in the mid-1990s and knows that keeping those guys on the same bus was worse than herding cats, even when they agreed on issues.]

Driving the bus was the Transportation Alliance's Rick Krueger. The success of Progress in Motion is a monumental career achievement for Krueger, the former DFL Rep. from Staples, former High Tech Council (now the High Tech Association), publishing and real estate executive. Not surprisingly, once the mission was accomplished, Krueger announced to his members this week that he's taking a new job, creating and heading government affairs for Global Traffic Technologies, a recent spin-off from 3M. Kudos to Krueger on a job well done and congratulations on the job ahead.

A final dynamic at play in delivering that staggering sum of $6.6 billion to state transportation coffers were the long-time relationships of those working the issue at the Capitol.

Call it "That 80s Show."

Krueger served in the House in the 1980s, as did former DFL Rep. and Bauerly Brothers Construction owner Jerry Bauerly, former DFL Rep. now lobbyist Dan Knuth (who represents Fresh Energy), former GOP Rep. Dave Bishop (who, as a citizen, helped greatly with the Rochester crowd), former GOP Rep. and now lobbyist Jim Girard (who represents Central Corridor Partnership, part of the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce) major league transit advocate Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin (DFL), former DFL Rep. and now Mayor of Staples Bruce Nelson, former DFL Rep. and now lobbyist Gerry Schoenfeld (who represents the Minnesota Biodiesel Council, the Minnesota Pork Producers Association and the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association), former GOP Rep. and now lobbyist Bill Schreiber (who represents Hennepin County, the I-494 Corridor Commission, the Metro Transitways Development Board and the Northstar Corridor Development Authority) and the and former DFL House Speaker and now lobbyist former Bob Vanasek (who represents the Minnesota Inter-County Association).

Other players from the 1980s include Ramsey County Commissioner Tony Bennett, former GOP Sen. Minority Leader Duane Benson (for GoMinnesota, which was the predecessor to the Vote Yes campaign, former head of the Citizens League Curt Johnson (for the Itasca Project), former DFL Sen. and now lobbyist Bob Tennessen (I-35W Solutions Alliance) and former DFL House staff and now lobbyist Jim Wafler (Associated General Contractors and the Minnesota Transportation Alliance). Both GOP former Govs. Arne Carlson and Al Quie publicly supported the tax increases in the bill.

It took 20 years to pass a transportation funding increase package, so don't look for all these players to go away just because they won (note that Progress in Motion is still advertising in PIM). Expect some type of continuing effort so that when the time comes for more gas tax and sales tax increases, the group won't have to reinvent the wheel.

The design of transportation systems carries its own ideology: the routes, exit placement, the eminent domain actions, the financing, carpool or toll road lanes; all these issues loom large in Minnesota, especially since no one can agree how to pay for needed work. St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood, the heart of the black community, got split in half by I-94, and many people today fear similar effects from massive new roads. Recently, people on the 'fringes' of the left and right who might be considered hostile to corporate globalization have talked about a 'NAFTA Superhighway' project which would link Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but little hard evidence illustrates how this plan could work. PIM first reported in July that a Twin Cities lawyer, Nathan Hansen, used Data Practices Act requests from MnDOT to get several rounds of documents released regarding NASCO, the North American Super Corridor Coalition, a non-profit organization based in Texas. Hansen has kept at it (here's his blog), filing a lawsuit to leverage the release of more documents, more of which finally came out recently. We have packaged everything MnDOT released into a ZIP archive of PDFs (60 MB!).

These MnDOT documents clearly show that NASCO was set up as a "systems integrator" to oversee NAFTRACS, a project led by Lockheed Martin's subsidiary SAVI Networks to build a complete cargo monitoring and security regime, which would include placing up to 200 RFID truck monitoring stations along Interstates 35 and 94. The entire 'Network Infrastructure' would be overseen by "Total Transportation Domain Awareness Centers of Excellence," which seemingly would fuse all available sources of data, including weather, RFID, cargo tracking, intelligence and security cameras, into NORAD-like Command and Control centers. Effectively, as the docs say, this would 'militarize' cargo along I-35, by cloning SAVI's current military shipping container tracking system at their "Lighthouse" research lab, which already runs the Pentagon's Global Transportation Network.

The NASCO/SAVI Letter of Intent clearly states that SAVI, i.e. Lockheed, would have exclusive rights to market the data collected by NASCO's 'Network Infrastructure'. NASCO's intended role as a 'systems integrator,' specified in their application for federal cash, seems a similar setup to the Coast Guard Deepwater arrangement that led to a complete mess, as PIM reported earlier this year. NASCO would control all sub-contracts for the system, with a focus on generating marketable business data and supply-chain logistics from everyone using I-35 for freight. In April, Brad Larsen, MnDOT's Federal Relations Manager, and the U's Center for Transportation Studies Director Bob Johns, discussed over emails that "it sounds like NASCO has a couple very interesting projects going on - the NAFTRACS project involves Lockheed." The other responds, "Our local Lockheed office seems to be a big player--influencing earmarks. Not sure what we will do." Elsewhere, the Eagan Lockheed office is described as a leading team for collecting the NAFTRACS business data.

I will resist speculating on 'what it all means,' since clearly this complex plan is international in scope. The document batch is hundreds of pages long, and I have not reviewed all of it. Your Web Editor, who discovered all this, wants to stress: this plan seems to promote long-range shipping at the expense of developing local economies, and it seems unreasonable for Lockheed to get all the data from such a plan. It seems like a way to put Lockheed in charge of maximizing imports from China, when our efforts could be better directed towards non-intrusive local economic development and non-contractor-dominated security systems, instead. This doc dump cries out for a mass of bloggers to digest it: are there any takers out there?

In this issue: Janecek's in the Mideast & The Inmates are Running the Asylum; Negative Identities: Senators Craig, Wellstone, Homophobia And Easy Messages; Phillips Incinerator Burning Down; Lively Green and the War on Drugs: Who Patrols the Border Patrol?; Bridge Charity Work; Bits & Pieces; Lobbyist Watch.

MnDOT has released five documents on its website relating specifically to the I-35W bridge (bridge number 9340) which we have packaged into a zip file (35 MB). The files include an outside consultant review, a University of Minnesota Civil Engineering field report, two brief status summary documents, and, most troubling, a MnDOT "Fracture Critical" engineering summary which reveals in candid descriptions and shocking photographs the deterioration of many critical bridge elements. Here's my summary of the relevant parts of the documents, which we posted in our special Bridge edition of the Weekly Report last Friday:

A 299-page draft report prepared for MnDOT by the URS Corporation of Minneapolis entitled, "Fatigue Evaluation and Redundancy Analysis" for Bridge No. 9340, released July 2006.

Shame on the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman and the rest of the left who are laying the blame for the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge on GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

We don’t even know the number--let alone the names--of people killed. Doesn’t matter to Coleman and his ilk. Take any shot to smear a Republican.

Writes Coleman:

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

"No New Taxes" has nothing to do with what happened, yesterday.

A few facts for Coleman. In general, the major bridges the federal government has built become the responsibility of states to maintain, and states routinely seek and are granted federal funding to help with the maintenance. The maintenance work being done on the I-35W bridge by Progressive Contractors, Inc., out of St. Michael, Minnesota, was on the list of projects of the 2007-2009 State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) list. Right there on page 116 of the report is the I-35W bridge. The $3.3 million price tag was being paid mostly by the federal government ($2.97 million) and not the state ($330,000).

The National Bridge Inventory conducted by the federal government in 2003 reported that the bridge had a "sufficiency" rating of 50% on a scale of 120. That’s not great, but that’s where about 80,000 of the country’s bridges stand. The significant finding of that Inventory, however, was that structurally, the bridge "meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as-is."

The federal government didn’t flag structural issues; neither did MnDOT.

Pawlenty could have raised the gas tax $50 a gallon and nothing would have happened. The structural condition of the bridge was not on anyone’s radar screen. At this point, that appears to be the real issue: All levels of government may have failed us.

But, specifically, Pawlenty and his administration have not. Those who blame Pawlenty and the Republicans for not raising the state’s gas tax since 1988 may want to review their legislative history. From 1988-1996, the Democrats controlled both houses of the state legislature. Transportation funding increase efforts stalemated among Democrats because urban DFLers wanted a permanent funding source for transit (the state gas tax is constitutionally dedicated to roads).

From 1996-2006, the Republicans controlled the House and the Democrats held the Senate. To be sure, "no new taxes" prevailed during those years. The last several years, the Legislature has sent funding increase packages that have been too rich in tax increases. The last one included a ten-cent gas tax increase along with an option by local governments--not the people--to raise the sales tax for transit.

These weren’t realistic packages.They were meant to embarrass the Governor.

Nevertheless, no matter how much money government has, it can’t fix a bridge that’s not on a list of bridges that need fixing.

For the record, in the 1990s, I did some work for the state’s highway construction companies. We lobbied to increase the gas tax by a nickel, and obviously, we lost. I believe the state does need to raise the gas tax (I happen to like to drive). If Democrats were serious about increasing transportation funding and not political grandstanding, they would send Pawlenty a a simple nickel increase bill. Bet he’d sign it…even before this tragedy.

Finally, thoughts and prayers to everyone at Progressive Contractors (P.C.I.). Owner Mike McGray runs a fine construction business, and from all we know at this point, it appears he lost at least one worker.

Some additional material: The I-35W bridge was completed in 1967. Many photos taken by the public have been posted on the Flickr service tagged under 'bridge collapse'. The new Minnesota 2020 thinktank quickly released a report by longtime Strib reporter Conrad deFiebre (who covered transportation) entitled "451 Minnesota Bridges 'Functionally Obsolete'."

SuperRondo Superhighway? MnDOT, NASCO, and plans for the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway

• UPDATE December 14, 2007: More documents from MnDOT were released in November, shedding further light on how NASCO is set up, its federal contract, and the effect of Minnesota's Lockheed office on earmarks. See PIM Exclusive: SuperRondo II: New NASCO NAFTA Superhighway Docs Released From MnDOT.
• The new batch of documents combines the MnDOT documents first described here in July, and the new releases. Download the 60 MB ZIP PDF pack here.

St. Paul's Rondo Days festival is right around the corner on July 21st. Rondo, of course, was the primarily black neighborhood obliterated when I-94 was built and blasted through, a route selected because of the neighborhood's lack of political clout. Deploying the "Stops-4-Us" message, the University Avenue Community Coalition plans to raise awareness about the potential damage to their neighborhoods because of the proposed Central Corridor light rail project, which they fear will remove parking, disrupt commerce and fail to offer enough stops for their community. The federal government wants fewer stops on the Corridor to reduce trip time, or else federal funds will be jeopardized. As one UACC organizer said to PIM, this federal policy has effectively removed transit stops from other urban communities around the nation.

On a much larger scale, proposals are now being drawn up for large transportation networks across America piggybacking on the interstate highway system. PIM has obtained documents from the Minnesota Department of Transportation about proposals to create major international transportation corridors along I-35 and I-94. The documents were obtained from MnDOT via the Minnesota Data Practices Act by local lawyer Nathan Hansen and posted on his blog and law firm's website. We have packaged the PDFs into a 66 MB ZIP archive available here through PIM's website.

The major group coordinating this effort is North America's Supercorridor Coalition, or NASCO. The MnDOT files include many strategic public relations emails among NASCO, lobbyists, government employees across the country, in Canada and Mexico, as well as grant applications specifying the exact nature of NASCO projects. Many emails among MnDOT personnel are also included. These documents formed the basis for a report by Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily, which also discussed MnDOT's views of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's (R) position on the matter. (Officially, he doesn't have one). The documents confirm that MnDOT agreed to join NASCO for a specially discounted price of $15,000, money that perhaps could have been better spent patching I-35W's potholes.