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Counterpoint: Wrong route was the root of rail line woes
The Southwest light rail line's troubles started at the beginning.
By Jim Brimeyer and Sue Sanger
May 15, 2023 at 10:30PM
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The recent front-page article about the construction of Southwest light rail transit ("Blame piles up over rail line's cost, delays," May 7) included finger-pointing among the Metropolitan Council, its construction contractor and the Legislative Auditor's office, but it totally overlooked the root cause of this issue — how Hennepin County mismanaged the original planning and route selection for SWLRT.
Hennepin County was responsible for the planning and route selection of SWLRT until Met Council took over in 2013-14, and the county led a highly skewed process to ensure that SWLRT would run through the Kenilworth corridor rather than through Uptown. It did so to ratify its previous purchase of the corridor, and its announcement that it would be used for mass transit, even though the proposed Uptown route would have served many more businesses, employees and transit-dependent riders.
To achieve its predetermined "right" answer, Hennepin County did the following:
- Presumed that the freight railroad that ran through the Kenilworth corridor would be rerouted to St. Louis Park, thus creating space for the SWLRT tracks in the Kenilworth corridor, even though the county had no engineering, environmental or economic analyses that might support the safety and efficiency of such a move.
The Hennepin County commissioner who chaired the Policy Advisory Committee convened by the county to determine the SWLRT route (in which the authors actively participated) repeatedly refused to permit discussion of this topic, and stated that freight rail was irrelevant to the development of SWLRT. Only after the route was determined did the county acknowledge that freight rail could not be moved to St. Louis Park because of the safety hazards it would create.
- Calculated the Cost Effective Index (a federally required comparison of the projected construction costs and ridership of the Kenilworth and Uptown routes) by including the costs of a tunnel on the Uptown route but not on the Kenilworth route, by omitting the cost of the crash wall near the BNSF tracks (required only for the Kenilworth route) and by omitting the projected ridership of all transit users who lived between W. Lake Street and downtown Minneapolis. When this skewed calculation nevertheless predicted that the Uptown route was more cost-effective, the county ignored it and continued to insist on the Kenilworth route.
The county failed to publicly disclose that it had a pre-existing agreement with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that the bike trail in the Kenilworth corridor could be moved elsewhere if the corridor was needed for transit purposes. Instead, the county dismissed public requests to consider moving the bike trail in order to create space for both the freight rail and SWLRT tracks at ground level, thus eliminating the need and expense for a tunnel in the corridor.
In short, public investigation of the causes of the current delays and cost overruns for construction of SWLRT must start at the beginning of the planning process. Hennepin County must not be given a pass. Rather, it must be acknowledged that had the county managed the planning and route selection process professionally and competently, SWLRT would be completed and running today through the Uptown area, at a significantly lower cost than what is currently estimated.
Jim Brimeyer was a member of the St. Louis Park City Council, 1996-2003 and 2005, and member of the Metropolitan Council, 2011-2015. Sue Sanger was a member of the St. Louis Park City Council, 1995-2017.
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Jim Brimeyer and Sue Sanger
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