Over at Minnesota Monitor, Andy Birkey writes about Transportation Repair Delays of the Week: Highway 14 and Rice Street. The reportage is brisk, mentioning Walz's support of Highway 14 improvements.
Unfortunately, Walz can't force MnDOT to do anything. This morning's Mankato Free Press paints a grimmer picture for area highway projects:
A total of $8.4 million in planned projects in Blue Earth, Faribault, Watonwan, Waseca and Le Sueur counties would be postponed under the tentative plan to cover a $140 million shortfall in funding needed to replace the collapsed I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.
Deferred projects in other Minnesota Department of Transportation districts in outstate Minnesota total as little as $2.7 million in northwestern Minnesota and $3.1 million in the west-central part of the state.
No MnDOT district other than the Mankato-based District 7 has deferred projects of more than $5.8 million under the plan released to lawmakers by Transportation Commissioner and Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau.
As might be expected, local officials hoping to improve Highway 14, one of the state's most dangerous roads, are outraged:
“It becomes very clear that either the governor or the lieutenant governor care very little about the deaths on Highway 14,” said North Mankato Mayor Gary Zellmer, a member of the Area Transportation Partnership.
The partnership helps determine the priority list for transportation spending in the district and has focused virtually all of the available funding on the Highway 14 expansion in coming years. If the right-of-way acquisition is delayed by the proposed shift of funding to the bridge project, the expansion project will be on hold — along with all of the other regional projects that could have been done if the district hadn’t committed to focusing $65 million on Highway 14, Zellmer said.
“This is the second time they’ve pulled this money,” Zellmer said, saying the state previously delayed providing part of its share of the Highway 14 project to cover a shortfall in funding for the Crosstown Highway/I-35 commons project in south Minneapolis.
But Southern Minnesotans are optimists by nature. The Free Press reports that with MnDot's situation being so bad, the legislature will have to do something about transportation in the next session. Actually, the legislature did do something about it in last spring's session, but the governor vetoed it. That money mostly likely wouldn't have stopped the I35 collapse, but it would have paid for Highway 14.
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