After latest brutal Southwest LRT audit, some lawmakers question the point of the Met Council 

The Southwest light rail extension required the Metropolitan Council to build a protective wall between its new track and the BNSF Railway freight rail line in Minneapolis. 

The Met Council estimated that erecting the wall would cost about $36.6 million. But the chief contractors on the light rail project, Lunda Construction Co. and McCrossan, said it could be as much as $82.6 million. 

So, the 15-person Met Council met to determine if Lunda and McCrossan’s more than doubling of the cost projection was a fair reflection of the work ahead. The result? The Met Council did not just approve the request, but gave a little more money to the contractors: a revised estimate of $83.4 million. 

The ballooning costs of the barrier wall was one of several decisions made by the Met Council in its ongoing Green Line extension project that were done without explanation, according to a performance audit released Monday by the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA). 

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“The Council’s policy does not specify a particular threshold or provide additional guidance on how to determine whether the variance between a contractor’s estimate and the Council’s estimate (or revised estimate) is fair and reasonable,” the report reads. 

Yes, we have been here before: 

• June 2023: ‘Think hard’ about Met Council’s ability to oversee any future light rail construction, says auditor
• March 2023: Minnesota lawmakers ‘speechless’ after scathing legislative audit report on Southwest light rail transit
• September 2022: What’s new and not new in Southwest light rail auditor report and Wish you were riding Southwest light rail by now? Blame tunnel vision
• October 2021: ‘Prolonged and significant difference of opinion’ between Met Council, project contractors over cost estimates

In fact, Monday’s report is the fourth major review produced by OLA, the in-house watchdog for Minnesota state agencies. Southwest LRT, also known as the METRO Green Line Extension, is 14.5 miles long and will connect the downtown centers of Eden Prairie, Hopkins, St. Louis Park and Minneapolis when it is completed. 

What is new is that the Met Council, whose members are appointed by the governor and are in charge of fostering strategic growth within the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area, is steadfast about when the project will be completed. 

Met Council Chair Charlie Zelle testified before lawmakers at a Legislative Audit Commission hearing Monday that the extension would be open to riders by 2027 and will stick to its 2024 revised cost projection of $2.86 billion. The original cost estimate, made in 2011, was $1.25 billion for a light rail line that would open in 2018. 

But what is also new is that at a time of budget-tightening, DFL and Republican legislators spoke openly Monday about completely rethinking infrastructure projects and dissolving the Met Council, an entity that was created in 1967 as a “regional solution for regional problems.”

“This is exactly what happens when an organization feels no pressure to be accountable to the people it serves,” said Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, who, along with retired DFL Rep. Frank Hornstein had earlier pushed to rethink the council’s governance structure.

“I have never seen anything positive about the Met Council,” said Sen. Calvin Bahr, R-East Bethel, addressing Zelle. “You come in so far over budget it’s like you don’t care.”

Sen. Mark Koran, R-North Branch, suggested that transportation projects going forward should be implemented by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), an idea discussed last year by Dibble and Hornstein’s governance task force. The Legislature in 2024 ended up passing a bill directing MnDOT to engage in more extensive consulting on Met Council transportation projects, but it didn’t go as far as some wanted.

The latest OLA audit provided ample material for these critical lawmakers, concluding that Southwest LRT suffered from “weaknesses in internal controls in each area we reviewed.”

The report found 10 instances, including the barrier wall, where Lunda and McCrossan came back to the Met Council with a revised cost estimate and the council signed off on more money without saying why.

Another problem area was Lunda and McCrossan’s removal of contaminated soils from project sites. The contractors were originally given $18.6 million to safely dispose of such soils, but the council later amended that figure to $39.7 million. 

According to their contract, Lunda and McCrossan were supposed to notify the Met Council each time they disposed of soil. Instead, the Council provided the contractors with signed blank forms to use as needed in dumping hazardous material. 

OLA found discrepancies between the logs recording when soil was removed from the project site and the one for when it was placed in a landfill.

“Deviations include no field logs for some days when truckloads were brought to the landfill,” the audit reads. 

Zelle said the Met Council largely accepted and even agreed with the audit’s criticisms and is taking action to curb wasteful spending. 

In a letter submitted by Zelle in response to the audit, he mentioned changes Met Council had recently made including hiring a cost estimating consultant and moving to an electronic process to track contaminated soil removal. 

Previously, the council kept a paper log of the removals; Zelle testified that old-fashioned carbon copies had been kept to track that removal process. 

Zelle did testify that the Met Council would ultimately be vindicated for the Green Line extension. 

“We have protected the taxpayers’ interest in this project,” he said.

Editor’s note: Matthew Blake wrote this story for MinnPost.com.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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