https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/swlrt-special-review-legislative-auditor-finds-over-500m-of-2-74b-budget-is-unfunded/
The report determined that some of these change orders were expected when the Council opened bidding for the construction contracts, but it didn't include the expected added costs in the project's scope.
Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, a leading critic of the handling of this project whose district captures part of the transit line, called this finding a "bombshell."
"This was deceptive. This was misleading. This was hiding important information from the public, from policymakers," he said in an interview Friday. "It's really quite outrageous."
Back when the cost estimate was $2.003 Billion, the Hennepin County taxpayer share of that was $879 million.
There were 536,000 households in Hennepin County in 2021.
https://stats.metc.state.mn.us/profile/detail.aspx
So the Hennepin County share alone is $1640 per Hennepin County household on average
The federal, state, and other county shares are all extra to this. Operating subsidies are extra.
Now with the extra $740 million in project costs, probably most of that extra will be paid by Hennepin County taxpayers (the feds don't match cost overrruns and doubt the Minnesota legislature is going to appropriate more), this will surely drive the cost
to about $2,000 per Hennepin County household on average. Primarily paid for by sales taxes -- the most regressive of all the major taxes.
As a Hennepin County taxpayer, I am extremely very angry that we are paying that kind of money to gold-plate one 14.5 mile route.
As a transit dependant person, I think our funds can and should be far better spent than pissing our money away on 14.5 miles, just so some damn politicians can cut ribbons while blathering Met Council talking points about shiny new trains.
I HAVE been following blow-by-blow the Southwest LRT and Bottineau / Blue Line Extesnion projects for nearly a decade, and I've been screaming and hollering about it.
I am not an anti-tax nut, and I am strongly pro-transit. But this is horribly poorly spent.
The Met Council are chronic liars. Yes, I have some examples of how those fuckiers lied about this project in the past, besides the excerpt above. Like when they tried to make it sound like the $135 million match from Minnesota that they tried to get back in 2016 would be matched 9:1 by the federal government -- well, they made it sound that way without technically lying, but it was a deliberatly grossly misleading propaganda piece. Actually half of the match would have come from county and city taxpayers, but they of course didn't mention that because they are sub-animals.
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