Governor Tim Walz and the Minnesota legislature delivered a "significant" transportation funding package in 2023 - and reform, "not tinkering"

When Minnesota voters re-elected their Governor Tim Walz in 2022 and simultaneously entrusted both houses of the state legislature to majorities of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, they chose a state leadership that was supportive of transportation improvements, including both increased funding and better ways of spending that funding.

Sherry Munyon of the MINNESOTA PUBLIC TRANSIT ASSOCIATION just last week recalled that as Walz started a second term and the new legislative leadership was sworn in early in 2023, "we knew we wanted a significant bill, not a tinkering bill." (Munyon made that statement July 29, 2024 while addressing a roomful of transit officials at a South West Transit Association American Public Transportation Association AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) workshop in Fort Worth, on the topic of state government aid to public transit.)

Munyon's "we" was a "big we," as she described the expansive and inclusive coalition that Governor Walz and the legislature worked with to craft the bill, with MARP at the center of a diverse array of interests. With the Governor's involvement, the transit agencies ranging from Mankato to Hibbing and downtown Minneapolis to Main Street Thief River Falls collaborated with business associations, labor, environmentalists and civic groups. They focused on outcomes for Minnesotans: transit that provides more economic access for communities that had historically faced transportation barriers, safer biking routes for school children (a soft spot for the former teacher sitting in the Governor's chair) and more trails and bikeways in communities across the state, a Duluth-Twin Cities train to reconnect different parts of the state, more frequent and reliable bus routes within the metropolitan regions, and much more.

The common sense Minnesotans didn't just put more money into the same old ways. (A Lutheran influence, always advocating for reform?) The legislature included important policy change, especially to curb the state highway department's outdated forecasting and modeling bamboozles that have been used to justify counter-productive highway widening that increases automobile dependency and creates more traffic (as most other states' highway departments' flawed methodology does.) The fiscally responsible Minnesota legislature directed that henceforth their methodology will be improved so that decision-makers will from now on judge their transportation investments by outcomes like reducing traffic, reducing carbon emissions, and reducing automobile dependence - rather than increasing those factors as other state governments still seem bound to do by clinging to biased junk science.

That new recipe for cooking up transportation projects is even better than a hot dish at a February smorgasbord in Bemidji.

With Governor Walz moving to the national stage, will he bring lessons from the North Star State? The Biden-Harris Administration (including the leadership of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) and the Pelosi-Schumer session of Congress made the biggest federal strides on transportation in generations, with their Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act (IIJA), also referred to as the "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law." The IIJA has provided billions in federal dollars for worthy projects across the nation. The only demerit to the IIJA is that, unlike Minnesota's bill, it contained very little policy change, so it continues to give license to state and local governments to continue wasting federal money on unworthy projects like urban highway widening as well, without any accountability for the negative social or economic or environmental outcomes.

When it comes time to renew the IIJA in a few years, the next Congress and next Administration could learn from Minnesota's approach: don't simply provide more money for transportation without also requiring that the money be well spent. Insist on documented outcomes like emissions reductions, and more mobility for all people, not just more pavement for more cars. Perhaps a simple Minnesota-like stipulation could be part of that future bill: "no federal funds to be spent on projects that are not Nice." Perhaps in that future year a former Governor of Minnesota will be presiding over the Senate as Vice President, and could suggest some common sense language for such an amendment.

Wouldn't that be a good North Star to follow?