Early indications are that the new Metropolitan Council — all 17 members appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton — will cut a higher profile than the last group, and will get more directly engaged in questions of regional competitiveness, economic development and maybe even stadium location. Steve Elkins stepped away from his longtime post on the Bloomington City Council to take a seat on the Met Council, where he heads the transportation committee. Elkins shared these thoughts over breakfast recently. Here's an edited version of our conversation:

MinnPost: How different will this council be from the last one?

Steve Elkins: I'm surrounded by really smart people who believe in the council's mission. Not everyone on the last council believed the council is a good idea. Another big change is that Peter Bell was almost the sole face of the council. I think he did an amazing job, given the circumstance. But under the new chair, Sue Haigh, members of this council are getting out far more into their communities and getting engaged in the issues.

MP: Bell directed the last council to — in his words — stick to its knitting; that is, to maintain a sharp separation between operating transit and recognizing the economic-development potential that transit can bring. Will that change?

SE: I think it will. Personally, I believe that maintaining these silos is one of our biggest problems as a region. Across the country there is growing recognition that there's no real separation between transportation and land use.

MP: How has that separation hurt our region?

SE: We've been slow to take economic advantage of our transit investments. We're now seeing some good redevelopment along the Hiawatha line, but even considering the recession it has been slow to come. We hope that with Central's construction, we'll see more concurrent development. The sooner we get a high-quality, higher-density project that people can admire, the more projects we'll see. And that, in turn, will bring more ridership and reduce the subsidy per ride. The idea is better ridership, more efficiency and faster growth in the tax base and the economy.

MP: Yet there's resistance from neighbors who don't want change, even in low-income urban neighborhoods.

Steve Elkins

SE: It's an interesting wrinkle. Usually you'd expect resistance from the stereotypical white suburban neighborhood fearing that new development would being "those people" moving in. In this case it's the opposite: People of color in St. Paul resisting development for fear that white people would gentrify their neighborhood. My colleague Gary Cunningham [he chairs the council's economic development committee] and I have been looking at examples from around the country. In Portland, for example, the whole region has become less segregated and more diverse while the downtown, with all its transit investments, has become whiter and more upscale. So, we do have to acknowledge that there's a premium attached to living near a transit station. The question is how to maintain affordability over time.

MP: There were shades of that during Hiawatha's construction — neighbors rising up against any change that might bring wealth to their areas.

SE: I remember a meeting early on when I asked then Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton what the city was prepared to do to take advantage of the line, and she looked me in the eye and said the city wasn't going to do a damn thing to change the character of these neighborhoods. But in general, these things are less scary than they used to be. People see developments like Excelsior and Grand in St. Louis Park and they say, 'How can we get one of those?'

MP: Many transit agencies around the country have real-estate offices. Is that a good thing?

SE: Well, historically, the owners of bus and trolley lines were developers. You look around and see the legacy of that: Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Uptown, 50th and France, Linden Hills. These areas were streetcar neighborhoods that have stood the test of time. Now we're trying to do a second generation of these. It's hard for a lot of communities because we don't have the historic examples. In Bloomington, we don't have the iconic gas stations from the atomic age, or a lot of places like the old Thunderbird Hotel. We do have two important historic remnants: our park system and our stock of ranch houses. We thought the next generation of young families would be cycling into these houses, but it turns out they're great for empty-nesters wanting single-level living. So people from Farmington and Lakeville who want to live closer in are buying these homes. The trend would be stronger if the housing market were healthier.

MP: The rental market has been picking up, however.

SE: Bloomington estimates that between 600 and 1,000 rental units will be under construction this year — a mix of market rate and senior. Most of the projects moving forward are within walking distance of commercial centers or transit. So maybe the lending community is beginning to see the market in a different way. And communities are figuring it out. Bloomington has a whole series of zoning ordinances that encouraged mixed use. We figured out a lot of things when we blew the reconstruction of Old Shakopee and France. We let the traffic engineers go crazy with extra turn lanes and a wider intersection when what we needed was a calmer, narrower intersection. We need to get planners and engineers to sit down together and figure out how to make neighborhoods work.

MP: Some suggest an inventory of all metro cities to discover which ordinances make it impossible to build the kind of places that will be loved and admired. Some, like Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, suggest a more unified zoning and permitting system. That hasn't been well received by suburbs because suburbs understand the advantage that they have over the central cities and don't want to lose it.

SE: It's widely perceived by developers that Minneapolis' process is just Byzantine, so why bother? In Bloomington, we have a design review meeting where all departments are present. It's easy for developers; one-stop shopping. Maybe the Met Council could become a clearinghouse for all the best ideas and best practices. Cities could choose to follow them if they wanted.

MP: The automobile takes up so much room — both physically and psychologically — and that makes it extremely difficult to retrofit communities to accommodate anything but a driving lifestyle. It's hard for people to imagine re-creating the traditional town form.

SE: Even something so simple as turning an underused four-lane street into a three-lane, with a turning lane in the middle and bike lanes along the side. It's not a big expense. All it takes is paint. You cut your accident rate by one-third and make your neighborhood more livable. But you'd be surprised at the resistance.

MP: There's a lot of talk about locating new housing near transit but almost no talk about locating jobs. Our region isn't very good at efficient job location. One example is that the LRT stations in downtown Minneapolis are surrounded by surface parking lots instead of office buildings. The incentive is actually to locate jobs away from transit choices. What can the council do about that?

SE: There's more employment now along the 494 strip than downtown, but it's all strung out. I read recently that only 30 percent of jobs in the metro region were accessible by transit. So people have very little choice about how to get to work. I think we have to work at connecting some of these suburban areas. Personal Rapid Transit, for example, may not work in the downtowns, but it might work in a place like 494.

As far as getting employers to behave differently, I don't know what to do about that. It's basic economic forces that are pricing jobs out of developed areas. Maybe we need to reform the property-tax system to maker it harder for speculators to just sit on land for 30 years, pay low taxes on surface lots and wait for somebody to offer them an outrageous amount for the property. Target Field was the most extreme situation. Speculators sat on that land and did nothing to improve it while to public invested in freeways, parking garages and transit. Then, thanks to the public, they sold the land for a windfall to get the ballpark built. That bothered me a lot.

MP: You see some of that with the new Vikings stadium proposal in Arden Hills, where the public is being asked to pay extra for infrastructure that's not yet there to enhance the profitability of an enterprise that's fleeing an area where the public infrastructure is already in place.

SE: The legislation will probably exempt the project from the council's metropolitian significance review, but any major road project would require a change in the council's policy plan, so there will be other opportunities to look at this.