Last summer, TCB exclusively revealed that the Met Council’s Green Line extension (Southwest) light rail project to Eden Prairie was mired in delays that would cost the project years and hundreds of millions of dollars. After stonewalling for more than a year about details, this week the public agency came clean about the extent of the problems.
“The length of the delay and the excess cost was surprising even to me,” said Minnesota House Transportation Chair Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis), who represents the beleaguered portion of the line and has been a project gadfly for a decade. “It exposes a lot of problems.”
The excess cost and delays have multiple causes, but the primary source of both is a short tunnel near Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, designed to thread a pinch point in the right of way. The corridor needs to accommodate Twin Cities & Western’s handful of weekly freight trains, a major regional bike corridor, and LRT. Significant water intrusion in the swampy soils have required the addition of retaining walls and delayed tunnel construction; it will add four to five years to the construction timetable.
“We haven’t done enough of these projects to know what we don’t know,” said Hennepin County Commissioner Debbie Goettel, referencing the failure to anticipate the water problems. Goettel is a civil engineer who sits on the Met Council committee that approves change orders to the project and represents the southwest portion of the line. She notes the contractors and consultants the Met Council hired also failed to foresee the extent of the problems, though ironically, project opponents in the neighborhoods adjacent to the tunnel were warning of them for years.
Hornstein traces the current situation to a decision to co-locate freight, bikes, and transit in the narrow corridor, rather than requiring the freight railroad to use a different route through St. Louis Park identified by an engineering consultant hired by the public agencies. The county owns the Kenilworth right of way and TC&W is a tenant. “That was the decision that brought on these other problems,” he said. “It was a cascading series of bad decisions after that.”
Goettel is skeptical there was a better route. Hennepin County, which chose the route, and the Met Council, which manages construction, did not face simple choices. Evicting TC&W was a risky venture sure to be challenged in federal court, due to the railroad’s statutory protections as an interstate carrier. Alternate routes down Hennepin Avenue or Nicollet/Midtown Greenway were fraught with neighborhood opposition and logistical hurdles. A decade ago, Kenilworth looked simplest.
“I wanted them to challenge the freight railroad,” says Hornstein. “Their zeal to avoid complexity and delay brought them complexity and delay.”
Despite calls from some critics to suspend construction, it is unrealistic to expect the extension, now 62 percent built, with a majority of costs already absorbed, to be abandoned: a billion in federal matching funds would need to be returned to Washington; partially built stations, bridges, and freeway flyovers would need to be demolished; several dozen multi-million dollar railcars sitting at Metro Transit’s car barn would need to be disposed of.
Still, difficult questions remain around how the line will be completed.
Hornstein asked the Legislative Auditor to probe SWLRT last summer. The auditor’s office declined, citing lack of staff and funds, but did issue a request for information from the Met Council that exposed a dispute between it and its federally required oversight consultant, AECOM Technical Services (ATS). ATS had alerted project management, beginning in 2019, that its lack of expertise in key areas was resulting in overcharging by contractors, acceptance of unnecessary delay, and shoddy construction practices.
The SWLRT project office denied the accusations, claiming ATS didn’t understand the real-world nature of the construction or specific site constraints.
The auditor indicated that a full-fledged audit would require dedicated funding from the legislature, and Hornstein says he has bipartisan support for that in the current session. Beyond noise, it’s unclear what the legislature’s leverage is, given it is only providing roughly 1 percent of the project’s funding, though Hornstein suggested that an audit could drive a consensus on reforming the Met Council, making it an elected rather than appointed body, something long opposed by the state’s DFL establishment.
Then there is the question of the $700 million in added costs to finish the line. $200 million will exhaust the project’s contingency fund, and a half billion dollars remains to be sourced. Hornstein suggests no help is coming from St. Paul. “The legislature declined to fund this line once. I sincerely doubt their attitude on it has changed with the current news,” he said. Hornstein added that Biden administration infrastructure dollars, a possible option, require a local match.
One way or the other, it’s hard not to see Hennepin County taxpayers being on the hook for a substantial portion of the overrun, though Goettel is still hoping “all the partners will come together” in search of a grand bargain. Hennepin County Commissioner Marion Greene, during the Met Council committee meeting authorizing use of the remaining contingency dollars, assured constituents that they would not bear the full cost of the overruns.
The Met Council has hired additional consultants to work with its civil construction contractor on disputes related to change orders and cost overruns. Goettel hopes the parties can work together to shave months off the bloated construction timetable.
Site clearing for SWLRT began in 2018, in the same Kenilworth Corridor where tunnel construction will extend into 2025 or 2026. When the line opens in 2027, its build-out and testing will have occupied most of 10 years, an outcome that would have seemed absurd to those who conceived of and planned the line nearly a generation ago.
And who is actually going to want to take this train?
Who will be working downtown?
Besides some sporting and entertainment events, who will be going down there?
Have you been downtown lately? It’s not back up to pre-COVID levels but there’s plenty of people working downtown during the day.
Who knows?? That seems the answer to no final date of completion and 700 million over budget. If they are admitting to 700 million over budget, who knows the real cost? Only with tax dollars can you have a boondoggle like this without folks being fired. A date to be finished, who knows??
What a mess and nobody accountable. How about a few well placed soil borings and some contracts with language that shifted the risk/burden away from the taxpayers. I guess when it is all monopoly money nobody cares. This will be a train to nowhere, just like all the transit focus about bring people downtown (ghosttown).
I’ve traveled on mass transit systems in many American and European cities where mass transit is critically needed; population density is high and traffic congestion from additional vehicles would overwhelm urban streets and even the highways. But Minnesota – specifically the Twin Cities metro – is very different from those areas. The only geographic barrier to sprawl is the St. Croix River which has been easily bridged over. And the potential ridership for our light rail lines has significantly and permanently declined because of work-at-home options for most office workers, and also because of crime in downtown Minneapolis. And topping off the negatives, most people here fear the crime and various disgusting acts that occur all too frequently on light rail. Don’t kill the messenger: that’s the reality of how people perceive – accurately – the state of light rail in the metro.
I confess to not having an opinion yet on whether the Southwest line should be completed. I’d like to see what the long term costs to taxpayers will be: capital costs to complete the line plus annual operating costs compared to a realistic projection of fare revenues. My gut feeling isn’t optimistic: this project has the makings of one of the all-time biggest boondoggles in American history.
its really wierd the author of this article just wrote another completely related article about the new discovery of cracks in the condo building they were butting up next to0 – how can this, yet another risk, not be covered in this article too? – not just the risk to the buildings, but potential delays to address again the mitigations they are taking to protect them, as well as potential costs to repair the damage – which residents warned about, and Mpls politicians in St paul tried to get into the project but were overruled by Gov Dayton… https://tcbmag.com/more-cracks-in-swlrts-alignment/
Why should anyone be surprised at this juncture, when the existing portion of the Green Line was also badly compromised by politicians’ dreams of using mass transit projects to promote development, and when neither politicians nor planners seem to recognize the fundamental and proper difference between a train and a streetcar line?
Is it possible to change the project so they don’t need the tunnel? Could the fright and light rail fit in the corridor? I live in the area and bike there all the time so I’d miss it but there are other routes for bikes and if they improve those routes I don’t think a lot would be lost.
After reading this my thoughts were similar. How can any tunnel take an additional 3-4 years when you have an unlimited budget. Let’s be real they will pay whatever it takes to complete this mess. Rip the bandage off and force this to be completed to save us all further public embarrassment.
When will issues of the next stop after 21st Street be addressed? My understanding is that the next stop is where the Minneapolis Impound Lot currently sits. Is that true? If yes, has anyone started to consider the time and expense of clearing that toxic site?
The flaws in this project were 100% predicted but those who supported it simply didn’t care. The engineering/cost issues aren’t nearly the biggest issues, however. Covid has pushed companies into remote working and many will never go back fully. A lot of standard white-collar job openings (many from large companies) are being advertised as remote or hybrid and encourage nationwide applicants. That is a clear sign that the M-F workdays will never be the same and neither will downtowns.
Inflexible transit systems designed for high-capacity point-to-point travel are simply bad designs. The money would have been better spent dealing with electrification and green energy sources.
I realize we are stuck in this mess, but all this bad news is further proof this route was always a bad idea. Even before COVID changed the world, there was always more benefit of Minneapolis residents using this route to commute out of the city for jobs (which is not a bad thing). Minnetonka/Eden Prairie residents were always more likely to use cars, or at least drive to a park-and-ride and use an express bus, than to commute by train into downtown Minneapolis. I’ve said it before I stand by it … a light rail route into the northwestern burbs would have been a better idea. A NWLRT line could have initially connected to Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, with an eventual connecting track to Maple Grove.
So now they ask questions? When do some of us get to say, told you so? They should have focused on the northern part of the twin cities for LRT and then increased buses in the SW area. Go where the high density, people needing transit were. And yet who will be held accountable for this mess? Or at least use an area where you don’t destroy a lake to build it.
I live at the junction of Nicollet & the Greenway. Using the Greenway would have served a lot more people and saved construction costs and lessened interference with ground-level traffic since it’s a former railroad corridor that is below ground. Despite the construction mess to my own neighborhood this route made so much more sense than any other. Typical of Light Rail – if they can’t do it right they do it anyway – ooh! Free Federal Money!!! The Hiawatha line should have been elevated and the University line should have been in the original corridor a few blocks north of University. One-dimensional thinking & massive fiscal irresponsibility that serves carpetbagger developers and hurts small business have been the name of the game for too long. Those responsible need to be publicly held accountable – any and all civil & criminal charges should be pursued. I think it’s high time for a property tax strike and the various levels of gov’t can scramble and starve until they substantially curb their budgets. Let’s force them to make some hard choices, learn to ask taxpayers’ permission and be held accountable like we all have to. There have to be serious consequences or this travesty will continue unabated forever.