Shot in the Dark

The Money Pit

So the Southwest Light Rail – already estimated at an insane two billion dollars – is going to go 40% over budget, and 3-4 years late.

Cost overruns and delays have pushed the most expensive public works project in state history well above its original $2 billion budget. Last year, Met Council tapped a $200 million contingency fund from Hennepin County taxpayers, which is now mostly committed. The council has been unable to give an updated cost estimate for months.

“These changes have impacted both the time required [for Lunda McCrossan] to complete its work and the costs under the civil construction contract,” Metro Transit General Manager Wes Kooistra and project managers wrote in a memo to council members. “These changes will also delay the systems contractor, the start of revenue operations, and result in additional costs.”

Many of the changes are due to posh Kenwood NIMBYs who support light rail, but not in their backyards, forcing the line into a ruinously expensive tunnel. That tunnel – which should be called the “Met Council Provides Concierge Service To Posh Neighborhoods With DFL Clout” tunnel, although the plaques over the galleries would probably add another $50 Million – has been a known issue for long enough that it’s already been memory-holed from the Met Council narrative.

They don’t consider themselves NIMBYs, naturally:

“They called us NIMBYs, rich people who just wanted not to be bothered,” says Mary Pattock, former chair of the Cedar Isles Dean neighborhood board and longtime critic of the LRT routing. Echoing Rep. Hornstein, she says, “we told them the geology between the lakes was messy. We told them there was not room to build a tunnel safely. We told them you are going to run into problems you are not going to be able to solve. Now it’s all coming true.”

Of course, the fact that they’re building a tunnel to carry the train under the neighborhood is because of NIMBYism on the part of the whole, well-to-do, clout-enabled neighborhood.

“750 million over budget” is in today’s dollars, by the way. My fearless prediction: by the time the first train takes the first armed robber from Target Center to Eden Prairie, this train will have cost $3.2 Billion to build. I’m making a note to check on this in 2026. I’m feeling confident.

I’ll be talking with Senator Dave Osmek about this on the show tomorrow.

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Mitch Berg

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17 responses to “The Money Pit”

  1. FRESCHFISCH Avatar
    FRESCHFISCH

    And possibly messing with the natural seal of the lakes. Something that probably can’t be fixed.

    But the train must go on. Damn to the naysayers.

  2. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Just imagine if a private enterprise was in charge of this project. But when money grows on trees… sorry, when money can be stolen from the taxpayer pocket to appease the urbanite nimby social justice eurocrat wannabee libturds who will never step foot into an LRT, it does not matter. Happy to pay for better MN indeed. Suckers.

  3. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Fresch, what does “the natural seal of the lakes” mean? I’m not casting doubt, I’ve just never heard the term.

  4. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    ^ I’m sure Angela Merkel knows what Fresh is referring to. ;^)

    This reminds me of the DMV debacle. The only difference is, this train will probably work. Although, it will exacerbate crime if the other lines are any judge.

  5. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    JDM, a puddle forms on the sidewalk when water flows into a low spot and can’t soak into the cement. A lake is a big puddle. There’s mud on the bottom of a lake from decayed vegetable matter but below the mud is a layer of rock. If the volume of water flowing into the low spot is greater than the volume of water evaporating/seeping through the rock bed into the aquifer below, then the lake retains water. If the volume of water leaving the lake is greater than inflow (drought), the lake loses water, the shoreline recedes, people extend their docks.

    There’s a theory that certain public works projects can ‘break the natural seal’ of a lake, causing water to drain out of the bottom. If the city digs a new well and pumps water out of the aquifer, that reduces water pressure under the rock which makes seepage occur faster. If the city digs a tunnel under the lake, same result.

    Of course, there are lots of tunnels under water that don’t leak (the English Channel being an excellent example). But any idea which “stands to reason” is hard to shake. The controversy over water levels in White Bear Lake is an example.

    I express no opinion whether breaking the seal is a real thing, or whether the Southwest Line will drain the nearby lakes. This project reminds me less of the DMV debacle (incompetent state employees) and more of the I-35E ‘practice freeway’ debacle. Money talks.

  6. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    ^ Pretty fair analysis regarding “Lake seal”.

    Wasn’t there a point in time where the Met Council and County had the opportunity to route the single track freight line back to the 29th St ditch (Greenway) — where it had been for 70 years until yr 2000 — everyone would have walked away happy. To this day, there is still space for it with minimal realignment. But the transit planners refused to budge. They were absolutely certain the Cedar Lake alignment and tunnel would be a piece of cake.

  7. FRESCHFISCH Avatar
    FRESCHFISCH

    I was told as a kid 50 years ago that lakes have a natural seal.

    When they built 35w from 494 to 62 right by Wood Lake in Richfield, Wood Lake, well, was actually a lake.

    The construction messed with some natural seal. It once was more of a real lake and now is more of a marsh. Over my 50+ years of going there it’s gets smaller every year.

    I’m no Lake Detective, but that’s what I was told.

  8. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Thanks, guys. I kinda figured but it’s nice to know for sure. Interesting about Wood Lake.

  9. Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenesis

    Mass transit buses cost about $500,000.
    3.2 billion $ would buy 6,400 of these buses.
    Buses are always cheaper than light rail, and they have another economic advantage over rail. When transit patterns change, bus routes can be changed, buses can be easily taken offline or added.
    Most city planners love them some light rail because most city planners are Stalinists. They know that their city planning utopias can only come true if they can control the decisions people make about where they should live, work, and play. If the people are too fat, you force the movie theaters to become roller rinks, and so on.

  10. Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenesis

    Let me explain that last sentence. You and I know that if a person normally goes to the movies a few nights each month and parks himself in a chair and consumes a tub of buttery popcorn and a liter of sugary soda, if that person was dropped off in front of a roller rink instead of a theater he wouldn’t run in, rent some skates, and get a few hours of exercise.
    City planners do not believe this. The reason intelligent people go to university and choose to specialize in urban planning is not because they are especially good at urban planing, but because they want to be urban planners..

  11. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    blatant threadjack, remove as you wish:

    2,000 Mules, The Background of the 2020 Election Fraud

    Move along sheople, nothing to see here, it is all just a part of a Big Lie™.

  12. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Regarding the notion of private enterprise doing this project, I’m guessing they wouldn’t for the exact same reasons the public enterprise version is a debacle. Rail goes in beautifully when there is a “dead zone” for development–that’s really the story of all the great railroads in the country–but when you’ve got buildings in the way, it starts to get very, very expensive. That’s why Chicago is such a roadblock for commerce–it needs a new way around the city, but people already live there.

    Really, the big problem we have is the same one I remember as a kid in the 1970s. The environmental left is all agog over the fact that steel on steel has lower rolling resistance than rubber on concrete or asphalt, and because of that preconception, they don’t look at the data which have shown that buses are more efficient than rail because their weight is about half to a third that of a railcar. They certainly aren’t calculating the carbon budget of all the concrete and steel that’s needed for tunnels, sleepers, rails, and the like.

    Really, what the public sector needs is politicians who will say “it’s way past time for you guys to start listening to the accountants and actuaries when they say that your ROI is way too low, even negative.”

  13. Blade Nzimande Avatar
    Blade Nzimande

    I saw a comment that broke the actual cost of this disaster down into the fine detail even 80 IQ nitwits can understand.

    If the cost didn’t go up another dollar from here (lol), that new rail line will have cost y’all $3,000 an inch.

  14. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    Light Rail is 20th Century Progressives trying to solve 21st Century Problems, using 19th Century technology.

  15. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    If the NIMBY tunnel breaks a lake seal and either Lake Calhoun, Lake Of the Isles, or Cedar Lake start receding, my schadenfreudisch cackling will be heard statewide.

  16. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    One other thing; the year I learned, much to my shock, that buses were more efficient than trains for hauling people was…..1981, and I’m sure that people (say the nice people at “Greyhound” for example) around the country knew very well of the inefficiencies of rail travel for a long, long time.

    I once tried to figure out how to make a train more efficient, and what I settled on was a wider gauge to allow the carriage to be lighter, a propulsion system in each carriage…..and I realized that I was in effect putting a bus on rails. After 50 years of Amtrak, it’s about time for transportation officials to figure this out. The only real advantage of rail is that you can have amenities on a ten carriage train that you cannot on a bus.

  17. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    One other note about transit; you saw that bridge that collapsed in Pennsylvania? Well, it had a 26 ton limit, and on the bridge as it collapsed was a dual carriage bus….

    ….that I’d guess weighed in at at least 30 tons. Now you “should” have enough robustness to endure that, but that struck me as “rather odd”, to put it mildly. Transit officials don’t seem to do the best engineering, from “light” rail to buses to electric buses to…..

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