A recent MinnPost article debates the future of the Metropolitan Council, primarily considering two structural changes: the direct election of Met Council members and breaking off Metro Transit to an independent agency.
The discussion began at the Metropolitan Governance Task Force, a legislative oversight commission in response to the rocky development process of the Green Line Extension Light Rail Project. This commission’s role is to reevaluate the Met Council, considering the direct election of council members, and now, making Metro Transit an independent agency.
However, the discussion fails to answer an important question: Why would (or wouldn’t) the creation of an independent Metro Transit improve governance and project outcomes?
To answer this question, it is important to situate the Met Council in context and history. The Met Council was created in 1967 as a response to emerging issues created by rapid development across the region. The goal of the council was to coordinate orderly economic development and to provide regional services.
These responsibilities were further expanded by the 1976 Metropolitan Land Planning Act, which requires the Met Council to create comprehensive regional plans and specific systems plans for transportation, wastewater and other regional systems. Metro Transit was created and added to the Met Council’s responsibilities in 1994, which has remained the region’s primary transit operator.
The Met Council’s distinct approach
At its core, the Met Council was created as an experiment in American urban governance, guiding the region in tackling cross-boundary and regional issues and systems. Urban life, economic systems and political links extend beyond the arbitrary boundaries of municipalities and counties. Maintaining mobility and economic opportunity across these spaces ensures residents’ personal mobility, accessibility of goods and services, and broader economic development in the Twin Cities region.
These aspirations are far beyond the scope of other Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and cities mentioned in the discussion, such as Denver, which has a separate governing body for transit. Portland, Oregon’s, Metro Council, the nation’s only similar regional government, is not a transit operator, making the Met Council a truly unique form of governance.
As mentioned in the article, several members of the task force cited the fact that they prefer separating the Met Council and Metro Transit because this structure is far more common in other regions. This ignores Minnesota’s vision for the Met Council as a distinct approach for reimagining the way we manage regional systems and services.
The Metropolitan Governance Task Force’s idea to separate Metro Transit and the Met Council began out of the controversy surrounding the development of the Green Line Extension, a light rail project connecting Minneapolis and Eden Prairie. However, simply changing the agency constructing and operating the projects will not produce better outcomes unless there are intentional efforts to reevaluate how we plan projects, calculate risk and coordinate competing priorities across scales of government and private contractors.
As identified in a 2022 Legislative Audit Office report on the budget and timeline of the Green Line Extension, a series of design changes led to huge cost overruns and delays. Colocating the Green Line Extension with a freight rail line in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park left the project no choice but to construct a complicated and expensive tunnel project along the Kenilworth corridor in Minneapolis. Combined with the construction of a barrier wall between the freight and light rail line and adding the Eden Prairie Town Center Station back into the project’s plan, these design changes further delayed the project and increased the budget.
Beyond planning changes, the Met Council seriously mismanaged contractors, mainly the civil construction contractor and the design and engineering contractor, a Lunda-McCrossan Joint Venture and AECOM respectively. A 2023 Legislative Audit report found that the council failed to enforce key areas of their contracts, such as schedule and cost, partly due to the lack of oversight and because their initial contract did not provide adequate enforcement mechanisms.
With AECOM, the issues were equally pervasive. AECOM held two different roles on the project, engineer and designer and the primary cost estimator, who evaluates project costs. As identified in a peer review, MnDOT stated that they do not allow this to occur on their own projects as this practice can present a conflict of interest.
Learning from management mistakes
We should significantly expand oversight on the Met Council’s transportation development and build more internal capacity to plan, develop and manage these projects, both within and across agencies. Creating more internal capacity to engineer and design these projects at the council and at Metro Transit will reduce the costly reliance on consultants and create more internal capacity in transit development, a common need in American transit agencies. Making other common-sense changes to allow for better enforcement of contracts and management of contractors will also improve project outcomes.
Failure matters in developing effective governance. Learning from management mistakes that plagued the Green Line Extension must be leveraged to improve existing governance structures and avoid these issues on future projects. An independent Metro Transit that does not explicitly address these challenges will not improve outcomes. Instead, this would serve only to create more fragmentation across agencies and more opportunities for misalignment in executing future projects.
Joe Harrington is a student and writer in St. Paul who focuses on urban geography, transportation and environmental policy.
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