Metropolitan Council Mishandles Taxpayer Money on Train Project Going Nowhere

Minnesota’s Metropolitan Council already doesn’t have the best reputation, but a recently released report on the status of the Southwest Light Rail is just embarrassing.

The original budget for the transit line was $2 billion and it was projected to be completed in 2023. Now the Met Council estimates that it will cost $2.767 billion and will not open until 2027! How can this massive project be so off the rails? Taxpayers are now on the hook for the additional $767 million that the project will cost!

The report sheds some light on the blatant mismanagement of this project. According to the report, “The Metropolitan Council did not hold the civil construction contractor accountable for requirements in its contract…” and also the Met Council “settled change order costs while allowing potential schedule delays to remain unsolved.” What a disaster!

The report recommends that “The Metropolitan Council should require its contractors to meet contractual obligations related to change orders and ensure contracts include adequate language to hold contractors accountable for change order requirements.” Well duh!

Under the Met Council’s mismanagement, Contractors would be hired, not do their job, and then would still get paid for it.

The Metro Council wasn’t completely unaware, because the report mentions enacting enforcement in the case that contractors don’t fulfill their end of the bargain. That means even if the council was aware that contractors weren’t following the agreement, they seemingly did nothing about it.

How could this have happened? We have no real way of knowing because the Metro Council also didn’t keep a record of exactly what they were doing. “The Metropolitan Council should improve its documentation practices regarding nonconformance reports and related deduction amounts,” the report stated.

To recap: Contractors were getting paid for not doing work, there was nothing the Council did to ensure that contractors would do their jobs, and the Council kept ridiculously poor documentation of what they were doing.

The Metropolitan Council has a lot of questions to answer. Especially since their actions have not cost taxpayers an additional $767 million more than the light rail project originally called for.