True North

Thanks to Bill Kuisle's email this morning, I found out that the Senate's bonding bill is stuffed full of transit bonding requests. First, let's keep in mind that the total Senate Bonding Bill is approximately $965 million. For all their talk about putting a priority on roads & bridges, there's an awful lot of transit projects & pork projects that they're requesting funding for. Here's an illustration:

Subd. 3.Urban Partnership Agreement $9,000,000

Here's the description of this line item:

From the general fund for expenses related to technology improvements, telecommuting, and outreach efforts for the Urban Partnership Agreement. This appropriation is not available until the United States Department of Transportation authorizes funding under the Urban Partnership Agreement. This appropriation is onetime and is available until June 30, 2011.

Here's another spending request & description:

Subd. 4.Greater Minnesota Transit $2,000,000

For capital assistance for greater Minnesota transit systems to be used for transit capital facilities under Minnesota Statutes, section 40.4174.24, subdivision 3c. Money from this appropriation may be used to pay up to 80 percent of the nonfederal share of these facilities.

Section 15 of the Senate Bonding Bill is titled Transportation. The total amount of money requested for Transportation is $21.5 million. By comparison, Section 16 of the Senate Bonding Bill is titled Metropolitan Council. Their request is for $136,620,000.

Of that total, the Urban Partnership Agreement (remember them?) gets $20,675,000.

The Bottineau Boulevard Transit Way is slated to get $500,000.

The Cedar Avenue Bus Rapid Transit is requesting $6,000,000 to "acquire land, or an interest in land, and to design the Cedar Avenue Bus Rapid Transit in Dakota County.

The Central Corridor Transit Way is requesting $70,000,000 "For one or more of the following activities for the Central Corridor light rail transit line that will connect downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul: preliminary engineering, final design, property acquisition, including improvements and betterments of a capital nature, relocation of utilities owned by public entities, and construction. No more than $20,000,000 of the appropriation may be used for preliminary engineering."

It gets interesting from there, starting with $750K for the I-94 Corridor Transit Way, $500K each for the I-494 Corridor Transit Way, the Red Rock Corridor Transit Way, Robert Street Corridor Transit Way, Rush Line Corridor Transit Way & $1 million for the Union Depot.

I'll bet that people will be upset to hear that they're considering spending $11 million on Como Zoo Gorilla Exhibits. Excuse me??? They want to spend $11 million to "construct, furnish, and equip Phase 2 renovation of the polar bear and gorilla exhibits at the Como Zoo" when we're running a $1 billion deficit??? This is proof positive that prioritize is a 4-letter word in the DFL's dictionary.

Bemidji is requesting $22,000,000 to "acquire land, predesign, design, construct, furnish, and equip" the Bemidji Regional Event Center "to be located within the core of downtown Bemidji."

Folks, I've been through Bemidji. It's a beautiful place to vacation but, at best, this Regional Event Center will attract tourists by the dozens. This is the ultimate in pork, in my estimation.

This is Minnesota's equivalent of the Bridge to Nowhere.

Another $15.5 million total is being requested for Orchestra Hall, Shubert Performing Arts and Education Center, the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester & something called the Asian Pacific Cultural Center.

When I added these things together, I found that the DFL is perfectly willing to saddle our chjildren with $153+ millions worth of pork & transit projects. Remember that this is the DFL that chastized the GOP for saying that we shouldn't saddle our children by bonding for roads & bridge repair.

King & I have been saying for at least a month that not bonding for road didn't have anything to do with not burdening our children with debt, that it had everything to do with the DFL wanting to use the bonding bill to pay off their political allies.

This list of items proves that point.

Comments welcome at LFR.