Shannon Fiecke of the Shakopee Valley News reports:

When it comes time for Shakopee and Prior Lake to build a second transit station for their express bus service to downtown Minneapolis, the cities were expecting to receive funding from the Metropolitan Council to buy the land.

The Met Council agreed to put up bonding dollars when the property was estimated to cost $1.2 million to acquire. But now that the site — located along the future county roads 21 and 16 intersection — will be leased from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota Community (at a fraction of the cost), the council has changed its mind.

This doesn’t make much sense to local officials, who included the issue in a four-page list of grievances aired Friday morning in a special meeting with Peter Bell, the chair of the Met Council.

While local leaders are grateful for the Met Council’s help in park acquisition and a new express bus service, they maintain that Scott County still isn’t receiving the attention it deserves for mass transit or Highway 169, despite the thoroughfare’s local significance and No. 2 status in the state for commercial traffic.

Referring to a map showing areas being studied for future high-speed transit, Prior Lake Mayor Jack Haugen asked why Scott County can’t even get a “dotted line.”

A feeling persists by some as if local cities are still “out there,” he said.

While Interstate Highway 35W and Highway 77 are getting a high-speed bus-line called Bus Rapid Transit, Highway 169 can’t even be considered for such a service because the Met Council hasn’t labeled the highway as a tier-one transit corridor, Scott County Commissioner Jon Ulrich of Savage said.

Scott County declined to implement a special regional sales tax for transit improvements because it thought all the dollars would go to larger projects in other communities.

Local officials also resent that while Shakopee, Savage and Prior Lake paid into a metro transit taxing district for years with little return for express bus service, Lakeville got major transit and highway investments as soon as it joined.

Bell called this a “fair complaint” and said he supports expanding the taxing district throughout the seven-county metropolitan area. The governor is open to talks on this, he said, so long as the total levy collected doesn’t increase.

Right now, being part of the district is voluntarily, which means communities must be enticed to join, Bell said.

Lakeville likely wouldn’t have come into the district had the state not received special federal funding to address congestion along I-35W and the Cedar Avenue corridor, the Met Council maintains.

Met Council representatives said they’ve supported Scott County on some key projects: Pressuring the Federal Highway Administration to accept a re-scoped plan for the 494/169 interchange and sponsoring state legislation to lift the ban on studying the Dan Patch corridor for possible commuter rail. (Neither of these efforts has succeeded so far.)

Bell said he’d like to widen the types of projects that are eligible for transit sales tax funding, but he’s just one voice on the board that distributes the funding. The opposing argument is major projects like rail won’t happen if less expensive ones qualify.

Scott County didn’t raise the sales tax here because officials thought its express bus service wouldn’t qualify as a “transitway,” unlike rail or perhaps bus rapid transit.

With the state’s new focus on smaller scale and preservation-type road projects, officials here point out that Scott County is still growing with a “skeletal principal arterial system that is subject to identified current bottlenecks.”

Another sore spot is the delay in receiving buses for BlueXpress. The Met Council has a new policy requiring local governments to order their buses through it.

Although BlueXpress received a special grant to purchase a reverse-commute bus, it’s still on order through the Met Council, leaving patrons here standing.

Furthermore, the Met Council won’t provide BlueXpress more funding for additional transit buses until ridership increases — a chicken-or-egg type situation.

BlueXPress can’t bring in more riders without more buses and operating dollars, Shakopee city Councilor Steve Clay pointed out in a meeting last week.

“Only in government!” he surmised.

PLANNING

The Met Council is also criticized for not making long-range transportation plans or supporting the county’s attempts to do so, while yet telling local communities they will take on more residents in the future and add a wastewater treatment plant near Jordan.

“If the region expects to grow in places like Scott County where the regional system is skeletal, it has a responsibility to plan for the future needs of the region,” the letter from the Scott County Association for Leadership and Efficiency said. “Lack of planning will result in costly retrofits not dissimilar to what needs to be done today on the beltway and other principal arterials (e.g. the cross-town, unweave the weave, devil’s triangle.)”

The Met Council doesn’t want to be falsely seen as making infrastructure promises, Bell said: “We can’t endorse something we can’t fund.”

The council is required by law to have a fiscally-controlled transportation plan, Bell said, but added that it could consider mentioning projects that could be done if additional dollars were available.

Council staff similarly blamed state law for not being able to fund land for the second park-and-ride transit site in Shakopee due to the property being leased from the tribe.

Scott County’s transportation director, Lisa Freese, thinks the property should qualify because it isn’t being leased from a private owner, but is owned by another government entity.

Council staff said they will check more into this.

Local governments also mentioned that while the state and Met Council invested heavily in transit facilities with the construction of the new Highway 212, these types of facilities weren’t constructed with Highway 169.

“Highway 169’s volumes and congestion issues are currently more significant than Highway 312,” the letter says. “[A] potential site at County Road 17 and Highway 169 could be utilized today for express and dial-a-ride transit.”

Not all the words from Scott County were negative, however.
Bell said the No. 1 complaint he received seven years ago when he joined the council was people didn’t even know who their council representative was.

Ulrich called Scott and Carver counties’ new representative, Craig Peterson, a “breath of fresh air” and said he was very engaged at the local level.

Shannon Fiecke is a staff writer for the Shakopee Valley News. She can be reached at sfiecke@swpub.com.