Planning for the Blue Line extension is moving ahead after votes from two key bodies last week.
On September 14, the Blue Line Extension Corridor Management Committee (CMC), which is made up of elected officials, business owners, residents, and activists from along the extension corridor, voted 13-1 to direct the Metropolitan Council to study the proposed route staff presented last month.
The route calls for the Blue Line to run between Target Field Station in Minneapolis to the Target North Campus in Brooklyn Park along Washington, 21st, and West Broadway avenues in Minneapolis, Bottineau Boulevard in Robbinsdale and Crystal, and Bottineau Boulevard and West Broadway Avenue in Brooklyn Park.
The route continues to face opposition from some along the corridor who are worried about whether such an investment would be worth it, particularly as it may affect their livelihoods. Some Met Council members are hearing their concerns.
On September 13, Met councilmembers voted 12-3 to accept $75 million from Hennepin County and to allow a contractor to develop detailed engineering drawings of the project. Those opposing the deal wanted planners to evaluate all their options and do their due diligence before moving forward with the light rail plan.
Ironically, the votes come at a time when the agency is preparing to resume its due diligence, which involves studying what impacts the light rail will have on the communities that planners want the extension to run through. Planners look at projected ridership, how fast the light rail will run, and how it will impact natural and historic resources, as well as parking and travel times, to name a few considerations.
Bus rapid transit option
As the Met Council and Hennepin County prepare to study the merits of building the light rail route through North Minneapolis to Brooklyn Park, some neighbors and Met Council members are asking them to also study express bus service. The express bus service, which planners call bus rapid transit, entails operating a bus line that only stops at specially designated stations and could run in mixed traffic or on dedicated roadways.
They are backed by three Met Council members who voted on September 13 against accepting $75 million from Hennepin County and asked contracted engineers to develop more detailed drawings for the light rail project. One of them is Councilmember Wendy Wulff, who represents southwestern Dakota County and the Scott County city of Savage.
Wulff is frustrated that Hennepin County seems to only want to build the light rail through North Minneapolis to the northern suburbs even though both Hennepin County and the Met Council aren’t sure if building the light rail would be worth the cost because of transit ridership changes since the pandemic.
“When you’re doing a project on rails, it is not possible to be moved around. You need to know that you have high ridership all day long, every day, and that that ridership is going to be continuous for 40 [to] 50 years,” said Wulff. “With COVID, we found out we don’t even know if we’re going to have ridership next week.”
Meanwhile, Nick Thompson, Metro Transit’s deputy general manager, says building bus rapid transit could prove equally disruptive to building light rail, perhaps even more disruptive. “If we were to build a guideway [bus rapid transit] on the current alignment, based on what we’re proposing for the LRT [light rail transit], we’d have the same or more impacts to the right-of-way. Same or more impacts to traffic. We’d have a slower mode of travel and need several more vehicles and more operators than LRT,” said Thompson.
Thompson adds that the light rail would be able to better negotiate the curves on West Broadway. Although he acknowledges some properties would be impacted, he says doesn’t know how until his team finishes studying the merits of building the light rail project.
Not everything is settled
Even though project planners say they intend to study the route they presented last month moving forward, the route is not set in stone. At the CMC meeting, both Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minneapolis Park Board Commissioner Meg Forney asked project planners to reconsider the location of the station at Lowry Avenue and Victory Memorial Parkway. Both were concerned the station would be located too high above ground-level and wanted the station to be built closer to ground level, such as at 29th Avenue. Planners are looking into the issue.
The other unsettled part of the plan is in the North Loop neighborhood. Residents are concerned about a station at Washington and Plymouth affecting traffic, even though the proposed station would not eliminate any traffic lanes. They are also concerned that building a light rail line on 10th Avenue would mean eliminating the only northeast-southwest connector available in the area for people who drive. Planners will study its impacts during the due diligence process.
What’s next?
With the acceptance of $75 million from Hennepin County, Met Council and Hennepin County staff have begun work on preparing the Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS), a document required by federal law to evaluate the project’s impact on ridership, travel time, and surrounding properties, natural resources and historic resources. Agency planners accepted comments on what they should study in the report through September 18.
As part of preparing the SDEIS, planners expect to have estimates on how much time trains on the extension will take to get from Target Field to Brooklyn Park by the end of the year. They will use those numbers to determine how many people will ride the route, as well as how much the project will cost. They hope to have those numbers ready by early 2024. Acknowledging that ridership may have changed because of the pandemic, Project Manager Christine Beckwith says they’ll be providing a ridership figure based on pre-pandemic and pandemic ridership levels.
To estimate travel time and ridership, Met Council-contracted engineers have to prepare drawings to show where the extension would run. Those drawings would also be released when the SDEIS is published. After three vetting sessions with the federal government, the agency plans to publish the SDEIS for public comment next spring.
After that, planners will begin the next step of getting formal approval from elected officials who serve cities along the route sometime next summer. If all communities along the route consent to the project as-is, the agency finalizes the environmental impact statement by the end of 2024. To prepare for that occasion, the Met Council is looking for contractors to work on the final statement, with proposals for Contract 23P182 due October 25, 2023. If all goes well, the extension could open for service in 2030, two years later than what the Met Council envisioned last year.
Several people at the corridor management committee meeting spoke in support of light rail. John Wescott, a White Nokomis resident who rides the Blue Line two to four times a week for work and to visit friends, thinks project planners are doing this all wrong and the Blue Line extension needs to be built in a way that prioritizes the train.
“This is a train, not a tram. It’s supposed to be the backbone of our transit system. Spending the additional money now on flyover bridges and gate crossings will likely pay off in the long run, as there’ll be fewer accidents Met Council will have to pay out for and higher overall ridership,” said Wescott at the corridor management committee meeting. “We aren’t putting transit first. We’re putting the needs of [motorists] ahead of everyone else.”
Mike Miller, who was born and raised in North Minneapolis and owns a business in North Loop that offers horse-drawn carriage rides, supports it: The light rail project “has got to be for the future. Not for the people in this room, but the people that we’ve never met and we don’t know. So when you’re doing this, I think it’s probably the best thing ever,” said Miller.
Anti-displacement may face uphill battle
Despite the funding approval as well as the extension route study, planners presented few updates on what work they are doing to support anti-displacement efforts for the project. Planners are hashing out details on how to implement the anti-displacement policy and noted they accepted applications from people who want to lead anti-displacement work through their “Senior Department Administrator, Disparity Reduction,” which closed on September 19. They also planned to convene a committee to court private donors to bankroll the strategy, as well as to develop a strategy to lobby the Minnesota Legislature for money starting next year.
Councilmember Jeremiah Ellison, who left the CMC meeting before members voted to study the recommended route to meet with elders at a residential council, wanted planners to hurry. “Folks are really nervous. They want to know what the solution is for them in terms of displacement. They want to know what the recourse is for them in terms of their ability to stay in the community, whether it’s as a resident or as a business, because this is our home,” said Ellison.
Meanwhile, Hennepin County says nothing is stopping local communities from taking action to implement anti-displacement recommendations. “In fact, there are many potential strategies and policies to build community prosperity and prevent displacement both within and beyond what’s included in the CURA anti-displacement report that only individual cities would have the jurisdictional authority to implement,” said Kyle Mianulli, spokesperson for Hennepin County.
One of those recommendations is rent control, which Mayor Frey vehemently opposes because he doesn’t think it will make housing affordable. “I look at facts and evidence and data and experts, specifically economists ranging from the far left to the far right,” said Mayor Frey as he left the CMC meeting. “There’s broad consensus from them saying that rent control doesn’t work.”
Support Black local news
Help amplify Black voices by donating to the MSR. Your contribution enables critical coverage of issues affecting the community and empowers authentic storytelling.