Transportation Bill Cruising Along

Rep. Terry Morrow, DFL-St. Peter, is only three months into being a state representative, and yet he’s already on a conference committee to settle the differences between the Minnesota Senate and House versions of the transportation bill. Yet he’s in good company, for the Mankato-St. Peter area’s other two first-year legislators, Rep. Kathy Brynaert and Sen. Kathy Sheran, both DFL-Mankato, are on the conference committee for the higher education bill.

But all three are following strong predecessors, former Reps. Ruth Johnson and John Dorn and former Sen. John Hottinger, so maybe the high profile of the freshmen trio is not totally unexpected.

Morrow, a Gustavus Adolphus College professor and former St. Peter School District chair, sounds somewhat like a kid in a candy store when he describes his experiences as a novice legislator, rattling off who’s doing what, jumping from issue to issue, outlining the process and throwing out numbers like highway costs per mile and percent of the transportation budget that goes to rural transit.

more insideMost Minnesotans don’t know how the conference committee system works, and Morrow confesses he’s learning by doing. The transportation conference committee is made up of five members each from the House and Senate (see table below), with the chair of the committee alternating between the House and Senate transportation committee chairs each day. (“They literally hand over the gavel,” says Morrow.) All the members are DFLers except one, Rep. Ron Erhardt, R-Edina. That’s because a legislator can only be a member of a conference committee if he or she voted in favor of that bill.

The first part of the process is comparing the two bills side by side, which is prepared by the legislature’s nonpartisan staff. (Citizens can do the same going the state Office of the Revisor of Statutes website.)

Morrow says that while there are “no insurmountable differences” between the House and Senate versions of the transportation bill, the big monster in the closet is the proposed 10-cents-per-gallon gas tax increase, which Gov. Tim Pawlenty has said he will veto. “I keep hearing about a 5-cents-per-gallon gas tax on the floor,” Morrow says. The governor has not expressly said he would veto a 5-cents-per-gallon increase, only that he would not sign it, which means he may let it become law without his signature.

The problem with the 5-cents-per-gallon increase is that it would only raise an extra $170 million per year. Put into context, the proposed budget for the one-mile reconstruction of the SH-62/I-35 interchange is $300 million.

In his own district, Morrow notes that $170 million is about the cost of widening U.S. 14 from North Mankato to New Ulm — judged to be one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in the state, if not the country — to four lanes. “There have been two deaths [from two separate accidents] on that road in the last six to seven weeks,” Morrow says.

The gas tax is not all that the conference committee will have to reconcile. Another issue is how much of the state’s transportation dollar will go to transit and how that will be split between the metro area and rural Minnesota. A third is whether to increase the legal weight of semis on Minnesota roads from 80,000 pounds to 97,000 pounds. Morrow says this issue is not as simple as one might think, as heavier trucks actually can do less damage to roads because they are required to have more axles, which spread the weight more evenly. Further, he says, a recent MnDOT study indicates that larger trucks can actually be safer.

From college classroom to the intricacies of highway engineering: It’s all in a day’s work for St. Peter’s Terry Morrow.