Rybak touts Obamanomics: Will city get federal funds in return?

Mayor R.T. Rybak. Photo: Studio 306

“This is working out exactly as I would want it,” Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said by phone from Washington, D.C. last Thursday.

Rybak, along with nine other mayors, was invited to President-elect Barack Obama’s address on the economy on Jan. 8.

“I have very good access to the Obama administration. It makes me a better mayor and able to bring more back home,” he said.

Obama pushed transportation infrastructure in his speech, but can Rybak expect to bring more of that home to Minneapolis? After all, the city was among very few to win massive federal Department of Transportation funding through its Urban Partnership grants for bus lane improvements downtown and a new toll lane on I-35W. And then there was the new I-35W bridge.

“We absolutely can ask for more,” Rybak said, citing U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar’s chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure as another factor in the city’s favor.

The mayor scoffed at Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s response last week to the prospect of $10 million in federal aid for state infrastructure projects.

“The first words out of the governor’s mouth were ‘Minnesota may not want it,’” Rybak said. “My message was very different.”

Rybak, a very early Obama backer, said he has no interest in a job with the Obama administration, and instead looks forward to working in Obama’s America back home – the precise definition of which seemed to slip between city and state as he talked about changes Obama might bring. (Rybak has said he’ll decide soon whether to run for governor).

One project that has appeared in lights on both the state’s and the city’s marquees is the I-35W bridge, which Rybak said fit Obama’s vision for a new generation of infrastructure projects that have green components — in 35W’s case, the capacity to handle transit that Rybak insisted on.

“Obama was very careful to say this cannot have earmarks [for] this project or that project,” Rybak said. But the mayor makes no bones about having a wish list for Minneapolis.

“Probably the biggest one on my list is to do mitigation for Central Corridor, to make a ring road around the University [of Minnesota] campus.”

A ring road is needed because trains running on the future Central Corridor light-rail transit route will take up all of Washington Avenue, a main Minneapolis campus artery, Rybak explained. Locals have feared that digging a tunnel for the trains to travel under Washington Avenue would jeopardize — you guessed it — federal funding.