Hennepin County OKs $1 million for new transit line

Bottineau Boulevard, a lesser-known transit route that would run from downtown Minneapolis to the northwest suburbs, got a big boost Tuesday when the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority OK’d spending $1 million on an alternatives study — the kind of research into routes, modes and feasibility done last year on the Southwest Corridor and earlier on the Hiawatha and Central corridors.

That gave Bottineau Boulevard a running start yesterday when metro counties cut a joint-powers deal for funding transit from new county sales taxes. As the Strib’s Laurie Blake reports, the agreement — following the override of the governor’s transportation bill veto — nearly cuts the governor’s appointees on the Met Council out of the new decision-making body. Transit-wise, it’s a 100-member shadow Met Council with only five actual Met Council votes.Still, the real Met Council, which runs Metro Transit, has dibs on the first $30 million the counties raise. Letting the Met Council spend county sales tax revenue is “a little bit of a cost of doing business,” Hennepin County Commissioner Mike Opat told Minnesota Monitor. “But I’m not in support of seeing it repeated.”

Hennepin County, the heavyweight in the counties’ transit-funding scheme, could act as early as next week on a new sales tax. But Opat said he prefers to wait and see whether the governor vetoes money for the Central Corridor, shifting a burden to the counties: “I’m not taking heat for something the governor should have done — i.e., fund transit.”