Political bickering over cause and culpability in the 35W bridge collapse continued apace at the State Capitol on Tuesday, as high-ranking officials from the Minnesota Department of Transportation rebutted a recent report commissioned by the State Legislature that called into question a number of MnDOT’s practices and procedures leading up to the tragedy.

Released last month, the report was conducted by the Minneapolis law firm Gray Plant Mooty (GPM) at the behest of the Joint Legislative Committee of the I-35 Bridge Collapse. It criticized MnDoT for not following its own policies when responding to concerns raised about the bridge, called the agency’s decision-making responsibilities diffuse and unclear, claimed expert advice regarding the safety of the bridge was “not effectively utilized,” and, most provocatively, stated that financial considerations may have played a role in how MnDOT chose to deal with bridge defects uncovered by inspectors. The Joint Legislative Committee reconvened Tuesday to provide MnDoT a forum for responding publicly.

Although coated in a veneer of cordiality and bureaucratese, MnDOT deputy commissioner Khani Sahebjam and the agency’s director of the bridge office, Dan Dorgan, addressed the report with varying degrees of condescension and contempt. The thrust of their comments was that without sufficient technical expertise to parse the intricacies of bridge design, engineering and inspections, the lawyers at GPM jumped to erroneous conclusions. According to Sahebjam and Dorgan, GPM’s claims that advice from the expert consultants went unheeded is either contradicted by further correspondence with those consultants or failed to appreciate how that advice was handled within the agency.

But even if MnDOT thought GPM knew what it was talking about, they’d still regard their recommendations are either premature or redundant. “The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation is expected to be completed later this year. NTSB will not only report the cause of the collapse, but will also issues recommendations with a goal of preventing bridge failures from similar causes,” said Sahebjam, reading from a letter to the joint committee by new MnDOT commissioner Thomas Sorel. “The NTSB work and any subsequent Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) policy changes will be the definitive reports on the I-35W Bridge for state transportation agencies.” Translation: Gray Plant Mooty is not the boss of us. And if those two federal agencies weren’t sufficient, Dorgan noted, MnDOT has conducted its own internal reviews (and already implemented some improvements working in conjunction with legislators) and has a report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor on the subject.

Members of the committee were visibly rankled by the dismissive tone–they, after all, were the ones who appointed GPM to write the report. They countered by citing bridge inspection reports that listed the same problem year after year, without any sign that the report had been read, much less addressed. They talked of interviewing MnDOT employees who were not aware of any hierarchy or chain of accountability that existed with respect to bridge safety issues.

As these comments overwhelmed the original intent of the meeting–to air MnDoT’s response to the GPM report–Sahebjam said wearily, “ It’s obvious with the bridge falling down, the trust that you folks and the public have in us has diminished. I want you to please trust us on this. We are the owners. We are the ones out there every day hanging out the bridges trying to do the right thing and trying to improve our processes.”

Predictably, Sahebjam’s plea gained no traction in the meeting. The bottom line is that the 35W tragedy was too profound and the issue has now become too politicized for the kind of trust he is requesting. Earlier on Tuesday, members of the joint committee visited the bridge site and marveled at the rapid pace of the rebuilding effort. Perhaps inevitably, one DFL committee-member, Sen. Jim Carlson of Eagan, linked the speedy construction to political pressures for the bridge to be finished in time for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul later this summer. And also on Tuesday, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty criticized the GPM report in terms very similar to those used by the folks at MnDOT.

No one should be surprised that a report commissioned by the DFL-majority Legislature should uncover an inattentive, inefficient, and unaccountable bureaucracy at MnDOT or that the authors of the report drew linkages between a lack of transportation funding and inadequate vigilance regarding bridge safety. Nor is it surprising that the Republican governor and the agency commissioners he appointed should want to defer to federal agencies under Republican control. Those agencies, in turn, have not finished their investigation, but have managed nonetheless to telegraph their conclusion that the bridge collapse resulted from a flaw in gusset plate design and not a scarcity of dollars to adequately maintain the infrastructure.

After listening to Sahebjam and Dorgan’s plea that they are primarily looking toward the NTSB and the FHWA for guidance, joint committee co-chair Sen. Steve Murphy (DFL-Red Wing), who is also chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, testily replied, “Look, we had a bridge fall down. We’ve been playing nice with the federal highway standards but now we need to exceed those standards two-fold at least. There are 112,000 bridges [across the country] that right now are rated below where I-35 was when it collapsed.” On the subject of gusset plates, Murphy added that he wants answers from the feds as to why everyone in Ohio knew about the failure of a bridge in that state due to inadequate gusset plates, yet administrators in other states with bridges of similar design were not put on alert.

Whether the smoking gun on the I-35 tragedy turns out to be gusset plates, no-new-taxes pledges, or some other combination of circumstances, the debate over maintaining our infrastructure has really only begun in earnest. Citing MnDOT’s own internal estimates on what it will cost to address all of the state’s transportation needs over the next ten years, Rep. Shelly Madore (DFL-Apple Valley) reminded the administrators, “We have a $24 billion problem and we’ve been given $6.6 billion”—the total revenue in the omnibus transportation bill passed this session over the governor’s veto—“to fix it. We have $15 billion worth of bridge repairs we need to make over the next 10 years. But there are a lot of politicians and people in this state who think that even the $6.6 billion is way too much. We need your help to educate them. The most helpful document you could give us is an accounting of what you need to get the job done.”

But compiling $24 billion to-do lists is not the kind of thing Minnesotans are likely to see MnDOT officials or anyone in the Pawlenty Administration doing anytime soon.

“Just so you know,” Murphy said to Sahebjam and Dorgan, “what I intend to do is sent the governor a letter chastising his office, because I can tell that the printed material [in their rebuttal testimony] came from his office. I am very skeptical and disappointed, frankly, with the governor’s ability to go out of his way to inject politics where it wasn’t needed on this.”