County Board Chairwoman Rhonda Sivarajah was among the most vocal opponents of the proposed 155-mile line, [... and] balked at Anoka County's possible commitment of $10 million or more toward the line.
Commissioner Matt Look, the county's new rail authority chairman, also questioned the $10 million commitment before voting against NLX.
"NLX is a gamble I'm not willing to take," he said.
Last year, Look pushed for a $13.2 million commuter rail station in his hometown of Ramsey. Some questioned its need, and it raised some eyebrows in Sherburne, Stearns and Hennepin counties. The station opens this fall.
Andy Westerberg and Robyn West were the other commissioners who voted to withdraw from the alliance.
Look replaced Commissioner Dan Erhart, who championed the 2 1/2-year-old Northstar commuter rail line, as Anoka County's rail authority leader when Sivarajah became board chairwoman last year. Along with James Oberstar, who lost his seat in Congress to Chip Cravaack in 2010, and Mark Stenglein, who left the Hennepin County Board recently to become president of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, Erhart is a once-key NLX player now largely on the sidelines.
In addition there was coverage online from MinnPost, MPR, and PiPress where coverage included:
However, Erhart said, it's not too late to reverse it.. With six of the seven Anoka County Board seats-- including his own -- up for reelection this fall, support for public transportation could shift.
"It would just take one vote," he said.
Interestingly, an online operation I believe is out of New Hampshire carried a partial feed from a Minnesoata operation having an arguably inasupicious board and sponsoring an essay contest in honor of an arguably inasupicious film actor.
It is interesting to see from details of each linked item, how one can infer that there may possibly be editorializing on the "news pages" for each of the different coverage outlets. (All except Crabgrass, which of course is wholly objective and unbiased about all that is posted here.)