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Thursday, March 21, 2019

Jim Abeler, get off your foot-dragging butt, and do the job.

That's a concept, isn't it, a foot-dragging butt. But he's a Republican, and any ideological contortion is possible rather than straightforwardly funding the fixing of roads needing it. If you are not truly dedicated to fixing Hwy 47, sir, then retire so somebody so motivated can take your place.

Sure, funds are there if your district's road were top priority, but everyone has top priority aims for their district, the entire legislature is full of such top priorities. I recall Carol Molnau during Pawlenty days, and the highway in front of her home became a top priority cramdown item of the then state government, driven by the ideological Guv + Lt. Guv. combo, while Ms. M was wearing a second hat as Dept. of Transportation boss.

Look it up.

Republicans. Exasperation personified to where GOP should be EOP, Exasperating Old Party.

Matt Look quoted in the item, agreeing with his friends. He wants lights off Highway 10, bigger, better, to him a priority but when having a chance to goad things along via needed gas tax money, MIA.

And back to Molnau days, a quick web search - Feb. 10, 2008:

Carol Molnau, Minnesota’s transportation commissioner and lieutenant governor, has a spectacular view of the state Capitol from her corner office in the Transportation Building.

But Molnau hasn’t been paying much attention to the Capitol lately, at least not to what’s going on under the dome.

When the Legislature, where she served for 10 years, convenes Tuesday, one of its items of business will be to decide whether to dump Molnau from her transportation job.

Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Steve Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, plans to ask the Senate to vote against confirming Molnau’s appointment before the session adjourns in May. If the Senate votes not to confirm her, she will, in effect, be fired as head of the Minnesota Department of Transportation. She still would be lieutenant governor.

Murphy and Assistant Majority Leader Tarryl Clark, DFL-St. Cloud, said last week that the Senate will take up the confirmation issue only after senators pass a transportation funding bill.

Democrats control the Senate 45-22, and Murphy said, “I don’t know of anybody in our (Democratic) caucus who is going to vote against throwing Carol Molnau (a Republican) out of her job.”

Asked why, he quickly ticked off a list of 10 delayed bridge and highway projects, construction cost overruns and personnel and financial problems at MnDOT.

But the underlying reason DFLers oppose her seems to be that she he has resisted their proposals to increase taxes and fees for transportation.

“Carol Molnau is not an advocate for transportation,” Murphy said. “If it costs money, she ain’t gonna do it.”

Molnau’s allies say she’s getting a bad rap. Republican Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, of Lakeville, a longtime friend, said Molnau shouldn’t be blamed for not advocating more transportation spending, because she is carrying out Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s policies. “It’s her job to support the governor’s budget,” Holberg said.

A frequent MnDOT critic, Sen. Dick Day, R-Owatonna, said that while he’s concerned about some of Molnau’s policies, “I think she’s doing better than she’s getting credit for.” He noted that in the past five years, MnDOT has carried out the most expensive highway construction program in state history. Proposed by Pawlenty and Molnau and passed by the 2003 Legislature, the program cost $825 million, with the state borrowing half of the money and getting the rest from advanced federal funding.

Critics have disparaged Molnau’s performance since the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed Aug. 1 – even though the National Transportation Safety Board has not yet determined the disaster’s cause.

A Minnesota Public Radio-Humphrey Institute poll released last week showed that Minnesotans disapproved of her job performance by almost a 2-1 ratio.

Yep, Republicans. Holberg saying don't blame Molnau because it's Pawlenty's budget. Nobody wanting blame, but if it's praise . . .

Finger pointing at each other instead of doing the job does not get the job done. The job is governing the state for needs of the people who elected them. Provision and maintenance and upgrading of public goods.

Finger pointing back then. And the Hwy 35 bridge fell, etc. From inadequate attention during Pawlenty days and prior DFL and Ventura occupancy of the Governor's office. Nobody is blame-free. Transportation is never funded enough, but at least the Democrats acknowledge the purpose of governing is to provide and maintain pubic goods whereas the Republicans contend government exists to pay their legislative salaries and to meddle in reproductive rights decisions others want to make without meddling. Which is why DFL people are at least sane and responsive to what's needed.

BOTTOM LINE: Jim Abeler, get off the duff and govern, please. You did it once and there was squealing and hollering but you survived and prospered, moving from the House to the Senate. The sensible people understood, back then, when you did the right thing. It's not that hard. And tell Michelle Benson the same, would you? Raise the gas tax or risk disappearing and drowning in one of those massive underwater potholes on the unmaintained access road behind the KwikStop shop running in front of the KMart Church. An even bigger bottom line for readers, if you voted for Abeler and/or Benson, read the Channel 9 item. The tooth fairy does not leave bridge funding money under the pillow when the baby tooth gets removed from there. Other reliances are needed.

It's time. Past time. Do the job. Or step aside.

____________UPDATE_____________
The Molnau feather-your-own-nest mode of highway priority decision making happened before her Lt. Gov. days. But the story is worth retelling because it is indicative of everyone having his/her local priorities so that while surely one local project will not bankrupt MnDOT, that begs the question. Something Abeler is doing, in this current gas-tax increase debate, which is why he needs to be called out. On the Molnau personal prioritization, see, Wikipedia here, and Strib, archived, here. The Molnau family farm was sold for development "for 3.3 million dollars near the Highway 212 project she had backed passed through the House of Representatives," per Wikipedia. Strib reported:

In early 2000, as real estate development boomed in Chaska, then-state Rep. Carol Molnau authored a bill that ensured a long-delayed plan to build a new Hwy. 212 there would be put on a fast track.

Molnau, as chairwoman of the powerful House Transportation Finance Committee, guided the bill to passage. But she did not disclose Hwy. 212's proximity to the land she owned in Chaska or that she was negotiating to sell the property to a national housing developer, state and local records show.

The transportation bill provided for rapid construction of what Molnau called "mega-projects." One that fit the bill's criteria was Hwy. 212, which would run less than a mile from her farm.

This is on a scale different from a situation where Abeler is credited here as faultless and public need oriented, for advocating a traffic signal on U.S. Hwy 47 that would benefit his own home's ingress/egress opportunity per that highway. That stretch of road is a chaotic mess, with few present neighborhood options - fairgrounds and all, and if a mega project is delayed because the gas tax situation is flummoxed by EOP politics, than the "bandaid" inexpensive traffic signal alone instead of "fixing the broken leg" has sense to it. However doing things piecemeal is more costly than one single major overhaul, but if the latter is forestalled by Minnesota Republicans being themselves yet again, the light is a low cost palliative. Not best, but better than the wholly screwed up status quo where a tiny town road segment has been made to carry more traffic than ever earlier imagined. But it is Anoka, in Anoka County, and the tiny-town decisionmaking history and mentality there is illustrative. Republican dominated over the years. Tiny town mentality, and proud of it.

FURTHER: The Repuboican bankruptcy of leadership thinking in my mind is best shown by my House District, after Abeler shifted to the Senate, electing Abigail Whelan who famously during a House debate about a tax haven question expounded at extreme length about Jesus; a situation that went viral on the Internet and reflected poorly upon the district I happen to live in. Don't blame me, I voted DFL. But that is illustrative of tiny embryo Angst supplanting doing the job of governing sanely with sound judgment. Bless Whelan wherever she is now, having left the legislature in order to snag her Mrs. degree. We've got another one of the embryo-Angst crowd in the House, Rep. for the other half of the Abeler Senate district, who "graduated from Lowthian College, in Minneapolis, in 1983, majoring in fashion merchandising." And the potholes proliferate, while the bottleneck road-rail dangers remain unfixed.

FURTHER: Abeler is entrenched. He could again do the right thing without his empire shaking apart. He did it once, declines now, when being a good party man apparently this time trumps being a good man. The last one time and done challenger Abeler faced offers "nothing to see." That entrenched, yet champion of a traffic signal?