South West Tram Green Line Extension Water Main Break Draws More Criticism After Water Main Breaks | Minnesota

(The Center Square) – Met Council South West Tram Green Line Extension encountered more problems.

FOX 9 reported Residents of condos in Calhoun Isles in southwest Minneapolis discovered on Sunday that a water main serving the Kenilworth Tunnel construction site had failed, resulting in flooding in their basement parking lot. .

The project had been on hiatus since late January.

“It sounded like Minnehaha Falls,” Vanne Owens Hayes, president of the condo association, reported FOX 9. “I stood at the end of the ramp and watched. The sound you heard, you swore you were at Minnehaha Falls because he was coming so fast.”

At a January 2018 Metropolitan Governance Legislative Committee hearing, the Calhoun Isles Condominium Association said the construction and operation of the project jeopardize their property and the well-being of residents.

Metro Transit’s senior communications specialist Trevor Roy told The Center Square in an emailed statement on Wednesday that the public transit operator was investigating the flooding and estimated the budget increase would be between 450 and $550 million.

Roy said the route through the Kenilworth Corridor required a half-mile tunnel because there was not enough space for freight trains and light rail to run side-by-side with the Cedar Lake Trail. He said the secant wall was implemented to mitigate potential ground settlement that could have resulted from the sheet piles.

The project’s completion date has been pushed back to 2027, four years behind schedule. Challenges have included modifying construction methods to include a retaining wall for the Kenilworth tunnel, adding construction of the Eden Prairie town center station, and constructing a protective wall between the BNSF rail tracks and LRT tracks.

Minnesota lawmakers are considering several bills to give the project more control. State Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, proposed that the Minnesota Department of Transportation take over the project.

The Reason Foundation’s deputy director of transportation policy, Baruch Feigenbaum, told The Center Square in a phone interview on Wednesday that building rail projects along freight rail lines involves additional costs.

He said civil engineering best practice includes a pre-construction assessment to determine if there is any groundwater that needs to be mitigated.

“It seems they weren’t aware of some of the groundwater that was in the area as well as how drilling for the project would affect the structure of some of the buildings, and I don’t know. not quite how a competent entrepreneur wouldn’t be aware of these things,” he said.

Feigenbaum said Minnesota ratepayers should be aware that there are often hidden costs and cost overruns on rail projects. He encouraged Minnesota policymakers to consider rapid transit by bus plans on shared use and right-of-way with cars and trucks in the future to limit costs and disruption, especially as he predicts that transit ridership will not return to levels before the pandemic.

“If we’re lucky, transit ridership may be back to 80% of what it was by 2025, but I don’t think even that is realistic,” he said. declared. “These are the types of projects that we just don’t really have the funds for, and when you see the other disruptions that are happening due to construction, there are real effects on people’s lives that make it an even worse choice of financing, in my opinion.

He said that any type of problem encountered during construction will increase costs.

“Apart from stopping work on the line in order to figure out what’s going on with this building, someone is going to have to pay to fix this building,” he said. “And it’s not going to be the people who own it there. It will be the taxpayers of Minnesota.

Wendell Cox, a transportation analyst who has consulted for private and public sector high-speed rail in six countries and served on Amtrak’s Reform Board in 1999, told The Center Square on Wednesday in a statement sent by e-mail that even if he did not follow the project, he is not surprised by the cost overruns.

“[Cost overruns are] fairly normal in transit rail projects (and they often fall short of ridership projections),” he wrote. “The new reality of public transit, with the exodus to remote work (some suggesting three-day downtown work weeks…with the other two at home) and dramatically reduced ridership does not only illustrates the difficulty these projects face.”

About Mark A. Tomlin

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