Did you hear about the last minute Obama administration rule that just cleared the path for the Met Council to expand its rule from Stearns County to Hudson, Wisconsin.?

Yeah, I thought you might have missed that one.

But that's the practical implication of the rule issued in December, which requires states to expand the geography covered by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (e.g. the Met Council), merge areas where they overlap, and to extend them across state lines.

Nationally the rule opens the door to Super-Regions that are beholden to federal dictates. Locally it creates an even broader scope for the out of control Met Council, which already has by far the largest budget and broadest scope of any regional authority in the country.

Fortunately citizens have at their disposal the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to review and reject this sort of Midnight Monkey Business by the outgoing administration. 

Narrated presentation on your left (8 minutes), and PDF here.

Additional resources:

• The Twin Cities Met Council: A Comparative Assessment;  Katana Community, 2016
• Governance of Transit in the Twin Cities Region, Office of the Legislative Auditor,  2011
• The Minnesota Policy Blueprint, Center of the American Experiment

The Met Council is the Twin Cities' very own "regional authority", which is a body intended to be the planning agency to help accommodate growth across the metro area. 

The  perennially controversial council is once again in the news, as a task force recently took a look at how we might update the Met Council and address some of the concerns expressed about it. I'm rarely one to take the "expert" opinion as gospel, however, so I thought I would conduct my own "zero-based review" of the Met Council, and  see how it stacks up against other such authorities across the country.

I specifically wanted to answer a few basic questions:

• How unique is the Met Council in terms of its structure, scope and spending?
• The Met Council is not a Council of Governments (COG), and many locals believe that provides the Twin Cities an advantage. Is that the case?
• What alternative models are out there, and how well do they work for residents?

As I developed this report, I was struck by how often "people in the know" were surprised by the information in it.  While it  is not intended to be the definitive report on the Met Council, it does provide context and new information that I think is useful for concerned citizens and legislators. 

It will take you 10 minutes to see if you agree with me or not.

Narrated presentation on your left, or PDF with appendix here.