Midnight Monkey Business - Expanding the Met Council's Regional Boundary

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