THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Everything is a scam: COVID/Light rail edition.

The latest light rail boondoggle is called the Southwest LRT project. It connects downtown Minneapolis with the western suburbs, and has never been a favorite of the tonier sort of people. They love light rail, except when it comes to or through their neighborhood.

The project has spiraled out of control, vastly outstripping its already bloated budget. As usual. Light rail is hideously expensive, and especially so when going through expensive neighborhoods. The line is only 14 miles long and will cost $2.7 billion.

That’s $190 million a mile. You can build a lot of roads with that kind of money. A typical lane of highway costs $1-2 million a mile. And would carry a lot more people*.

OK, so it’s expensive and over budget. Over budget as in $1.1 billion over budget. That’s quite an error. $1.6 billion to $2.7 billion. And despite a lot of effort looking under couch cushions and in the pockets of jackets, lots of money still needs to be found to fill that budget hole.

So guess where a bunch of the money is going to come from?

A plan to close the yawning budget gap for the $2.7 billion Southwest light-rail line was put in motion Monday, but the proposed infusion of $211 million still would not be enough to see the troubled project to completion.

The Metropolitan Council’s Transportation Committee on Monday unanimously recommended moving $111 million to the Southwest project, most of it taken from federal COVID-19 relief funds. That plan will require approval by the full council, which will build and maintain the line, in a vote expected next week.

Meanwhile, the Hennepin County Board is slated to vote Thursday on a measure to transfer an additional $100 million to the Southwest project, an extension of the Green Line that will link downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie.

But with project funding currently falling short by $450 million to $550 million, the Met Council would still need to find an additional $240 million to $340 million to finish the job. And it’s unclear at this time where the extra money will come from.

COVID. Is there anything it can’t do?

Honestly, this is just the icing on the cake. The project is government in a nutshell. Plan something totally ridiculous. Grossly mislead people on how much it will cost. Get started before the deception is too obvious to ignore. Screw things up. Plead “sunk cost.” Use “emergency” to steal more money.

* Yes, but building roads provides insufficient opportunities for graft: “A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.”