Star Tribune
Southwest LRT builder attributes problems to faulty design, criticizes state probe
The contractor building the $2.7 billion Southwest light-rail line attributes many of its cost overruns and delays to a “deficient design” crafted long before ground was broken on the project nearly five years ago.
In documents obtained by the Star Tribune through the state’s Data Practices Act, officials with Lunda McCrossan Joint Venture (LMJV) also take aim at the state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor, calling its critical reports on the project “inaccurately reported or incorrectly interpreted” and “lacking any apparent experience or expertise.”
The legislative auditor has “either misrepresented the facts or twisted them to serve an objective,” wrote Dennis Behnke, CEO of Wisconsin-based Lunda Construction Co., in a March 29 letter to Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie Zelle.
LMJV largely has refrained from commenting publicly on Southwest’s issues since it was awarded the $800 million civil construction bid in 2018.
Legislative Auditor Judy Randall declined to comment on the LMJV documents. Two additional reports on the project from her office are expected by the end of the year.
The Met Council is overseeing construction of the 14.5-mile line, which will connect downtown Minneapolis and Eden Prairie through St. Louis Park, Hopkins and Minnetonka once it begins service in 2027. The extension of the current Green Line is more than 70% complete.
Southwest is an enormously complicated infrastructure project, one the Met Council calls a “generational investment.” It includes 16 new stations, 29 bridges and two light-rail tunnels, including one in Minneapolis’ narrow and densely populated Kenilworth Corridor between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles.
The project’s expanding budget has made it the most expensive public works project in Minnesota history, as well as the focus of growing public disdain. Southwest’s original $1.25 billion budget has more than doubled, and its opening date has been pushed back nearly a decade.
Both Lunda Construction and C.S. McCrossan Inc. of Maple Grove had extensive experience building large infrastructure projects, many of them in Minnesota, when they formed a joint venture to bid on Southwest. Construction began in 2018.
Issues surface
The Met Council has blamed the project’s increasing costs on a $93 million crash wall separating light-rail and freight trains west of Target Field, a late addition required by BNSF Railway as a safeguard for “a 200-mph high-speed train,” according to LMJV. The council has said the wall wasn’t in the overall bid package because its design was not complete.
Adding the Eden Prairie Town Center Station back into the project, after it had been nixed to save money, also boosted costs. And then there were the difficulties cited by the Met Council in building a tunnel for light-rail trains in the Kenilworth Corridor, which required a different construction method to protect the nearby Cedar Isles condo complex.
In documents supplied to the legislative auditor, LMJV said that it was unaware that Southwest’s design was “incomplete, erroneous and inadequate” when it bid on the work in 2018. As a result, according to LMJV, the parties “have been struggling with the consequences of that problem ever since.”
Some 2,544 construction changes deemed “continuous and extensive” affected the project’s schedule, resulting in “increased costs due the contractor being on site longer and escalating labor and material costs,” LMJV said in a statement to the Star Tribune.
The company said it had “no fault or liability related to these issues,” and declined further comment.
LMJV says the legislative auditor gave Southwest’s engineer of record “a pass despite all the problems with its design,” without naming the firm. A group of consultants led by AECOM, a publicly traded Texas-based infrastructure consulting firm, is responsible for the Southwest’s overall design and engineering work.
In October 2021, the Office of the Legislative Auditor released a memo detailing a fraught relationship between AECOM and the Met Council. AECOM did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Other challenges
In the documents, LMJV also details the challenges of construction in an active freight railroad corridor, which is adjacent to the popular bike and pedestrian Kenilworth trail.
And there were issues involving “wealthy communities not supportive of the project with little tolerance for the impacts arising from construction,” LMJV says. Residents in Minneapolis’ Kenwood neighborhood unsuccessfully sued the Met Council in 2014 to stop the project.
LMJV says it was ultimately able to agree on a schedule with the Met Council to keep the project moving forward — a victory it said was “mistakenly criticized” in the legislative auditor’s March report.
That report calls out the Met Council for not withholding payment to LMJV “for repeated failures to provide an acceptable project schedule.” LMJV calls that assessment “questionable,” and notes the auditor’s staff members are “not an expert in the design, scheduling or project administration of megaprojects.”
LMJV further states in its correspondence that “had the parties engaged in the adversarial process suggested by the [legislative auditor], the project would now be in litigation, cost many, many millions more, and be delayed by many more years.”
In Randall’s response to Behnke, she notes that he took exception to “aspects of our report. While we appreciate your feedback, we are confident in the findings and conclusions as we presented them.”
Megaproject woes
In a 37-page position paper submitted to the Office of the Legislative Auditor, LMJV details the difficulties not only with the Southwest project, but other megaprojects across the country.
A 2015 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. notes that about half of rail projects typically exceed their budgets. And bridges and tunnels — endemic to the Southwest project — incur an average 35% cost overrun, according to McKinsey.
“Obviously these projects are super complicated and so is the oversight,” said Kyle Shelton, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies.
Shelton said transit agencies in the United States historically have relied on outside consultants and contractors to design and build megaprojects. That isn’t bad, he said, “but it leads to fewer people in agencies that have the experience to really oversee these projects over long durations.”
“Almost everybody involved in these projects would say the projects could be better,” Shelton said. “Often the political side of things makes it more difficult, because the conversations are hard. Sometimes you have to pay way more [to plan] before you start, which isn’t always politically expedient.”
Controversy erupts again
A firestorm erupted at the Legislature when the legislative auditor’s report was released in March, much of it directed at the Met Council for a lack of transparency related to Southwest’s issues.
In its response to the legislative auditor, LMJV notes that the Met Council couldn’t have accurately forecast when the project would be complete because the original schedule did not factor in the effect of all “design errors,” which “were unknown at the time.”
The firm recommends that the Met Council perform an independent review to evaluate “the extent to which the project’s significant cost overruns are due to issues with its design.” Council officials say they intend to conduct a thorough review of Southwest’s cost and schedule at the appropriate time.
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
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