As a Minneapolis resident I have seen my share of graft, lunacy, gaslighting, self-sabotage, and mindless destruction in government. Our city is a mess, our County is profligate beyond measure, our unelected Metropolitan Council is a graft machine, and our state government has never seen a boondoggle it didn’t want to blow money on.

But few government decisions have been as nakedly cynical as the one I just read about in my local newspaper, the Star Tribune. It really takes the cake.

For decades our local Lefties have been itching to build a light rail system to cover the region. After all, light rail has created the Portland we know and love today, right?

They never got anywhere until Jesse Ventura was elected governor. He loved light rail in Atlanta because it allowed him to bar hop without driving. Yes, he said that.

So Ventura pushed through an execrable project that is a total disaster, and ever since the Metropolitan Council has been pushing through other similarly useless and destructive projects. Light rail stations are now the preferred places for overdosing on fentanyl for our finest citizens. We also get some shootings and other crimes, but apparently fentanyl just feels better near a train.

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.

A plan to close a budget gap for the $2.7 billion Southwest light-rail line was put in motion Monday, but the proposed $211 million still would not be enough to see the troubled project to completion. https://t.co/hFuJ7Tcufq

— Star Tribune (@StarTribune) December 13, 2022

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.

The other day I wrote about how schools were drowned in COVID cash and couldn’t even spend it all, and are using the money to hire people and pay bonuses. Now we have COVID money being dumped into a boondoggle that also has nothing to do with the pandemic.

This is, of course, a feature not a bug for the government-types. COVID spending, just as COVID mandates, had nothing to do with the pandemic. COVID was an excuse to open up the money floodgates and to clamp down on your freedoms.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Fighting government is extremely frustrating, because it has the megaphone and you only have the truth. Unfortunately that means we usually lose the battles and are left saying “I told you so.” It’s infuriating.

But we do have to seize these opportunities to crow about being right, because the alternative is never chipping away at the prestige of the grifters. Over time it does have an effect. Honest.