08-02-2025
Legislature Q&A: Tony Albright
The 2016 Legislature adjourned without addressing key items – taxes, transportation and bonding bills. Partisan gridlock is a recurring theme. What specific measures do you support to increase the transparency and reduce the gridlock of the lawmaking process?
The House and Senate did address these items. A strongly bipartisan tax bill passed in both chambers. Unfortunately, the governor decided to forego a decision and left it to a pocket veto. The House passed a strongly bipartisan bonding bill that addressed infrastructure, local road and bridge needs. The bonding bill was not forwarded to the governor because metro DFL senators squandered our bipartisan efforts with their insistence on inserting Southwest Light Rail Transit funding.
What will it take to pass comprehensive funding for roads, bridges and transit? What sources of revenue should be raised for what specific programs? Or is current funding sufficient?
Over the course of the last biennium, the Legislature identified several existing revenue sources that could be used to provide the necessary funding to rebuild and improve our roads, bridges and expand transit in common sense ways without raising taxes. The 2015 House Transportation Bill, as passed off the house floor, was a comprehensive plan that provided $6 billion over the next 10 years, and widely confirmed as effective in moving our transportation infrastructure forward.
How would you propose to improve traffic flow at Highway 13/County Road 21 and 21/Main Avenue through Prior Lake, and how and when should the project be funded?
The last several years have seen comprehensive study and design analysis by respected transportation experts. Much debate by stakeholders has provided feedback to each one completed. If the city and its citizens do not come to agreement on a plan and schedule for improvements in the next three to five years, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and Scott County will likely move to address their own safety and traffic flow issues at this intersection and obligate the city to a response (on a timeline not of their own choosing).
