Minnesota and the Wisconsin DOT Budget

Intersting. The Captain quotes a news story, and comments (story in italics).

Minnesotans aren't clamoring for action from state leaders in the wake of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found, supporting neither a gas tax increase nor a new special session to fund bridge repairs.

The poll found 50 percent of respondents opposed raising the gas tax, while 46 percent supported it. The gap is within the poll's margin of sampling error -- 4 percentage points, plus or minus.

Minnesotans simply didn't buy the rhetoric. They saw through all of the fingerpointing, noting eventually that Oberstar did his best to route funds away from bridge and highway repair and into bike paths and visitor centers. They also found out that MnDOT has a $2.2 billion budget, more than twice that of public safety, and that perhaps adding to that budget should take second place to verifying that its existing money gets spent properly first.

Yah, well. Here in Wisconsin, we spent umpty-millions to make Hy 151 from Madistan to Iowa a very safe highway.

It is that--there's almost zero traffic on its 4-lane/divided path.