March 7 Update:

The Community Preferred Alternative Act has been officially introduced in the House (HF 4646) and Senate (SF 4677)! We are grateful to Representative Samantha Sencer-Mura and Senator Foung Hawj for leading on this important legislation. Take action today to ask your legislator to sign-on!  

Moving forward, the bills must be heard in the Transportation Committee to be eligible for passage. You can take action by contacting transportation committee chairs Sen. Scott Dibble and Rep. Frank Hornstein to ask them to schedule a hearing.

Minnesota legislators must act to require that MnDOT listen to the desires of impacted communities.

Major transportation projects, both in the past and in the present, have displaced and segregated minority and low-income communities, contributing to economic, racial, and environmental inequality. Highway planners ignored the objections of impacted communities and bulldozed their neighborhoods.

Today, MnDOT is required to develop one or more design “alternatives” for major, federally-funded highway projects to fulfill requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Minnesota Environmental Protection Act (MEPA). However, this requirement does not require MnDOT to select or even study solutions that are preferred by the communities directly affected by the project.

A current example of this is the I-94/252 project, where MnDOT has continued to advance highway expansion options despite abundant and long-standing opposition from community members and local elected leaders.

To ensure that the voices of impacted communities are heard and that all options for the projects are fairly studied, we are advocating for the "Community Preferred Alternative Act."

This law would require MnDOT to study a project option if an impacted local government passes a resolution asking the department to do so.

Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives introduced HB 5154, a similar bill that would require TxDOT to study “an alternative design for the project that has been approved by a vote of the governing body of a municipality or county that represents an affected local community; and the negative impacts to an affected local community from previous transportation projects.”

Furthermore, the new law would include a requirement that MnDOT must obtain a favorable vote from a project’s policy advisory committee before moving forward with selecting a preferred alternative and beginning construction.

For most major projects, MnDOT creates a policy advisory committee or PAC. The PAC consists of elected and appointed officials from impacted communities who provide decision direction. However the PAC does not currently have formal decision making authority for the project, and MnDOT can ignore their concerns. The Community Preferred Alternative Act would make community consent mandatory before major transportation projects can move forward.

Take action today! Your email will be sent to your state senator, state representative, and Governor Walz.