Our Streets-led and Supported Policies Included in Senate, House Transportation Bill, but 2023 VMT Win is Under Threat
Budget bills are on the move as the Minnesota House and Senate pass omnibus transportation bills. Our Streets is tracking progress at the state capitol as we enter the last few weeks of the 2025 legislative session. Elements of the Highway Justice Act and other Our Streets-led efforts continue to advance.
Where does the legislative process go from here?
In the process of establishing legislative rules and processes, legislative leadership sets deadlines for bills to be heard in various committees. Bills that are acted on favorably by committees in each chamber can be rolled into Omnibus policy and finance bills. These large bills take elements from many other bills and meet budget targets, the amount that the various bills can spend from the state budget.
On April 28th, the House passed its omnibus bill, and on May 1st, the Senate passed its companion bill. In the coming two weeks, the legislature will convene conference committees to reconcile the differences between these bills before sending the agreed-upon language back to the House and the Senate to approve by the end of the legislative session on May 19th.
Our Streets will continue to track this process at the Capitol, so stay tuned for more updates.
What are the key takeaways from the Senate Bill?
The Senate transportation bill has been, for the most part, a bipartisan bill with many good policy initiatives that balance priorities in a difficult fiscal context. Senate transportation leaders have set out project development process changes for major highway projects and projects on county and local roads funded through state aid programs.
These policies include Our Streets-led and supported policies like:
- Clarifying highway purposes to include all modes of transportation along our trunk highway system, giving Minnesota the flexibility to invest holistically in bike, pedestrian, and transit investments along trunk highways, and funding mitigation projects to reduce vehicle miles traveled.
- Establishing bylaws and additional powers for MnDOT’s Policy Advisory Committees on the I-94, 252, and Olson Memorial Highway projects to address concerns with the public process that elected officials have raised over the past several years across these project corridors.
- Updating MnDOT’s project development process so that purpose and need documents (guiding project documents that define the transportation issues a project will address) will be developed holistically and will no longer bias certain project design and scoping processes that favor highway expansions.
- Requiring that MnDOT conduct multi-disciplinary project development so the department will more holistically consider projects, beyond just the perspectives of traffic engineers
- Providing local and county governments the flexibility to implement county and state aid street projects by eliminating the cumbersome variance process for these projects and allowing better design standards to be used. This will enable cities to implement safe street designs that protect all road users.
Several policies in the Senate Bill harm our progress towards a more complete multimodal system for all Minnesotans, regardless of how people choose to travel. These include:
- Eliminating most of the funding for the Northern Lights Express train to Duluth
- Directing efficiency savings at MnDOT to the corridors of commerce program, an initiative that will fund additional highway expansions. MnDOT also opposes this provision.
What are the key takeaways from the House Bill?
Contrary to the Senate bill, the Minnesota House Omnibus bill has many initiatives that harm Minnesota’s transportation system’s ability to connect communities by all modes of transportation and do so safely, affordably, and efficiently.
The biggest policy issue with the bill is the effort, led by house republicans, to overturn the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) bill from the 2023 and 2024 legislative session. This policy builds out climate accountability for highway projects, requiring the state to invest in transit, biking, walking, or other infrastructure to offset the climate impacts of highways. The House bill also includes significant cuts to transit and active transportation.
The current house bill would eliminate project-by-project analysis for VMT and climate pollution for highway expansions and delay the implementation of the study of MnDOT’s entire system by an additional year to 2028.
In essence, this gives highway projects a three-year free pass on climate accountability and worsens the existing carve-outs to allow projects to move forward despite this law’s ambitious goals. The human cost of this delay will be more projects like the Highway 252 expansion advancing, which is on track to be the largest highway-driven displacement in communities of color since the destruction of Cedar-Riverside and Rondo in the 1960s.
The House bill does include one strong policy initiative led by the House DFL and Our Streets. This includes a measure to open MnDOT’s black box, making agency and project information much more accessible to Minnesotans. It would also require MnDOT to articulate how transportation spending advances MnDOT’s statutory goals.
Our Streets will continue to fight to make a transportation system that serves all Minnesotans and creates vibrant and connected communities across our state.
Stay tuned for more updates as the session progresses.
State Legislative Priorities
Let’s ask our representatives to pass legislation that advances a people-first transportation system that prioritizes climate, racial, and economic justice.