Morrow named to 35W panel

Lawmakers to review MnDOT's bridge decisions

By Mark Fischenich

Freshman state Rep. Terry Morrow of St. Peter has been appointed to a special committee formed to investigate the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.

The bipartisan panel of eight representatives and eight senators will review bridge inspection reports from the past 40 years and examine whether decisions made by Minnesota Department of Transportation officials contributed to the collapse of the bridge, according to House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

Kelliher appointed Morrow and the other seven members of the House to the panel, which will also attempt to determine whether other Minnesota bridges are unsafe.

“We’re trying to look at what happened and what we can learn from that to keep it from happening again,” said Morrow, a member of the House Transportation Fi-nance Committee.

They won’t be duplicating the work of National Transportation Safety Board inspectors investigating the structural reasons for the collapse, he said.

“We’re not doing what the NTSB is doing,” Morrow said. “... That’s really a role for engineers, experts.”

The committee will look at whether the state’s transportation department is adequately staffed to do the inspections required to make sure bridges aren’t in danger of collapse, he said. That will include checking to see if the agency’s salary structure is prompting many of its experienced and most qualified engineers to move to private engineering firms.

It will also try to quantify the gap between the available funding and the amount of money needed to adequately maintain the state’s bridges.

“This is a big task, and one of the things we’re going to be looking at is whether MnDOT has the people-power and resources to do what they’ve been asked to do,” Morrow said.

Morrow, an attorney and college professor, doesn’t have a professional background in transportation but has immersed himself in the topic since being appointed to the transportation committee. In his first legislative session this spring, he earned a spot on the transportation finance conference committee, a group of five House members and five senators who worked out a compromise transportation funding bill that included a gas tax increase and other methods of boosting transportation funding.

That bill was vetoed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and Morrow was a vocal proponent of overriding the veto — an effort that came up short of the required two-thirds majority in the House. This summer, he’s attended a pair of national transportation conferences.

“As a bit of a transportation geek, my reputation is growing here,” he said.

Morrow is also on the joint House-Senate transportation committee that has been meeting to respond to the bridge collapse, which occurred Aug. 1 and is believed to have killed 13 people along with shutting down a portion of the state’s busiest highway. That committee — focused more on the immediate needs for replacing the I-35W bridge — is meeting again next week.

The investigative committee will hold its first hearing sometime after that and will likely attempt to complete much of its work before the start of the 2008 legislative session in February.

Morrow said the committee’s work is vital because regardless of political differences about the proper role of government, there’s almost universal agreement that safe roads and bridges are at the heart of it.

“In a crisis or tragedy like this, one of the things we have to be careful to do is learn and improve,” he said. “... Public safety and infrastructure is at the core of what government does.”