The state senators traveling through southern Minnesota Tuesday, today and tomorrow expect to have about $970 million available next year to spread among construction projects around the state.

The problem is that they have $3.4 billion worth of requests, according to Sen. Keith Langseth, chairman of the Capital Investment Committee and leader of the caravan that made a dozen stops while traveling from Glencoe to Marshall Tuesday.

“It’s going to be $4 billion before its over,” said Langseth, DFL-Glyndon.

By lunchtime, Langseth and the other committee members had visited a Carver County truck station, heard about transportation projects being sought in Glencoe and learned of a shortage of local funds for a planned city hall in Gaylord. They’d toured the polluted Lake Titloe watershed and been told about methods for cleaning up the water draining into the Gaylord lake.

They’d been briefed on the hoped-for upgrade of the century-old rails along the Minnesota Prairie Line and were heading to Nicollet County’s Ft. Ridgely to hear more about a proposed trail that will explain the history of the Dakota Conflict battle site.

The capital investment committees in the Senate and House write the bill that funds construction projects through the sale of state bonds. The amount of spending available to the committees is determined by a formula that restricts the percentage of the state general fund that can be used to repay bonds.

That’s where the $970 million limit comes in. There may also be about $78 million in additional bonding authority available because of a veto of a bonding bill by Gov. Tim Pawlenty during this year’s legislative session.

The difficult part is that few of the requests are blatantly unnecessary or clearly more appropriately funded with local or private dollars, according to Langseth.

“I would say considerably less than a fourth of them,” he said.

Even after lopping off a quarter of the proposed projects, committee members will still have $3 in requests for every $1 in available funding. Which left local officials trying to make a lasting impression about the value of their particular project in the brief time available before committee staff prodded senators to move on to the next site.

In Gaylord, proponents of cleaning up Lake Titloe provided reports by water quality experts from Minnesota State University, a tour that showed septic systems draining directly into ditches that empty into the lake and an explanation of their wide-ranging plan to reduce the pollution levels in the lake.

Jim Swanson, the chairman of the Lake Titloe Committee, contrasted Sibley County’s small population and modest per capita income with the scope of the clean-up project. And he noted how much the city, through storm water diversion efforts, and volunteers, through efforts to improve farming and septic system practices, are doing already.

Much more can be done if the state comes through with $674,000 during the 2008 legislative session — $499,000 to help the city divert more storm water from the lake into a holding pond and $175,000 for planning and preliminary designs for restoring wetlands upstream from the lake.

“The pieces are kind of there,” Swanson said of the methods for cleaning up the lake.

What’s absent is the money.

The story was the same for city officials who are in the process of a building-swap with the library. Gaylord has been looking at expanding its library, including adding classroom space for the area’s relatively large Spanish-speaking population.

The original plan was to build a new library on a vacant lot, a project that was expected to cost $2.5 million, said Chuck Klimmek, the president of the local Economic Development Authority. Looking for a more cost-effective option, city officials decided to offer its municipal building — which included a large and under-used auditorium — to the library.

The move will boost the size of the library from 3,300 to 7,300 square feet and cost about $900,000 in renovation expenses. The city needs about $400,000 to retrofit the library for city administrative offices and is asking for about $200,000 from the state.

A suburban senator noted that bonding funds are supposed to be reserved for projects with statewide or regional significance and asked Klimmek to justify the use of state funds for a municipal building.

After the meeting, he conceded that the senator’s question makes the project a tough sell. But he noted that the city took a hit to help the library serve a broader and somewhat regional population, slashing the cost of the library project and opening the vacant lot to a new mini-mall that will help revitalize the downtown of a county seat.

“We sacrificed city hall to solve that at half the cost,” he said.

As for the Lake Titloe folks, they can make an easy case for regional or statewide significance. The polluted lake flows into the Rush River, which pours into the already polluted Minnesota River — a major contributor to the pollution of the Mississippi River.

Today, the committee will be asked for help with emergency response training facilities in Marshall, the Jeffers petroglyphs in Cottonwood County, the Mountain Lake fire and ambulance building, a bio-energy plant in Heron Lake, the Worthington fire hall, the Worthington-based community college, the Lakefield Science Center and a Fairmont sports complex.

On Thursday, New Ulm, Lake Crystal and Mankato get their turn.