editorials

A major bridge has fallen, but not much else appeared to have changed Tuesday, when the 2008 Legislature convened and picked up the transportation funding fight about where they'd left it nearly nine months ago.

DFLers unveiled a new bill that's slightly bigger and better for bridge repairs. Otherwise, it's very much like the old bill -- the one Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed, and that failed to win enough House GOP support to become law over that veto.

This might not be a classic case of legislative insanity. Doing the same thing could produce a different result, if a handful of House Republicans have had a change of heart. But no DFL architect of the new bill pointed yesterday to a feature added to soften a GOP objection or lure a GOP vote. No previously reluctant House Republican was announcing his or her support.

And little of the optimism that usually attends the start of a session was palpable, whether the topic was transportation or any other state need. Talk in the corridors was not about bipartisan negotiations, but about vetoes, overrides, and the governor's unilateral, meat-ax budget-balancing power known as "unallotment."

What ought to be evident to legislators and the governor is that partisan paralysis carries an increasingly high price.

Rep. Alice Hausman, the St. Paul DFLer who heads the House bonding committee, learned recently that when an inability to compromise took state government into partial shutdown in 2005, Moody's was watching. In October 2006, the Wall Street bond rating agency told the University of Minnesota that it was denying the state its top rating because of "the challenge of potential political gridlock, preventing the Legislature from reaching consensus for its budgets, including a state government shutdown that occurred in 2005 for 13 days."

In other words, state leaders can add the millions of dollars in higher interest payments that go with a less-than-optimal bond rating to the better-known costs of lawmaking gridlock. Delay makes building repairs more expensive, roads more congested, aging bridges more "fracture critical."

Inaction on transportation, building projects and the state's budget deficit this year will also take a toll on public confidence in state government. That's a precious commodity that state leaders allow to erode at their peril -- and Minnesota's.