Committee hears overview of Corridors of Commerce program, funding and eligibility rules

Matt Burrows, a policy analyst with House Research, told the House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee on Feb. 11, 2025, that the Corridors of Commerce program funds capacity and freight-related improvements on Minnesota’s trunk highway system and operates as a competitive project-selection program administered by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT).

The program, Burrows said, was created in legislation in 2013 and has been revised several times. It targets projects on the interstate system, U.S. highways and other trunk highways and is separate from MnDOT’s general project-development process. “The basic articulated goals of the program are roughly twofold,” Burrows said: “provide for capacity expansion … particularly looking at gaps or bottlenecks” and improve freight movement and economic competitiveness.

Burrows outlined the program’s key eligibility and design features: projects must be on the trunk highway system (a subset of the National Highway System), fit into one of two statutory classifications (capacity development or freight access/mobility improvements), and be sufficiently developed to begin construction within four years under current law. He described the scoring and selection process: an open solicitation of project ideas, a local screening step, MnDOT eligibility review and a scoring matrix used to rank projects. Funding from a given round is generally distributed by ranking and by three geographic allocation buckets: a Metro allocation (bounded roughly by Interstates 494 and 694), a Metro-connector allocation (an 11-county outer ring) and a Regional Center allocation (the rest of the state). Burrows also said the legislature set a readiness-development set-aside of up to 10% of program funds to support initial scoping and design for projects that are not yet fully developed for scoring.

On funding, Burrows said the program has used a mix of trunk-highway bonds and appropriations and has received more than $1.7 billion in authorizations and awards since inception, with a recurring trunk-highway fund base appropriation of $25 million per year. He emphasized that the bond authorizations have been structured across session years and that the timing of when funds are available can stretch across fiscal years depending on bonding schedules and debt capacity.

Committee members pressed Burrows and MnDOT staff about public access to project lists and scores, and the relationship between Corridors of Commerce scoring and other statewide priorities such as greenhouse gas analyses. Nicole Estat, identified in the hearing as MnDOT’s capital planning director overseeing the program, said MnDOT’s website lists prior selected projects (2018 and earlier) and that the agency posts announcements and an Excel spreadsheet with awards and scores; she said MnDOT was updating the site in advance of a call for readiness-advancement funding. On greenhouse-gas mitigation and technical advisory board work, Estat said greenhouse-gas impact assessment is part of the analysis required for some trunk-highway projects and that the Technical Advisory Board addresses measurement and modeling for those analyses, but she distinguished that GHG assessment from the 10% readiness-development pot described by Burrows.

Committee members asked several policy questions: whether Corridors funds are carved out of the same trunk-highway funding pool (Burrows said they are funded from the same trunk-highway fund and bonding authority), and why the program exists separate from MnDOT’s normal highway programming (Burrows described legislative desire to prioritize certain capacity projects and to provide a vehicle for larger or regionally significant projects that districts could not otherwise accomplish). Members also asked about whether the scoring explicitly accounts for multimodal alternatives; Estat said the program’s scoring is primarily focused on trunk-highway work and does not directly score other modes except to the extent projects relate to statewide multimodal policy objectives.

Burrows and MnDOT staff also reviewed legislative history and past Office of the Legislative Auditor work that prompted statutory changes in 2017 and further refinements in 2018 and 2023, including requirements to use statutory criteria in scoring, add regional balance considerations, and add the local screening stage prior to MnDOT’s scoring.

The presentation closed with staff offering to provide committee members with the more detailed maps and the spreadsheet of awards and scores that MnDOT maintains.