Minnesota Council of Health Plans director Julie Brunner sent a letter to state agencies on Friday to alert officials to the error-riddled data that insurance companies have received.

Advocates of increased funding for roads, bridges and transit projects across Minnesota hope to recreate a formula that worked once before. In the wake of the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, a broad coalition of groups, which included the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce as well as labor unions, joined hands to push for a 5.5 cent gas tax increase in the 2008 session.

State lawmakers and transportation advocates have their summer homework cut out for them in crafting a politically feasible way to begin addressing a projected $20 billion shortfall in the state’s transportation funding over the next two decades.

Meet Sarah Clarke, of the Minnesota State Colleges Student Association.

In the aftermath of the 2013 legislative session, transportation advocates have mostly lamented lawmakers’ decision not to increase funding for transit and highway projects. But this year’s transportation finance bill contained a silver lining for greater Minnesota counties that has gone mostly unnoted.

Whether the 2013 legislative session in Minnesota was a successful one depends on which Democrat you ask. While many long-sought DFL priorities were achieved at the end of the five-month session, including gay marriage and increased spending on education, a handful of high-priority issues were ultimately shelved in 2013 in the hustle and bustle of crafting a $38 billion budget.

DFL legislative leaders have taken a proposed increase in the state’s per gallon gasoline tax off the table. Although nothing at the Legislature is ever truly dead until adjournment, the fate of the gasoline tax appears to be sealed, according to news reports and the House and Senate transportation chairs.

Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration on Thursday for the first time floated an idea to House and Senate transportation negotiators for funding highway construction. Minnesota Department of Transportation Commissioner Charlie Zelle told the House and Senate transportation conferees that $300 million in trunk highway bonding would be a way to pick up the pace on improving the state’s transportation infrastructure.

Everyone expected a bumpy road en route to a politically viable 2013 transportation bill, but the events of the past week have suggested that it may be entirely impassable.

The battle over transit funding that’s brewing at the Capitol this year has its roots in the 2008 transportation bill that ultimately saw the Legislature override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto.