Incumbent 84-year-old tax and transportation policy guru, Ron Erhardt, faces challenger, Dario Anselmo, who garnered the Republican endorsement despite sharing many of the moderate views that hastened Erhardt’s defection from the party.

Anti-tax and pro-gun organizations are most active among the groups staking their position on contested races.

Political and ideological opponents did not waste their chance to grab some of the spotlight from Tuesday's groundbreaking.

The news that state campaign finance officials had released a long-awaited statement on donor disclosure rules barely made a ripple in the political news cycle, but the opinion figures to make Minnesota a critical battleground in the national, post-Citizens United legal war over transparency, privacy and campaign money.

The Taxpayers League of Minnesota is airing a new television commercial on cable stations calling on DFL Gov. Mark Dayton to negotiate a budget without tax increases. The ad asserts that state government spending would increase by 12 percent in the next biennium under the $34 billion budget that was passed by the Republican-led Legislature.

For five months DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and the GOP-controlled Legislature sparred at the Capitol over how to eliminate the state’s $5 billion budget deficit. But with the legislative session concluded and no end to the budget impasse in sight, the debate will now move beyond St. Paul as legislators face constituents in their home districts.

The budgets being advanced by Republican legislative majorities have elicited a lot of grumbling from both DFL and nonpartisan fiscal hawks and insiders to the process. But while the most vocal criticism has revolved around the use of spending and savings figures that are not sanctioned by state agency fiscal notes, there have also been expressions of alarm over the GOP approach to enacting many of the envisioned budget cuts.

With the House and Senate now in Republican control, issues that have long been bottled up appear to stand a chance of making it onto the ballot in the next statewide election in 2012.

There were few surprises when the Minnesota House GOP released committee rosters last week. Legislators, Republican and Democrat alike, landed in spots where they've sat before, or - in the case of new lawmakers - where they have accrued relevant experience in their professional and personal lives.

I want to compare two recent transportation projects in Minnesota.