Since I started writing for the Hill & Lake Press roughly a year ago, we’ve touched on a variety of topics of concern to the Hill and Lakes area, including the park board master planning process, public safety, the Hennepin Avenue redesign, Southwest Light Rail and the City Council’s quiet “up-zoning” of our neighborhoods.
The sheer volume of issues has been shocking to me; each, individually, is highly consequential, with impacts that could last decades, and collectively it feels like we’ve crammed a decade’s worth of news into a single year.
While I struggle to characterize many of these developments as positive, there have been some clear wins, and it’s worth taking a moment to highlight a few:
The Cedar-Isles Park Plan
This is, by far, the brightest spot in my view. While the initial park proposals were hair-raising to many, the park board commendably shifted focus to community consensus items, making water quality and ecology a primary focus, and dramatically reducing its proposals for historical built structures that would never, realistically, be maintained appropriately.
Although the process is not over, the current park plan is, overall, a win for the park board, a win for the community, and a win for the millions of regional park users who make the Chain of Lakes the most visited park area in the state.
Public Safety
Throughout the fall, I wrote a series of articles about the public safety problems the city is facing. While these issues remain very real and don’t have obvious quick fixes, there are bright spots. Operation Endeavor, the city’s multi-jurisdictional approach to decreasing violent crime, has proved a success in its first six months, with violent crime having decreased by double digits since the program’s inception.
Operation Endeavor will continue into the spring. Last October, I wrote about the statewide shortage of officers and the 2022 Legislature’s appropriation of precisely zero new dollars for officer recruitment and retention. As predicted, that’s changed this year, with the governor initially proposing $300 million in local public safety aid, and then increasing that number to $550 million in his revised budget.
Much of this aid is in the form of discretionary grants to local law enforcement agencies, meaning it can be used for officer recruitment and retention if those agencies deem it appropriate. If this proposal makes it through our now-unified Legislature, it will be a win for public safety and a win for our communities.
Southwest Light Rail/Met Council
No, I don’t regard SWLRT as a “win” for our neighborhoods, but last May I wrote an article touching on the project’s apparent mismanagement, and how the construction process has made our objecting neighbors appear positively clairvoyant. I noted in conclusion that the Met Council’s overreach may ultimately result in losing its cherished status as an independent, unelected body not directly accountable to voters. Fast-forward to March 2023.
The Office of the Legislative Auditor has released two of an expected four reports on SWLRT, both of which have confirmed significant mismanagement by the Met Council, and bills with the potential to strip the Council of its independence from voters (spearheaded by our own Sen. Scott Dibble and Rep. Frank Hornstein) are now working their way through the Legislature. The governor has indicated an openness to signing such a bill if it reaches his desk.
Bridges!
Back in April of last year, when we were discussing ways to improve the Cedar-Isles park plans, I highlighted CAC chair Win Rockwell’s excellent suggestion that the park board should commit resources to restoring and preserving the emblematic channel bridges at Lake of the Isles and Bde Maka Ska.
Appendix A to the current version of the park board plan is devoted to historical preservation, and confirms that repairing and preserving these area-defining structures will be a priority in the coming decades, rather than continued deterioration or (worst case) replacement.
There has never been a legislative session where money is more likely to fall off the back of a truck, and let’s hope the park board can get creative and arrange for one of those trucks to stop on a bridge.
