It’s now May and the Cedar-Isles master planning process marches onward. We’re entering what I would describe as the “black box” phase, where we all nervously bite our fingernails as we wait for the Park Board staff and consultants to unveil their “preferred park concept” in early June. We don’t know what it will contain, and waiting is hard, at least for me.
Judging from recent traffic in my email inbox, I’m not alone in this regard and the (probably unavoidable) lack of transparency at this point is amplifying an already existing and profound mistrust between the community and our local units of government, including the Park Board and the Met Council.
This is a serious problem for all concerned, but I believe it is possible to turn this planning process into a success that also takes a meaningful first step toward rebuilding community trust.
What is the source of this mistrust? From proposed pickleball courts and pointless bike trails in Kenwood Park, to the flea-bitten Southwest Light Rail project, to the one-size-fits-all cudgel of Minneapolis 2040, there is a sense among many residents that their preferences and concerns are nothing more than a meddlesome nuisance to our elected (or semi-elected) leaders, routinely and casually swept aside to make space for the grand plans and brave visions of emboldened urban planning “experts.”
Disregard has led to distrust
To put an exclamation point on this perceived disregard for community feedback, one of our CAC members recently sent me an article from an urban planning website, www.strongtowns.org, entitled “Most Public Engagement Is Worse Than Useless,” by Ruben Anderson, a Canadian urban design consultant.
The title is intentionally provocative, but the piece itself is a thoughtful meditation on the inherent tensions between urban design that requires actual engineering expertise, and the inherent expertise residents develop simply by living in a neighborhood and learning its rhythms.
Both have their place, Anderson argues, but resident expertise is often not recognized at all or is thoughtlessly reduced to “a sad dot-voting exercise.”
The point behind the title of Anderson’s article is that asking for public input is a waste of time when the answer is already clear, and seeking it out creates public distrust when that input is inevitably disregarded (“they wanted solar panels and they got weatherstripping”).
On the flip side, resident input is critical for larger-scale, lived-in urban design, and casually disregarding resident expertise can ruin neighborhoods. Anderson cites one “recovering engineer” who “describes how he would arrogantly ruin neighborhoods and destroy streets, thanks to his confidence that his asphalt was for the better. He was the expert…. Citizens were promised something better, but what they got was something worse.”
We have seen far too much of this arrogant disregard from our local units of government in recent years, and that disregard has created a justifiable mistrust when it comes to the master planning process for Cedar and Isles. Public input for Southwest Light Rail was sad, dot-voting exercise if ever there was one, and the construction process has made our objecting neighbors look practically clairvoyant.
Likewise, the Park Board’s inability to rein in its paving urges during the Kenwood Park master planning process still prompts eye-rolling and disbelief among neighbors, and the upcoming Hennepin Avenue redesign is filled with paternalistic assurances that small businesses don’t really need parking and we’ll all learn to enjoy riding busses or biking in February.
Don’t even get me started on the Park Board’s hubris in thinking it had the institutional competence to solve homelessness by allowing camping and rampant drug use in our parks. Of course, not all of this is the Park Board’s fault, and the master planning process itself is mandated by the Met Council, which has not exactly covered itself in glory recently, especially regarding Southwest Light Rail.
No amount of expert reassurance will change the fact that they’re running mass transit through some of the least dense (and least needy) neighborhoods in the city, destroying a vast swath of beloved and heavily used parkland in the process, and trying to build a tunnel they can’t seem to finish that’s causing people to fear for their safety in their own homes. In the process, they are spending a sum so vast—nearly $3 billion—that it would make a material difference in Ukraine’s fight against the Russians. That’s not to mention that it is the one issue that managed to unite both Democrats and Republicans this legislative session: an audit of Southwest Light Rail.
People distrust the Met Council with good reason, and if it doesn’t start engaging more respectfully with the communities it serves, it may soon find Democrats and Republicans united again to strip away what it values most: its independence from the ordinary political process.
In light of these many “expert” failures, is it any wonder a large number of people don’t trust the Cedar-Isles master-planning process? Especially given the overreach in the initial “park concepts”— boardwalks and parkway closures, built structures, lake decks and floating bogs. In proposing this Disneylandification of two of the crown jewels in the Minneapolis park system—something no one asked for—the Park Board consultants never took the time to actually learn the area or think meaningfully about the impact on park users or area residents.
Needed: humility
As Ruben Anderson advocates in his article on public engagement, good urban design comes from humility, effective public engagement, small iterative changes, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t.
Instead, we’ve been presented with grand, sweeping visions that treat these parks as isolated petri dishes, rather than as organic and connected parts of a larger community. Indeed, some residents believe this amusement park focus is all a misbegotten effort to drive LRT ridership, essentially turning these parks into the tail that wags the dog that is Southwest Light Rail.
Despite all this negativity, I am actually cautiously optimistic that the Cedar-Isles master planning process can produce good results for all concerned. Nothing has happened that can’t be taken back and—unlike the neighbor-against-neighbor conflict surrounding the Hiawatha golf course—here there is a strong community consensus against built structures and in favor of improved water quality and preserving green and natural spaces. That’s a firm foundation on which to build.
Public input has been informed, articulate and remarkably consistent. The Park Board’s ecological consultants have been widely praised. Emma Pachuta, the project manager, has won over a number of people (including me) with her responsiveness, her willingness to thoughtfully engage on difficult subjects and her steady and professional demeanor. Many of the steps necessary to keep Cedar wild and Isles pastoral are already outlined in detailed documents (such as the Natural Areas Plan and Ecological Systems Plan) from the Park Board, the DNR, and others.
All the ingredients necessary for a thoughtful, responsive plan are present, and while some important matters remain unresolved (such as bike trails on Isles, ped paths on Cedar), ditching the structures and focusing on water quality and green space will make a whole lot of people very happy and be an important step in rebuilding community trust that’s been badly broken in recent years. Everybody wins.
As for the unresolved issues, it may not be possible to reach a consensus on all of them, but if we keep discussing them among ourselves, the CAC and board staff, we’ll keep generating ideas, and some may eventually attract majority support.
In particular, if we can safely treat the “preferred park concept” as a second draft (which I’ve been assured it is) rather than a final one, we can continue the conversation on those outstanding issues during the public comment period and try to reach a fair accommodation on those specific points as well.
Regardless, the existing layout strikes me as presenting a fairly binary choice to politicians and staffers: Either (a) embrace an existing, broad community consensus and make it the centerpiece of your plan or (b) ignore or marginalize that consensus in favor of other less obvious interests and let the chips fall.
Option (b) is certainly an available choice (and clearly has been made before), but unless I’m badly misreading things, anyone who does so will be acting at their political peril this time around. Trust is earned and choosing the first option would be an important and effective initial step for both the Park Board and Met Council to begin rebuilding broken community trust.
