Hennepin County is designing a disabled access ramp to the Midtown Greenway in southern Minneapolis, but the plans are already spurring neighborhood resistance because construction will dramatically alter the long-running Soo Line Community Garden.
The park was set up 30 years ago on a vacant lot that was lost to a small group of volunteers. Preceding the adjacent Midtown Greenway, which opened in 2000, Minneapolis Park and Recreation is considered an “old garden” because it existed before the Park Board acquired the land in 2010. It has more than 100 organic plots serving about 200 gardeners, including Children from nearby Whittier International Primary School.
“We will take a class at a time and walk in there and the students will get a chance to do some farming,” said Jeff “Nacho” Carlson, youth programs coordinator at Whittier School. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had children chasing a monarch butterfly or have stopped and listened to a Cardinal and been in that little oasis of nature.”
In a high-density neighborhood like Whittier, where most of the land around the Midtown Greenway driveway is private, Soo Line Garden was the only government-owned site with enough space to build an access ramp, said Amber Klein, design project manager.
She and consultant Greg Brown of Kimley-Horn have come up with a few potential designs over the past eight months, which have so far been shared with a small working group of community stakeholders. Each design includes 8- to 10-foot-wide, 500-foot-wide bi-directional black bitumen bike road paver through the lawn.
“The Whittier neighborhood is excited about getting into the Midtown Greenway, but I think we definitely understood and heard from the community that they value Soo Line Community Garden and the green space it provides,” Klein said. “We’re trying to put our foot down there and have a minimal impact on the lawn, the pollinators and the trees.”
The gardeners in Sue Lane have been a consistent voice against the boycott’s plans. Through public comments during recent Minneapolis park board meetings, outreach booths at neighborhood events, and a “Stop the Destruction” MoveOn petition, they argued that the county could find another site along the Midtown Greenway already unused as a community park.
“It looks like Hennepin County just picked the garden and didn’t really think about anything else, but we really think it would do a lot of damage to the area,” said gardener Stephanie Bradley.
Gardeners proposed an alternative design that would leave the garden intact and install an access ramp on the south slope of Midtown Greenway.
But county planners are not keen on this suggestion. Klein said it is located on property held by the Hennepin County Regional Rail Authority for a future high-speed transit line.
There are no plans or funding pending for this line, but the District Council, Metro Transit and Metropolitan Council considered the possibility of creating a “Midtown Corridor Transitway” in 2014.
The Whittier Alliance, a member of the Access Ramp Working Group, wants to prioritize the transit line because it “will serve more people than any other line and have a significant impact on the greenhouse gas reductions we need to achieve collectively,” the director’s executive said. Kaley Brown.
But Soren Jensen of the Midtown Greenway Coalition, another member of the working group, said Soo Line gardeners convinced him that an access ramp could coexist with the railroad on the other side of the Greenway from the garden.
“There are plenty of good reasons to explore it, but so far Hennepin County hasn’t quite been willing to think about it,” he said. “We encourage them to be more open and flexible.”
The working group will then meet in January to select two or three potential bike path and ramp designs. The county plans to present these plans to the public in February and use the feedback to select the concept. They will present the final configuration to the Park Board for approval, followed by construction in 2023.
With support from the Whittier Alliance, the Park Board appropriated $370,000 in Park Dedication funds for the project, subject to Board acceptance. Federal regional begging funds will make up the rest of the estimated $1.4 million construction cost.