A photo of the Gross cold storage building taken from the outside, but looking in the door to the collapsed ceiling. It is unconscionable that the Park Board would let anyone even enter this building, much less store equipment there.
BY KATHRYN KELLY
At a community meeting a few years ago, Commissioner Musich was asked if the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board (MPRB) would start the Hiawatha Golf Course project before they had the money. She replied, “We don’t start projects until we have the funding.”
On August 7, 2024, a proposal was presented to the MPRB Admin & Finance Committee for a 2024-2025 contract to pay $934,000 to private firms for work on the Hiawatha Golf Course Park Plan. Yet, the MPRB doesn’t have the money to pay the contractors. So, they proposed breaking the project into two parts. In 2024 they proposed paying the private firms $411,000 by “borrowing” $428,000 from another “funded” project, the Luce Line Trail project. No source was listed to pay back the money. The MPRB also HOPES to get the remaining $523,000 in 2025 funding from the Met Council.
What do taxpayers get for this? The contract states that it includes:
o A review of all previous work
o Three new golf course layouts
o More basement surveys
o A second traffic analysis
o More public engagement/meetings/surveys
o Some environmental investigations
o One or two field trips to other nine-hole golf courses
o Research to find out impediments to the plan caused by the historic designation
The Park Board wants to spend another million dollars studying turning Hiawatha Golf Course into a swamp, and they are taking that money from needed maintenance funding that should be used to repair collapsing buildings.
In other words, more concepts, a little research and a rehash of the same old items.
The members of the Admin and Finance Committee voted the proposal down, likely because two Commissioners wanted to keep their Trail project money. Commissioner Musich was absent. So, the Planning Group is back to the drawing board, trying to find funding for this project.
In the meantime, the cold storage building at Gross Golf Course, which stores expensive equipment, is falling down (see photo). It has been on the project list for years but keeps getting pushed back. Maybe the over $1 million spent on the Hiawatha Golf Course Plan so far could have built a high-class cold storage building for Gross Golf Course. And now that further spending on the Hiawatha project has been voted down, the $150,000 slated to be taken from the golf course budget for the Hiawatha plan can be put towards the cold storage building.
