BY KATHRYN KELLY
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) held an open house at the Nokomis Community Center on Jan. 16th, to show off their progress with Hiawatha Links, the new name for the Hiawatha Golf Course project.
At the entrance to the gym, the MPRB had several boxes and some plastic discs with which I could indicate which element of the project I was most interested in. I had to make one choice even though more than one was important to me.
As I went to the first 5 display boards, I felt like I was back in 2017 when I first attended these meetings. The boards asked people what they wanted on the site by having them stick blue dots on the items they like. Didn’t we all attend meetings and fill out surveys, ad nauseam, in previous years to determine this? YES! But these 5 boards were heavily oriented to non-golf items. There were 9 golf items, 13 food and beverage items, 15 non-golf activities and 18 social activities. There were many duplicates across the boards which is one way to over-represent a particular item in the results, hoping that a person will select it each time they see it. The other problem with these amenities is that most already exist in the Hiawatha and Nokomis parks. For example, why do we need to build another fishing dock a few hundred feet from the existing one on Lake Hiawatha?
I then saw boards with invalid information like the current 9-hole golf course design which is obsolete and will be replaced by 3 new designs.
Some boards contained problematic information. For example, one board talked about Theodore Wirth dredging and filling the property for the current golf course; the Park Board has shamed Superintendent Wirth for doing this. Yet, another board proposed the exact same thing for the new Hiawatha Links golf course. Also, a board stated that the plan will improve flooding to the north. This appears to be the same old solution that the City of Minneapolis has used for over 50 years; send more water to Lake Hiawatha which just continues to unfairly burden the Lake Hiawatha neighborhood with more and more water.
Then, there were disturbing elements of the plan. The proposal still plans on dumping storm water at E. 43rd St. and 19th Ave. S. – across the street from homes – for pollution mitigation. This violates Environmental Protection Agency guidelines which say “do not implement pollution mitigation near other properties.”
And a new statement is also disturbing for nearby at-risk homeowners. It says that the plan will “address potential impacts to nearby properties resulting from changes to pumping by installing a more localized pump or nearby resident sump pumps.” They have always said that the plan will “protect nearby low basements from groundwater intrusion to the same degree they are protected today.” Are they now telling homeowners to prepare for water intrusion into their homes by installing sump pumps? Is the Park Board now willing to admit that their plan will not protect the homes?
In the end, this meeting had some pretty posters and a new project name, but nothing really new to show for the $1 million dollars of golf revenue that the Park Board has spent. This meeting just reinforced that, over the past 10 years, they have been spending money hand over fist on nothing while crying poverty, and the new contractors are being paid to start again from square one. If there was an indication of total cost, I didn’t see it. We have only seen a 6-year-old estimate of up to $64 million. Certainly, costs have gone up since then. Many believe that the project will now cost over $100 million!
On the way out, the MPRB had more little boxes and plastic chips, and asked me to make a choice again. I said that I wanted another box that said, “I don’t support this project.” The employee didn’t know what to say, so I picked up a chip and laid it on the table and said, “This is my choice; keep 18 holes.”
It’s time to quit wasting money on this project and start spending golf course revenue on maintaining and enhancing the existing golf courses!
