Star Tribune
Minneapolis Park Board to consider killing plan to make Midtown Greenway a regional trail
The Minneapolis Park Board is considering canceling plans to obtain regional trail status for the popular Midtown Greenway, owing to concerns that it will wind up on the hook for lighting, safety and legal expenses.
Making a regional trail out of the Greenway, a six-mile bikeway that traverses south Minneapolis from Bde Maka Ska to the Mississippi River, would bring additional funding, higher safety standards and membership in the metro area’s network of park and trail connections. It also could help further cycling advocates’ goal of extending the Greenway across the river into St. Paul.
But the Greenway corridor has expensive needs, including plowing, lights that need to be upgraded for millions of dollars and the occasional homeless encampment that may require sanitation. The long-range planning process would sort out what expenses would fall to Minneapolis, Hennepin County or the Park Board. But some park commissioners fear they would be stuck with the bill.
The commissioners are scheduled to take a vote next week on a resolution to suspend the planning process for the Greenway, which would end hopes for achieving regional status. That possibility has incited the ire of cycling advocates.
“Having the Met Council and the Park Board would be a tremendous boost to our efforts to extend the Greenway over the river, but it won’t happen if they stop the master plan,” said Soren Jensen, executive director of the Midtown Greenway Coalition.
Every four years, the Met Council identifies trails that would be promising extensions of its regional parks and trails system. The Park Board nominated the Midtown Greenway in 2020 for review and the Met Council added it to the list, pegging it as its No. 1 candidate.
“To me, it was probably the biggest no-brainer of the bunch,” said Emmett Mullin, the Met Council’s regional parks manager. “It’s such an important and already functional trail.”
The Greenway is owned by the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority and operated by Minneapolis, which maintains it. Security for the trail is provided by both the Sheriff’s Office and the Minneapolis police.
But neither the county nor the city has expertise overseeing trails, so the Minneapolis Park Board — one of 10 Twin Cities parks agencies and counties that work with the Met Council — began a “due diligence process” to launch a regional trail plan for the Greenway. That process uncovered several major areas of concern.
A number of Park Board commissioners expressed fears at a March meeting about the Met Council’s already underfunded regional trail network, which is facing significant maintenance issues. The funding for the Greenway that would be provided by the Met Council — estimated to be $40,000 a year in operations and maintenance, and $70,000 in capital — is just one-tenth of the total cost of managing the Greenway.
Commissioners raised concerns about wading into a legal minefield of policing responsibilities. The Park Board currently is facing its biggest lawsuit ever, an American Civil Liberties Union complaint about the ejection of homeless encampments from city parks in 2020.
They also worried that getting involved in the Greenway could muddy accountability regarding customer service. Should the Park Board become the Greenway’s operator while the county continues to own it and the city maintains it, park users may have a hard time distinguishing the responsibility of each agency.
“What I have been hearing from planning staff is that we don’t have the staff capacity to work on the parks that we already have full and complete jurisdiction over,” said Commissioner Becky Alper, who proposed in March to cease work on making the Greenway a regional trail. Commissioners voted 5-4 not to suspend the rules to allow a vote on the motion.
Michael Schroeder, the Park Board’s assistant superintendent for planning, doesn’t see any downside to completing the long-range plan. He said that doing so would ensure the Greenway becomes a regional trail while unscrambling the roles and financial responsibilities of the Park Board, Hennepin County, Minneapolis and the Met Council. Completing the plan would not necessarily commit the Park Board to spending any money on it, he said.
“[Staffers] were not looking to get out of doing a master plan,” Schroeder said. “We were actually interested in completing it and then providing the information to commissioners that they only have in part at this point.” If commissioners don’t want to spend time on the Greenway, that’s their prerogative, he said.
Jensen, of the Greenway Coalition, said he hopes the Park Board will complete the long-range plan, make the Greenway a regional trail and take the $70,000 that the Met Council would offer to cover incremental improvements like water fountains, bathrooms, picnic tables and wayfinding signage.
“Don’t have wild speculation that you’re going to be on the hook for all kinds of expenses that you don’t know would be in the inter-agency operations agreement,” he told commissioners. “Don’t stop the process that’s already started.”
Star Tribune
Palestinian officials say an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza killed 15
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering the displaced in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s emergency unit in northern Gaza, confirmed the toll and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by both militant groups inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
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