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
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
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