"Done deal" comes undone at Met Council

A "done deal" to let private DeLaSalle High School build a football field on public Nicollet Island parkland fell into disarray Wednesday when the Metropolitan Council rejected a land swap proposed by Minneapolis park board administrative staff. Met Council members said the deal, which the Metropolitan Parks and Open Space Commission had also rejected, would violate their fiduciary responsibility to the regional park system.

But the decision came just two days after the Met Council's Community Development Committee voted unanimously in favor of the scheme, and only hours after stadium backers had been calling it a done deal.

Why did Met Council members change their minds and their votes?

Met Council members learned that Minneapolis park board administration staff had not revealed that the property they proposed to trade was already protected public parkland and has been since 1971. For Met Council Member and Community Development Committee Chair Natalie Haas Steffen, that raised "trust issues." Met Council members also expressed concern about appraisals showing the park board property worth almost $2 million less than the Nicollet Island parkland, and they voted the deal down.

In its place, Metropolitan Council Chairman Peter Bell pushed through a plan he admitted was "not perfect" and "messy," which he and Minneapolis Park Board Attorney Brian Rice concocted as Met Council members waited 20 minutes for their meeting to start. It trades away regional park protections on the Nicollet Island property for protections on the same land the park board originally offered, plus a promise to allow regional park protections on unspecified park land to be named later.

But Minneapolis park commissioners never gave park staff authority to offer the original land swap, let alone the last minute replacement deal. In fact, Attorney Rice, a DeLaSalle graduate, assured Minneapolis park commissioners in March 2006 that finding and paying for replacement parkland was DeLaSalle's responsibility, not the park board's: "There ARE restrictions on this land that the Met Council holds, and that the State of Minnesota holds. DeLaSalle is going to have to, under this agreement, get those conditions released. And if for example, the Met Council says, to DeLaSalle and the park board, 'Okay, we will release these restrictions, provided that you go out and replace this 1.3 acres of land' - that is a cost that DeLaSalle must bear; otherwise we don't have an agreement."
The deal still needs approval of the Minneapolis park board and the State of Minnesota. The state Court of Appeals hears a suit Sept. 18 filed under state law requiring options be explored before developers destroy historic resources.