Park Board Staff's Misdeeds Undo 'done Deal'
From the Friends of the Riverfront Website
Park board attorney Brian Rice's pleaded with the Met Council to save his swap: But the Met Council said it went against their fiduciary duty to protect regional parksA "done deal" to let a private school build a football field on public Nicollet Island parkland fell into disarray Aug. 22, 2007 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 even a few hours before the vote stadium backers had been calling it a done deal. Why did Met Council members change their minds and their votes? They learned that Minneapolis Park Board administration had hidden the fact that the property they wanted 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." She and a majority of the Metropolitan Council voted the deal down.
Metropolitan Council Member Natalie Haas Steffen shot an angry look toward Minneapolis Park Board staff: Citing "trust issues," she voted against a land swap Minneapolis park board staff had proposed without telling what they knew about the property.Instead, Metropolitan Council President Peter Bell pushed a plan he admitted was "not perfect" and "messy" and which he and Minneapolis Park Board Attorney Brian Rice concocted at the last minute as Met Council members waited 20 minutes for their meeting to start. The new deal trades away regional park protections on the Nicollet Island property for the same redundant protections on the land the park board originally offered, plus a promise to allow regional park protections on unspecified park land to be named later. Bell and Rice have 30 days to construct a deal on paper that will then give the park board 18 months to come up with additional land to add to the regional parks.
But Minneapolis park commissioners never gave park staff authority to offer the original land swap, let alone the last minute replacement deal. And Brian Rice, their attorney and a DeLaSalle alumnus, gave Minneapolis park commissioners this assurance in March 2006: "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, and says, '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."