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“I feel bad about it,” Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board commissioner Tom Olsen told me. “It’s one of those things where you can work really hard, make all the rational arguments about good governance, about following our plans, our Park Board values and goals… The plan that we had was completely in line with that. [Instead,] the board voted to not take advantage of these Met Council dollars [that] would have saved our staff a ton of time, and saved us over $300,000.”
That’s how Olsen explained last week’s contentious vote allowing the government body to ignore its adopted planning, five years of community engagement, and forgo “free” money to create a new linear park in Uptown. At stake was a six-block swath of land unremarkably called “The Mall,” which today is used primarily for on-street parking alongside trees and a walking path.
The long-term vision for the area, the Southwest Parks Plan, was adopted five years ago by the Park Board and calls to use the space as a linear link between the lakes and Hennepin Avenue. Instead of parking spaces and cul-de-sacs, the land was scheduled to be a recreational trail lined with bike paths and recreational space linking Uptown with Bde Mka Ska.
When the plan was adopted, advocates bemoaned the fact that it might take 10 or more years to implement the space, which is why it seemed like good news when the Met Council announced an upcoming sewer project, and offered to install the parkland on its dime. The project would have cost the Park Board next to nothing and implemented part of the broader park vision far ahead of schedule.
That’s why the precedented decision to keep surface parking for cars, rather than park space for people, is such a disappointment. Relying on a fig leaf involving fire safety, the Park Board overturned an earlier vote and will have the Met Council reconstruct the street as-is, without new park space. Sadly, the decision reflects the practices, rather than the values, of what should be a progressive branch of the complex Minneapolis city government.
Today the Minneapolis Park Board is often a useful tool for wealthy Minneapolis homeowners to control green space for their own use, an obscure endeavor that sometimes resembles an HOA. Recent failed efforts like closing the parkways for periodic summertime open streets or removing parkland dedication fees for Indigenous-owned housing have stalled while defense of parking spaces and asphalt continue apace. It makes you wonder whether or not the city of Minneapolis even needs a Park Board anymore.
Before reacting, stop and ponder whether anyone knows much about the actually existing Park Board. I’d guess that very few Minneapolitans can name the four commissioners who represent them (one ward-based and three at-large board members), let alone one member. Folks from any other metro-area city might stop and rightly wonder, “What is a park board”?
Hearing from few while ignoring many
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board dates back to the 19th century, when the park system emerged during the city’s peak years of residential development. Originally focusing on the riverfront and lakeshores, it’s an elected body that oversees the Minneapolis park system, maintaining autonomy from the city as a whole. As detailed by local historian David C. Smith, it began as the Board of Park Commissioners in 1883 and began acquiring park land — as one critical study pointed out, often adjacent to racially exclusive neighborhoods — throughout the city.
That was then. Today, the Park Board oversees a $151 million budget — a bit less than a tenth the size of the much larger city government — and even has its own property tax levy, giving it political independence. In theory, this is a feature, separating the city’s priceless park land from the murk of day-to-day politics. In theory, the Park Board escapes the volatile budgetary demands of the city’s general fund, erecting a firewall between parks and the (often obvious) chaos of larger city political dynamics.
In practice, the Park Board is often less progressive than the city government as a whole, making decisions that reflect the desires of the few over the needs of the many. In the case with Mall Park vote, a small group of well-connected Uptown residents overturned years of engagement in the name of a few parking spots.
Board is largely ignored by media
The two main problems with the 21st century Park Board center on its governance structure. First, nobody pays attention to board meetings or elections, which makes it vulnerable to parochial influence. You’re lucky if there’s a mainstream news story on the Park Board twice a year — for example, the 2024 labor strikes — but the lack of coverage doesn’t mean important decisions aren’t happening.
After all, the Park Board has its own police force, its own unions, and even its own internal human resources department, completely separate from the city’s overlapping bureaucracy. To me, the lack of transparency is a sign that both the media and the people of Minneapolis are not up to the task of understanding Minneapolis’ obscure government layers.
“Campaigns and elections can be chosen by relatively few people, and it can be really hard to get clear messages though,” Commissioner Olsen said. “There’s not a lot of reward to this work, [and] it’s especially hard as progressives because progressives don’t show up in these spaces as much.”
The Park Board’s second structural problem relates to the elected position. Being a Park Board commissioner is a thankless task that I wouldn’t wish on anyone who wasn’t retired or well off. It pays a measly $24,000 a year and comes with a heap of unrewarding labor. Commissioners lack dedicated staff for constituent services or navigating complex documents. The meetings themselves are typically hours-long and contentious, with small groups of vociferous citizens dominating public comment and often years-long grievances between commissioners who view every square foot of park land as personal turf.
“We’re never really going to get to a place where the average person can meaningfully run and be on this [board],” Olsen said. “You have to have a particularly [flexible] job, or be retired, or privileged, or really good at grinding.”
In this way, the problems at the Park Board run deep. Its exclusive leadership and relative obscurity makes it susceptible to well-heeled pressure, allowing equitable engagement to fall by the wayside. The result begs the question: What if it didn’t exist? After all, Minneapolis had a separately elected library board until 2008, when it was disbanded in favor of the county government. As far as I know, the library system carries on fine, and I’m even guessing a good chunk of administrative overhead was saved in the process.
Given how vulnerable the existing Minneapolis Park Board is to well-heeled influence, it’s fair to argue that the city would be more equitable and progressive if the Park Board didn’t exist. Why, for example, does the Park Board own seven golf courses, only two of which are within city limits? Why are the city’s parkways overwhelmingly designed for automobile commuting in an era when recreational space is at a premium? Why is so much park land still devoted to parking? Why are basketball and soccer given short shrift when it comes to space allocation?
After the meeting on the Uptown Mall, which had reversed an earlier vote, Olsen seemed despondent.
“I got called out for calling people NIMBYs, but this is NIMBYism: I do not want progress or change within my area, so I’m going to influence the process to get my way,” Olsen said after the vote. “That’s exactly what happened here.”
There’s a chance that the upcoming election might change Park Board dynamics and elect more progressive leadership, but he wasn’t optimistic that anyone was even paying attention.
“We’ll see what happens with this election,” Olsen said. “I hope things change, but I don’t necessarily think they will.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the annual salary of a park board commissioner and to correct the number of golf courses within city limits.
