Minneapolis council member fights city plan for water facility

Days before a Minneapolis City Council committee considers a plan to move city water maintenance operations to the East Phillips neighborhood on the South Side of the city, the council member who represents the area says she's losing sleep over the issue.

"That time you wake up at 5 a.m. for the seventh time in a row because all you can do is stress about how to stop further environmental degradation from happening to one of your area's most impoverished and [diverse] communities," Alondra Cano posted on Facebook earlier this week.

For weeks, Cano has been rallying neighbors of the property at Longfellow Avenue and E. 28th Street to push back against the city, arguing that the neighborhood is already overburdened with industry, traffic and air pollution. She says the site has potential for less industrial uses, like homes, a cafe or some kind of environmentally friendly business — and the city's purchase would stop that kind of revitalization in a neighborhood that needs it. But council committee members who will vote Monday will also weigh arguments from the city, which is looking to centralize its Public Works facilities and faces a shortage of industrial land on which to house them.

Greg Goeke, the city's director of property services, said the northeast Minneapolis site now used for water maintenance is no longer a good fit.

"We've outgrown it," he said. "The buildings are basically functionally obsolete. We don't have adequate room for employees to park, so they spill out into the neighborhoods, and it's hard getting deliveries in."

The East Phillips site is next to another city-owned property, which is used for transportation and street maintenance repair and stormwater and sewer maintenance, among other operations. The addition of water maintenance facilities would bring about 100 additional employees to the neighborhood each workday.

Cano and people who live near the property said they're worried about the impact of that increased activity, both on the flow of local car, bike and pedestrian traffic, and on the already troublesome air quality of the area.

Andrew Fahlstrom, who has lived in the neighborhood for five years, said some of the pollution comes from the traffic of vehicles cruising up and down nearby freeways and the busy thoroughfares of E. 26th and E. 28th streets. More trucks and more workers coming in to work could exacerbate the problem, he said.

"Phillips is sort of the dumping ground of the rest of the city, and that's true of anywhere people of color have lived and poor people have lived," he said.

Fahlstrom said it seems the city is adding industrial operations in a way it couldn't in other parts of the city where it would draw more protests.

"You try to put that in hipster northeast and it's not going to fly," he said.

Cano and neighborhood groups have spent the last few months dreaming up a plan they see as a better fit for the site. They enlisted the help of an architecture firm, which drew up a sketch of a mixed-use development that would include housing, a bike shop to serve the nearby Midtown Greenway, an agribusiness operation and a rooftop solar array.

If the city backs out, the site could be sold to another company or developer. And until the city begins a formal assessment of its planning and zoning in the area in three years, the property is still zoned for light industrial use.

Still, neighbor Patty Zanski said she and others are convinced the city should stay out.

"As someone who lives across the street from that site, I'm willing to take a risk and see if we can find someone more willing to work with us," she said.

The council's Ways and Means Committee will consider the issue at its meeting Monday afternoon.