Bill would end funding break for North Side park

A mostly suburban group of legislators has taken aim at a 30-year-old special funding stream that has diverted $14.3 million from the Metro Council to North Mississippi Regional Park.

The proposal introduced in the Senate on Monday would end an arrangement that has funded buying land for and developing the long skinny park lying east of Interstate 94 in Minneapolis and Brooklyn Center.

State Sen. Bev Scalze, DFL-Little Canada, said 30 years is enough to devote a special funding stream to one park. She is the chief Senate sponsor. The money allocated to the park comes from interest the Metro Council earns on proceeds from selling park bonds before the money is spent.

Scalze, like some metro representatives to the Metro Council or its parks commission, said she wasn't aware of the diversion engineered by area legislators in 1985 and 1987 until she read a September article about it in the Star Tribune.

However, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board officials said this week they need the continuing stream of money to finish paying for a new natural-filtration swimming pool that's scheduled to open in Webber Park next summer. They said they got $1.22 million in interest earnings in 2013, and are awaiting an additional $1.1 million to help finance the $6.8 million pool. The boundaries of the regional park were expanded in 2013 to include Webber so that it qualified for the interest earnings. The Park Board said it wants to use $2.2 million more from the funding stream for trail and park improvements along the river.

They argue that the park deserves the special funding stream because it finances one of only four among 54 regional parks in the metro area that serves a significant number of minority visitors. But the most recent Metro Council survey finds that two-thirds of those using the park are white.

Scalze said that the same argument of serving minority residents could be made for using the money on the East Side of St. Paul. The other three regional parks where minorities make up more than one-quarter of visitors, Wirth in Minneapolis and Phalen and Keller in St. Paul, don't benefit from the diversion and share in metro-wide parks funding.

She said that she discussed her proposal with former state Sen. Gene Merriam, who tried unsuccessfully in 1987 to block the removal of a $1.5 million cap on how much money could go to North Mississippi. The original diversion was engineered in 1985 by two influential now-former senators, Carl Kroening and Bill Luther. The park's interpretive center is named after Kroening.

The provision diverting the interest earnings to a single park was written by Brian Rice, an attorney who still lobbies for the Park Board.

The law initially limited the diversion to spending in the park boundaries. But in 1989, the law was changed to extend a greenway a dozen blocks west of the park, and in 2013 to help finance the pool.