On a recent morning, past the riverfront rail yards southeast of downtown St. Paul and just beyond mounds of shredded trees at a wood recycling center, a trio of wild turkeys crossed the rain-slicked road to find refuge in one of the city's largest — and least visible — parks.
Thanks to a land-swap deal with St. Paul Regional Water Services approved last week by the St. Paul City Council, Pig's Eye Regional Park will for the first time get a parking lot and an entrance with a sign.
In exchange, the water utility will use a portion of the park to store soils removed from around broken water mains.
It's considered a good deal by Nelsie Yang and Jane Prince, the City Council members who represent the city's East Side.
An earlier proposal would have given the water utility a longer lease on a larger tract of land in return for the city getting the site of a former water reservoir in Highland Park to develop soccer fields.
But neighbors saw that as unfair, given that it reduced parkland on the East Side while adding to the already robust recreation offerings in a more affluent neighborhood on the other side of the city.
So city and water services officials reworked the lease.
The deal is now a shorter term — 20 years instead of 30, and it can be terminated if the city finds a better use — and the footprint for the storage of removed soils shrank from 8 acres to 5.5.
