The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has settled on plans for a major revamp of Cedar Lake's South Beach. Now it just needs to find funding.
The centerpiece of the little park just off the corner of Burnham Road and Cedar Lake Avenue will remain its wide sand beach. The popular spot sits along the Cedar Lake Regional Trail and is just a few feet from the Kenilworth Trail that angles northeast into downtown Minneapolis.
Plans for the beach approved last week call for a new floating launch dock for canoes, a series of ramps, railings, stairways and retaining walls, bike racks, widened bike and pedestrian paths, picnic tables, toilets, new trees and bushes and a seating plaza between the Cedar Lake Parkway Trail and the beach.
The project will cost an estimated $331,000. Money has not yet been earmarked for it. A plan approved by commissioners is a necessary first step, however.
"It's very, very tired down at South Beach, and I think people care enough about it that they've taken the initiative to come up with a general design that's acceptable to the entire neighborhood," said Anita Tabb, the Park and Recreation Board commissioner for District 4, which includes Cedar Lake. "We are trying to meet and come up with ways that we can see where we might be able to get some funding for that, but at this point we just don't have the answer."
One possibility is to make improvements to the park in stages, cobbling money together over time, Tabb said.
Commissioners approved the plan Wednesday after nearly a year of meetings and deliberation. The Cedar Isles Dean Neighborhood Association paid $40,000 in Neighborhood Revitalization Program dollars to prepare plans and construction cost estimates.
Cedar Lake is situated just west of downtown Minneapolis and accessible by canoe or kayak through a waterway from Lake of the Isles.
