Council Perspectives – City Council President, Ward 2 Council Member

Ramsey County’s recent announcement of a $320 million commitment to downtown is good news. We need all our partners on board to rejuvenate our urban core with more housing, shopping, jobs and public amenities. The economic boost this investment could provide will expand our city and regional tax base, alleviating the tax burden on residents and businesses.

The funding will help jumpstart development at RiversEdge, the site of the former West Publishing Building and Ramsey County jail that has sat vacant for the last decade. It will also support new housing development and public infrastructure downtown, like sidewalks, lights and trees.

There’s hard work ahead to make sure this announcement is more than just a hopeful headline. Here are some ways the County can ensure the dollars do the most good for downtown and the entire region:

Move with urgency. Too many County projects have been announced to great fanfare and then stalled out. An ambitious plan for RiversEdge was unveiled in 2018 and has since stagnated. The County’s Riverview Corridor project, undertaken three decades ago, was dropped unceremoniously last fall with no backup plan. When the City organized trash collection in 2018, the County’s curbside composting program was “just around the corner”. Eight years later, it still is. Downtown doesn’t have years to wait. We need this development today.

Make good on the “private” part of the public-private development. RiversEdge is being billed as a “public-private partnership”, but the only private partner, AECOM, walked away from the project last year and there’s been no mention of how a new partner will be engaged or what the private development will look like. In order to maximize the public investment, private development must be part of the deal. The County should double down on the search for a new partner and make sure their work on the public park in the meantime doesn’t make it harder to find a developer for the private components.

Involve the community. The County’s announcement prompted a number of my constituents to reach out with good questions. What will be the ongoing operational cost of the park? Are housing and jobs still part of the deal? What will be the impact on the tax base? Given that the dollars are coming from existing funding sources, why did it take so long for the County to make this commitment to downtown – and what is the opportunity cost of spending money here rather than on other pressing needs?

The County’s “Building Stronger Together” website notes that this initiative builds on previous plans that included public input, but an investment of this kind warrants its own community engagement process, especially if the County is rethinking the private development components. Community engagement doesn’t have to slow things down; in fact, authentic public involvement should occur within a relatively short timeframe to keep people engaged and to actually inform the work. It’s an essential part of the process.

Work with partners. The County’s announcement aligns with the work that we at the City have been doing for years to revitalize the riverfront and the downtown core. It also fits in with the Downtown Alliance’s investment strategy which identifies RiversEdge, office-to-housing conversions and better streetscapes as priorities.

But the details of the County’s investments are still fuzzy. As decisions are made about where and how to spend $50 million for “housing” and $50 million for “public spaces”, the County should reach out to the City, the Downtown Alliance and other key partners to make sure their dollars are complementing, and not competing with, other investments. Ideally, the County, City and Downtown Alliance could work together on a long-range capital plan that chunks downtown development into discrete phases so we can ask our state and federal partners to fund multiple projects at a time. This would get us out of the perennial trap of being asked to choose just one project for funding each year.

This work will not be easy but it’s worth the effort to get it right. I look forward to partnering with the County to make sure we do the hard work beyond the headlines for the benefit of our whole community.