With 750K grant on hold, Lincoln Park project returns to earlier form
Date:
REGIONAL NEWS & INVESTIGATIONS
PO BOX 161702, Duluth MN 55816
Email contact@duluthmonitor.com
Phone (218) 391 - 8791
Links
Follow Us
Free Newsletter
- All rights reserved.
This story has the appearance of laziness, deceptiveness, or incompetence on another City project. This is another example why looking to Government to do something right is foolish.
All three of your assumptions are correct.
When reporting on a story like this, is it worth filing data practices requests to get an idea of how this idea morphed over time, or would that evolve into an icky Art Johnston-esque rabbit hole?
My suspicion is Duluth staff weren’t knowledgeable about Section 106 requirements, so when they received the grant, they said “well we got some outside support, let’s go a bit further!” They drew up a new plan didn’t know/read or forgot to send in the updated stuff.
Going off your 4/19/2020 article critiquing the county’s use of money on extended breaks, perhaps it’s worth investigating how much money the city wasted on drawing up the “enhanced” plans they eventually scrapped entirely.
The City knew fully about the Section 106 requirements. The City also fights govt data practices requests, so that process doesn’t work. The original approved 2016 plans were submitted for the grant process. The grant was awarded, then someone at City Hall decided their vision for the park was superior to the original approved plan. Private “charettes” were conducted by the City, engineer and some stakeholders to develop the 2018 plan. The 2018 redesign was never submitted to the Parks Commission, nor the Heritage Preservation Commission, nor City Council, nor the Section 106 officer for review or approval. The 2018 redesign was first brought to the attention of the State Section 106 review officer the first week of Sept, 2019, a full year after work was started by her on the 106 review.
The approved costs for the engineered plans to date are $132,000. This does not include the historical reports that were paid for by the City for the Section 106 review.
The flawed process has been fully vetted and those errors resulted in the National Park Service pulling funding back on Dec 23, then pulling lead agency authority back from the City. That is only the second time in 20 years that the Section 106 officer in St. Paul has seen that happen on a project.
Yup, lots of money spent for City staff and consultants for the multi years worth of planning design, redesign, etc. I think the consultant fee is over $130,000 already. Sending the old plan, not the new one, was intentional. It would take extra effort to send an old plan, have to look it up to attach it, than to send the one currently being worked on, looked at, refined, ready at hand. The city does enough of these that they know the process and knew that tearing out historic stone walls and road would trigger historical concerns, so they submitted the prior plan that did not tear out the historic wall and roads and was approved by parks commission and city council. The most recent plan, even though vastly different from the approved one, was not sent back to parks commission or city council for review.
Correct. You are spot on. You should run for City Council. None of the City Council members ever had a single concern with how this was playing out over the past 9 months.