Tallas Bay to be dredged again

Here we go again. The Monitor is good at digging up records, but it consistently leaves out who actually did the work, and the Monitor knows who.

This piece recaps how the Parks Commission voted 6-4 against the Kayak Bay/Spirit Landing paddle launch in 2018, and how Mayor Larson overruled that vote at the City Council two days later. What it doesn’t say is why that vote went the way it did. A small group of very informed citizens, Friends of Western Duluth Parks & Trails, which grew out of the River Corridor Coalition, showed up to Parks Commission meetings for months if not a year or more, fighting the broader Western Waterfront Trail Extension plan, which included two new launches, one being at Tallas Bay and the trail as planned would eliminate the ability for the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad excursion train to operate. The last two meetings before that vote each ran over five hours, with our group and the Lower Chester folks both fighting to be heard. Without that sustained pressure, that plan would have cleared the Commission easily.

And the record backs up that this was a manufactured process, not organic consensus. Our group is the reason that process even reflected public opposition in the first place. We’re who got the word out and turned out roughly 80 people to the Riverside Small Area Planning session, which is why its findings looked nothing like what the City wanted. City planner Lisa Luokkala later told commissioners the public was behind the park, citing a 2016 stakeholder session and that same Small Area Plan as proof. But the plan – which had to be done as part of this same Riverside/Kayak Bay process – says the opposite in its own findings: its top public priorities were to keep the shoreline undisturbed, protect the bay and estuary, and provide river access only in already-disturbed areas, with no new disturbances. In plain terms, the plan the city relied on for cover states clearly that the public saw no need to build any kind of launch at Tallas Bay. That’s not spin, that’s citing a document against its own findings, findings our group helped generate, to get a vote.

The bigger story which, credit where due, the Monitor and before it John Ramos’s 2018 “Developers in Paradise” series for the Reader are the only outlets that have actually dug into this, is what this fight was really about. It was never just a kayak launch. The goal was multiply the $18M into $55M to bolster the outdoor amenities and turning Spirit Mountain into an all-season destination that could hold visitors for three night stays built around outdoor recreation. The city’s economic development arm brought developers in to build out the land below the hill, which wasn’t a bad idea on its own.

What we got was a set of consequences nobody planned for. RiverWest never landed the hotel it was supposed to anchor. Commercial tenants never materialized beyond the Ski Hut, whose owner was an investor in the project. Once the hotel didn’t pencil out, developers fell back on building $800K homes as income property, all but two of those (20+ with 20 more on the way) are now short-term vacation rentals, sitting outside every ordinance the city currently has for regulating that use. Nobody left at the City had anything to do with setting that up, so nobody’s left to answer for it.

That’s the pattern here: a good idea gets captured by insiders, gets pushed through with little transparency, and years later the public is left holding a mess with no one accountable for it.

Again, the Monitor does a good job but there is much more behind the public record than is being reported here.

As for the sediment I will say as a huge user of the estuary I am seeing vegetation pop up in places I have never seen it before, so I haven’t seen any data showing that Knowlton Creek is unique but it surely can be an issue and more may need to be done upstream or improved on the Spirit Mt part of bring water back into the bay.

Nice little addition for the developer at the public’s expense.