Nancy Edmonds Hanson
hansonnanc@gmail.com
The five Rotary clubs of Fargo-Moorhead are laying plans to establish a nature park for youngsters in north Moorhead.
The Moorhead City Council applauded the recently unveiled plan at its special meeting Monday. Public works director Steve Moore said that taking on the project – with the service clubs handling all aspects, from design to raising the estimated $600,000 needed for its completion – required nothing of the council except making a change to its community capital improvement program, which lays out priorities in the city’s strategic plan.
Council members unanimously approved the change, adding the nature park to four other priorities on the Park District’s wish list. That step prompted removing two others currently on hold. The four already on the list include the river corridor, a community aquatic center, a southside dog park and an inclusive playground for children of all abilities.
Moore said that after deliberating on locations on both sides of the river, the FM Rotary Foundation chose Riverfront Park north of First Avenue as its site. The city park board approved the proposal last week. North Dakota State University’s landscape architecture students are working on the park’s amenities and layout. Among possibilities: a bicycle skills area and an ice-skating ribbon, as well as water features, winding trails, natural materials like logs and tree stumps, hills and sandy paths. Its intent is to provide an all-natural setting for vigorous free play in contrast to the steel and plastic structures in most parks today.
This will be Rotarians’ third recreational project and, like the others, will be fully accessible for children of all abilities. The first is the inclusive playground in Fargo’s Lindenwood Park. The second, the Miracle Field, adjoins Southside Regional Park in Moorhead.
The foundation has already raised $31,000 toward its goal, Moore told the council. “They’re looking for a project champion,” or lead gift, he added, along with sponsors from the business community and local philanthropists. Funds from annual projects like September’s Rotary bicycle event, the Flatlander, will also be earmarked for the nature park.
Affordable housing advances
The Commonwealth Companies, a developer of low-income housing based in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is a big step closer to beginning construction of a 46-unit apartment building adjacent to Regal Estates on the north side.
The council approved sale of a tract of land at 2605 Eighth Ave. N. that was originally purchased to facilitate road construction and provide space for a storm water pond and bicycle and pedestrian trail. The sale price of about $410,000, or $2.90 per square foot, will be divided between urgent improvements to city facilities and economic development.
This is the developer’s first project in Moorhead; it is also behind the Edge Artist Flats in downtown Fargo. Since 2001, the firm has built 5,850 affordable housing units across 14 states. Bids will be let for the three-story building in January; construction is expected to begin in June. When completed in May 2021, it will offer four units specifically for homeless individuals. The balance will be available for low-income seniors, families in the work force and tenants with disabilities.
Describing the project, assistant city administrator Dan Mahli told the council, “There isn’t a county in the whole country that isn’t facing a housing crisis. More citizens are getting older, and the cost of residential construction is going up. Commonwealth is a high-quality developer. It’s exciting that this is happening here.”
Success complicates budget
Steve Moore again stepped up to share a good news-bad news scenario with the council: Since its introduction in 2017, Moorhead’s single-sort recycling program has far exceeded projections, reaching a total of 2,500 tons last year as opposed to the 1,700 anticipated. But at the same time, the city’s cost of handling all that paper, glass and plastic is going up, and steps will have to be taken to cover the expense it creates. Will it be an increase in residential garbage fees of 88 cents per month? A change in the materials accepted in the blue recycling bins? Or will some alternate approach be found?
Along with the unexpectedly impressive volume collected from Moorhead homes, Moore pointed to the collapse of the international market for recyclables. The city contracts with MinnKota Recycling to sort and ship its recyclable waste to markets in the Twin Cities, which in turn have sold much of the volume to China. “They’re no longer in the market,” he said. “That has led to a drastic drop in revenue.”
The financial dip affects Moorhead because its agreement with MinnKota assigns half of all income realized from the sale back to the city’s budget. In years gone by, that amounted to a fairly significant amount – “though much less than the cost of operating our program,” he cautioned. But last year, after China rejected U.S. waste, it almost disappeared. The city’s share for the entire year, Moore reported, brought in $718.36. As a result, the solid waste department has tapped its dwindling reserves to balance the budget in 2018 and 2019.
He laid out four possible remedies to the council. Three involve an increase of less than a dollar, either immediately or in two steps over 2020 and 2021. The fourth involves removing glass entirely from single-sort recycling. While recyclers have experienced drops in value for all of the materials accepted in the blue bins, the glass price has been the worst. It’s now actually a negative number.
The director suggested eliminating the costly – and heavy – glass containers. Council member Steve Lindaas said that concerns him less than other blue-bin candidates: “Glass is inert. Plastics are not. I don’t want to see them going back into the environment.” He added that other uses exist for glass, including grinding and adding it to asphalt to surface streets.
With the MinnKota contract due to expire Dec. 31, the council asked for more information on alternatives, then tabled the issue. It will be taken up again at its regular meeting Dec. 9.
