Updated April 25, 2014  Southwest LRT Meeting Rescheduled.

Development has huge support among politicians especially in an election year.  But who is representing the water? . . . Sacrificing water for transportation is short-term.

Southwest LRT Meeting Rescheduled Metropolitan Council/Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority hearing on municipal consent for the much-delayed, constantly revised SWLRT, moved to May 29 The Metropolitan Council announced that the joint public hearing with the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority will occur May 29 at the Hennepin County Government Center, 300 South Sixth Street, Minneapolis at 6PM. An open house will be held on the Public Service Level of the Hennepin County Government Center beginning at 5PM. The previously announced May 12th hearing will not take place. The hearing was rescheduled to May 29 due to the need to correct information in the Minneapolis portion of municipal consent plans. Municipal consent plans, which are available on the Council’s website at www.swlrt.org and at numerous city halls and libraries along the corridor, were updated by Council staff on April 22 to ensure every set contains corrected information. What is municipal consent? In the municipal consent process, the Metropolitan Council will be seeking approval from the county and the line’s five host cities on preliminary design plans to build the LRT line in their jurisdictions. The preliminary design plans show the footprint of the LRT line and its physical design components. Further engineering in 2014 and 2015 will provide greater details, such as station elements and landscaping features. The preliminary design plans will show the Southwest LRT line with adjustments as approved by the Met Council. Details include: • Location of the 15.8-mile line and the 16 stations, down from the original 17 stations with the elimination of the 21st Street Station in Minneapolis. The plans will retain Mitchell Road Station as the line’s westernmost station.   • Location of LRT tracks primarily at ground level with several bridges and tunnels including running underground for approximately a mile in two shallow tunnels in the Kenilworth Corridor in Minneapolis. • General dimensions, elevations and alignment of the LRT route and crossings. • Location of the operations and maintenance facility in Hopkins. More information about the municipal consent process is available at www.swlrt.org. About the Project: The Southwest Light Rail Transit (LRT) Project (Green Line Extension) would operate from downtown Minneapolis through the communities of St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Minnetonka, and Eden Prairie, passing in close proximity to the city of Edina.  The proposed alignment is primarily at-grade and includes 16 new stations and about 15.8-miles of double track. The line would connect major activity centers in the region including downtown Minneapolis, the Opus/Golden Triangle employment area in Minnetonka and Eden Prairie, Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, the Eden Prairie Center Mall, and the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes. Ridership in 2030 is projected at 29,660 weekday passengers.  The project would interline with the METRO Green Line (Central Corridor LRT), which would provide a one-seat ride to destinations such as the University of Minnesota, state Capitol and downtown St. Paul.  It would be part of an integrated system of transitways, including connections to the METRO Blue Line, the Northstar Commuter Rail line, a variety of major bus routes along the alignment, and proposed future transitway and rail lines.  The (appointed, not elected) Metropolitan Council would be the grantee of federal funds. The regional government agency is charged with building the line in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Transportation. The Southwest Corridor Management Committee, which includes commissioners from Hennepin County and the mayors of Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, Edina, Hopkins, Minnetonka, and Eden Prairie, provides advice and oversight. Funding is provided by the Federal Transit Administration, Counties Transit Improvement Board (CTIB), state of Minnesota and Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority (HCRRA). The Southwest LRT Project website is www.swlrt.org.

By Susu Jeffrey, Community Voices TC Daily Planet  April 08, 2014
Updated April 11, 2014

See below to take action.

Cedar Lake

Cedar Lake with Minneapolis skyline in the background

In the mid-1990s, the Seattle-based landscape architects Jones & Jones working on the design for the north part of the Cedar Lake Trail dug and dug but could not find the old northeast outflow path from Cedar Lake. Water channels and springs can be disappeared.
If the SW LRT double tunnel plan is adopted almost 9/10s of a mile (4700 linear feet) on the south and east of Cedar Lake will cut off a huge percentage of recharge groundwater feeding into the lake. Cedar Lake is spring fed. I live in Bryn Mawr, Cedar is my swimming lake. I feel the cool spring water here and there when I swim across Cedar in the summer.
Several years ago I asked former County Commissioner Gail Dorfman about the water vis-à-vis SW LRT and she said the water had not been considered. That, of course, was before any tunnel plans. Lots of numbers are quoted about the proposed SW LRT but no one is talking numbers about the water, specifically the amounts and path of dewatering and the threat to recharging Cedar Lake. Where are the water studies?
The Great Medicine Spring and Glenwood Spring
The Great Medicine Spring in Theodore Wirth Park along with nearby Glenwood Spring were permanently dewatered into the sewer system in the late 1980s with Interstate-394 construction. The practice was to dynamite and dewater both sides of a roadway.  Dewatering, like tiling a wet field for agriculture, uses buried pipes with holes where groundwater drips in and is channeled away.
The I-394 dewatering system, designed by MnDOT, funnels 2.5 million gallons of water a day into downtown sewers and mixes with street runoff during storms. Where the Bassett Creek pipe vomits water into the Mississippi a sign reads: WARNING Pregnant women and children under 6 should not eat fish taken here.
Roads and water don’t mix. City water is now piped into the Wirth Park tamarack bog.

“In 1874, Col. John H. Stevens, the first settler in Minneapolis, said that this [Great Medicine] spring was frequented by Native Americans, ‘who came hundreds of miles to get the benefit of its medicinal qualities.'” (Greg Brick, MN Ground Water Association, Vol. 16, No. 1, March 1997, p.6.)

Whatever unique properties the Great Medicine Spring contained are lost forever. Calcium and magnesium would have been in the water that trickled through limestone cracks, but what else? Imagine patients walking “hundreds of miles” for this curing water, this immune booster-plus liquid that restored the body. The Medicine Spring was unlike any other spring in our spring-rich landscape.

“Our most famous surficial spring is Glenwood-Inglewood Springs, known at office coolers throughout the Metro area. Winchell (1905) drafted a cross-section of the geology of this spring, showing how the water emerged from a gravel-clay contact on the banks of Bassett Creek, in Minneapolis. The water utilized at present is not derived from the original spring but from pipes driven through the clay into a water-bearing sand bed. Other surficial springs feed the Minneapolis chain of lakes. (Brick, Ibid.)

It is difficult to visualize underground water veins because they are invisible to us. Looking at other development projects in Minneapolis can reify the threats.
Lost Minneapolis Lakes
Minneapolis lost the quality of Brownie Lake to the Brownie-Cedar channel built in 1917 when Brownie dropped 10 feet. Another five foot drop occurred with the Kenilworth Canal between Cedar and Lake of the Isles. Brownie, in a hole protected from the winds, no longer “turns over” at springtime refreshing the lake’s oxygen so that layers of the lake do not support life.
Loring Lake “fed by unfailing springs of pure water” began to fail as early as 1887 with surrounding development.
Tiny Spring Lake at the base of Lowry Hill was acquired in 1893 but is now hidden by I-394. Brownie and Spring lakes function as views for people to walk around.
Powderhorn Lake began being reshaped, dredged and deepened but reduced in size, in 1895. By 1899 storm water intrusion affected water quality. Water level drop in Powderhorn was reported in 1911 and 1921. The lowest lake level was related to the 1963 trench dug for I-35W.
Development has huge support among politicians especially in an election year. But who is representing the water?
“Nature does not negotiate,” Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International reminds us. We are some of the 15 million Americans who flush our wastewater and drink out of the Mississippi. Our bodies are 70 percent water.
Lengthy shallow tunnels for a fixed SW commuter train that hardly serves city residents is proposed for the sieve that is the lake-blessed city of Minneapolis. It is a near sighted, flawed plan.
(c) 2014 Susu Jeffrey
Addendum from Susu:  Southwest Light Rail Transit is a Flawed Plan.

• Unfair to Minneapolis residents
• 2 tunnels adjacent to Cedar Lake threaten recharge
• Cuts through established parkland
• Avoids city populated areas  (click for map)
• Final stop is Target Field, not an office in in the city that drives Minnesota business
• Doubles time from Eden Prairie from 20 minutes on express bus to 40 minutes on LRT
• $1.67 billion!
• Minneapolis Mayor City Council, and Park Board oppose
• Please phone Governor Dayton at 651-201-3400 and Mayor Hodges 612-673-2100 and say “Reroute the Southwest LRT.”

Update April 11, 2014
The route IS the problem with SW LRT. The route is now fixed and does not serve Uptown, the Lyndale or Nicollet or Hennepin or I-35W corridors. This is transit without the mass. (See http://www.swlrtcommunityworks.org/map.)
The route goes to the baseball stadium—great on game days but on workdays does not get workers near downtown offices. Everybody is for mass transit that can take people where they want to go. Unfortunately the North Star train is not a success. The Hiawatha line moves low income workers to the VA and the Mall of America, administrators to the Whipple Bldg., and lots of people to the airport yet each ride is publicly subsidized—like highways. All transit is subsidized. Like education—but you wouldn’t send your kid to just any school. Just any LRT is not “good.”
The tunnel between Cedar and Lake of the Isles was an idea to get federal funding. How about fixing the bridges?—re-up the public plumbing infrastructure?—install residential & business insulation? (a jobs program)—reforest storm damaged north Minneapolis? There’s is plenty of work to do.
In addition to not serving the densest urban population areas the SW LRT would require permanent dewatering at the top of the Chain of Lakes, i.e., Cedar Lake, which empties to Minnehaha  and on to the Mississippi. Permanent dewatering can never be mitigated.
Environmentally thinking, sacrificing water for transportation is short term. The SW LRT is a water issue in the same way the Enbridge tar sands pipeline across northern Minnesota is a water issue.