
Legal boundaries vs. actual use
The land surrounding the Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park is a jumble of jurisdictions.
Contrary to popular use, the actual area of the dog park is contained to a 6.6-acre triangular chunk in the southeast corner of the total area where park users currently let their dogs roam off-leash. The National Park Service owns or manages some land along the river, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs owns adjacent land to the west and the Minnesota Historical Society controls the land to the south.
Those other landowners have asked the Park Board to erect a fence clearly defining the boundaries between their land and Minneapolis parkland, with the National Park Service offering a federal grant to fund the project, said Park Board project manager Carol HejlStone. That fence would cut off the dog park’s access to the river for all but a stretch of beach to the south, and reduce off-leash dog access to some woods, too. Knowing this would upset members of the public, the Park Board proposed expanding the formal boundaries of the dog park to just under 17 acres of Minnehaha Regional Park land over which it does have jurisdiction, she said.
In short, while the dog park’s acreage will be legally expanded from 6.6 to 17, the total area where off-leash dogs have accessed for more than 35 years will be diminished in practice.
“We understand that dog park users would be upset with the addition of a fence, and so what we were wanting to do is formalize the rest of the MPRB-owned area as off-leash space, which is how it’s been used through time,” said HejlStone on Monday. “But we are intending to cut off access to land that is not owned and maintained by MPRB because those landowners don’t want off-leash dogs on their property.”
On Tuesday, National Park Service Planning Program Manager Forest Eidbo clarified that NPS does not own the long stretch of riverfront that the Park Board is proposing to fence off — an aspect of the plan that is garnering controversy among dog park users. Eidbo said NPS manages the territory around Mni Owe Sni, or Coldwater Spring, a Dakota heritage site in the historic Fort Snelling territory located about 1,400 feet inland from the south point of the dog park.
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