Bridge to Somewhere
Planning, November 2009
A small town redirects a federal bridge project to benefit its downtown
There is a family-owned business in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, called Manea’s Meats. It’s a prominent retailer that draws shoppers from across the St. Cloud metropolitan area to this town of 12,000 on the Mississippi River.
A couple of years ago, Manea’s moved its entire operation one block east, to make room for a new river bridge that now touches down in the heart of downtown. It moved into a brand-new building that fronts a brand-new streetscape and sits on a newly cleared downtown site chosen especially for the store. All of this was paid for largely through federal highway dollars.
If that sounds like a pretty sweet deal for a small butcher shop, know that Manea’s isn’t the only land owner in town that got such help. Its building is just one of nine constructed through the one-of-a-kind Downtown Impact Mitigation program. DIM addresses businesses whose land or buildings were taken for construction of the new Mississippi River bridge and associated streets. The program offers financial incentives to encourage those businesses to stay downtown.
It is a logical extension of other mandates to mitigate transportation projects’ environmental or historic resource impacts. DIM is, however, far more complex. Because of that complexity, and the fact that doing this as standard practice (especially in larger cities) would open a Pandora’s box of funding difficulties for the Federal Highway Administration, it is unlikely to happen again.
Calling a bluff
In Sauk Rapids, the whole process began with the need to replace the old Mississippi River bridge that linked the city to St. Cloud. The bridge was to be funded, according to standard practice for replacing obsolete infrastructure, by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration, and two counties (Benton and Stearns).
The project would be led by the two counties, not the cities, and the initial designs were, to say the least, unappealing to Sauk Rapids. As proposed, the bridge would fly over Benton Drive (the city’s main drag) turn 2nd Street (a primary downtown cross street) into an elevated roadway, and essentially divorce the commercial district from the regional transportation system.
The city rejected the design, its engineer refusing to sign off on necessary local approvals. “It was our unwillingness to participate in a transportation project that we felt would destroy downtown,” remembers Sauk Rapids city administrator Ross Olson, “that made Benton County say ‘If you think can do a better job, then you can have it.’” The city called the county’s bluff and took over.
With a new design, the city replaced the flyover with a touch down at Benton Avenue and 2nd Street. That intersection, however, would be raised eight feet and moved westward, away from the river. It would still require significant right of way acquisition, and 15 buildings housing 25 businesses would be demolished.
A study commissioned by the city found that overall downtown sales could decline by as much as 30 percent. “That just wasn’t acceptable to the city,” says Todd Schultz, Sauk Rapids’ community development director. “The businesses we would lose had no where to go.” A major concern was that all the buy-outs would relocate to highway commercial districts outside of town, and that Sauk Rapids’ historic commercial core would simply wither and die.
This was in 2002. Over the course of the following three years, Olson and Schultz organized a team that would ultimately create the DIM program. The landscape architecture and planning firm Dahlgren, Shardlow, & Uban, created the Downtown Framework Plan following extensive public involvement. Next came a set of architectural guidelines for new construction. Then architect Janis LaDouceur undertook perhaps the most contentious and difficult aspect of the process: the relocation and development Plan.
LaDouceur spent weeks interviewing downtown landlords and business owners likely to be affected by the bridge project, trying to place their business needs and wants appropriately within the downtown context. Her plan is an illustrative shell game that describes where an impacted business might go in the “new” downtown, what would have to be removed to clear a site in that new location, and what would eventually be built on the sites that would be demolished and regraded during bridge construction.
Meanwhile, Olson and Schultz were talking up Sauk Rapids with various outside allies: the St. Cloud Area Joint Planning District (which maintains a lobbyist in Washington), the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the FHWA, and the region’s congressional representatives. Mn/DOT and FHWA ultimately agreed to provide $8 million for the DIM, which the city could use to acquire blighted or substandard properties in the downtown area, raze existing buildings, relocate those residents, and subsidize the construction of new buildings for DIM-participant businesses.
Remarkably, little of this was controversial in the community, since many of the buildings considered blighted were well recognized as such by the townspeople. In addition the city staff consistently would show off the overall plans for the downtown, rather than focus on single buildings
Making it happen
Manea’s is a representative case study. It relocated from Benton and 2nd Street North to make room for the new bridge touchdown. The building would be bought by the city in a typical right-of-way acquisition process.
First, according to the DIM program, Manea’s would relocate to a city-owned site at 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street North, which had been identified in the Framework Plan as as an area that would benefit from downtown-style retail. Manea’s would buy the land from the city.
Second, Manea’s would have to build at least as many square feet as were demolished. This is the critical “economic mitigation” requirement for participation in the program, and it ensures that the downtown’s retail square footage remain at least the same. Construction would be subsidized by the DIM, provided that the building met the design guidelines.
Finally, Manea’s would agree to own the new building for ten years, at which time the DIM subsidy would be forgiven. The big trick was coordinating relocating and rebuilding the businesses with the bridge construction – while disrupting commerce as little as possible, Olson notes.
With minor variations, the process was similar throughout the downtown area. Although it is difficult to put a firm number on the number of businesses involved – because some owners relocated their buildings but have new tenants -- the amount of retail square footage in the downtown has actually increased, says city attorney Igor Lenzner.
Status report
The overall plan for the community is only about half done, Schultz notes. In addition to the bridge and the business relocations, the plan includes new streetscapes on the core downtown thoroughfares (complete), a new park on the old bridge abutment (in the bidding process), infill development on other vacant lots (under study for the best uses and marketing options), and improvements to other downtown businesses (partially complete).
The total price tag was more than $60 million, with funding from Mn/DOT’s bridge reconstruction program, federal transportation dollars (including the $8 million DIM program), a $1 million grant from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for bicycle transportation, a Small Cities Development Grant, federal earmarks (thanks to legislative support and region-wide lobbying efforts), and a regional half-cent sales tax, which generated about $3 million for streetscape improvements.
Yes, the Downtown Impact Mitigation program cost taxpayers extra money. “It really does make transportation projects more expensive; it definitely does,” says Olson. “But the benefit that you get is saving a community, saving the economic vitality of a downtown area.” Olson and Schultz feel that the DIM program saved their downtown not just from an unsympathetic transportation project, but also from years of erosion of urban form.
The seeds of that new downtown are there. Two-story commercial and mixed-use buildings flank the main intersection, a fitness center moved in, and all the new buildings nestle up to the right-of-way with parking lots behind or to the side. But the urban fabric is still a little spotty, with some vacant lots and run-down buildings remaining. Even Olson and Schultz admit to a few disappointments, namely an auto parts store with its back to the bridge touchdown intersection.
Still, Sauk Rapids efforts have largely been successful. “Seven or eight years ago we started a comprehensive planning process,” says Olson. “We just had an incredible opportunity via the bulldozer to make it a reality.”