When it comes to city services, from police and fire to schools and parks, residents tend to be takers, consuming more city goods than their property tax dollars actually pay for. The truck-heavy businesses in the gritty industrial corners along Highway 280 or the Pierce Butler Route, on the other hand, tend to be givers, and believe it or not, they give fairly generously.
Spanning more than 1,500 acres of industrially-zoned land north of Interstate 94 between Snelling Avenue to the east and the city line to the west, the West Midway Industrial area is a net provider of taxes, and their positive impact on the tax base is just one reason city officials hope to keep business there in place, if not expanding.
“For every dollar they pay, they get 70 cents in service,” said Allen Lovejoy, a principal planner in the city of St. Paul’s Department of Planning and Economic Development (PED). From janitor to CEO, jobs in the industrial zone also pay an average of $47,600 per year, which beats the citywide average of $43,200. Yet another reason to keep businesses happy.
Nevertheless, residents in the area have their own concerns about trucks, traffic, street design and other aspects of life near a busy industrial zone. Hoping to explore ways that everyone can live and work together, a city task force has assembled the “West Midway Industrial Strategy,” a 70-page report now available for public consumption. A draft was released Aug. 6 online at: http://www.stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=3915.
Begun in 2010, the wide-ranging report looks at everything from high school internships to truck traffic and building rehabs. Proposed transportation improvements, including improved highway access onto Interstate 94 from University Avenue and Highway 280, make up about a third of the document. Traffic strategies were such a large part of the planning, in fact, that the task force put its work on hold for more than a year while the “Northwest Quadrant Transportation Study” was being crafted.
That transportation study has been completed and incorporated into the overall “West Midway Industrial Strategy,” which is being reviewed by the St. Paul Planning Commission’s Comprehensive Planning Committee.
“We’re going to take the better part of four different meetings to go through the report, and make any changes that the committee wants to make,” Lovejoy said. “And I suspect that there definitely will be some changes.” The full Planning Commission will most likely take up the report around the end of September and host a public hearing in October. The St. Paul City Council would do the same by the end of the year.
Lovejoy said the three-year planning efforts have sparked some apprehension among business owners in the industrial zone, who suspected they’d be hit with a slew of zoning changes preventing them doing their jobs or expanding. Lovejoy said that other than the zoning changes already adopted immediately around three Central Corridor light rail stations on University Avenue, the report suggests leaving zoning alone. A letter to business owners explaining as much went out about three weeks ago.
“There are no zoning changes in here,” he said. “This strategy does not recommend zoning changes, and in fact, talks about the importance of retaining as much industrial land as possible. You can imagine that there are business folks out there that are not tuned into specifically what we are doing, and the rumor mill suggests that we are going to zone land to non-industrial, and that is not the case.”
So what does it suggest? From boulevard improvements to soliciting public funds for demolition, rehab and environmental clean-up of vacant industrial properties, the introduction alone lists dozens of possibilities under the general titles “business collaborations” and “strategic public investments.”
First, a word on dimensions. The zone, shaped like a letter C or a chunky L, stretches from Interstate 94 north to Energy Park Drive, and from the city line, several blocks west of Highway 280, to just beyond Prior Avenue in the east, with a northern portion extending as far as Snelling Avenue north of Pierce Butler Route. Most of the zone situated south of Minnehaha Avenue ends at Aldine Street, two blocks east of Fairview Avenue. West of Highway 280, the zone stretches from Interstate 94 north to Larpenteur Avenue.
Lovejoy said the plan touches upon five general categories of changes:
1.) Residential-Industrial: Part of the plan calls for improving the “edges between residential and industrial.” He pointed to a north-south alley between Prior and Howell streets. “To be frank, the alley is pretty rugged,” he said. On its west side, “there’s industrial stuff backing onto it. It’s unpaved. Not high buck. Not high issue. But something we need to be attentive to.”
2.) Pedestrian: The second issue, he said, was getting better pedestrian connections through the industrial area.
3.) Trucks: As much as possible, keep the trucks from wandering into residential areas by mistake through a combination of street improvements and pathfinder signage.
4.) Bicycle links: Fourth, add east-west and north-south bike connections, which are detailed on page 32 of the report.
5.) Redevelopment: The task force also talked about the redevelopment potential for vacant, old and outdated industrial buildings. The report characterizes some of the issues, “but we’re not picking winners and losers,” Lovejoy said. “It’s not like it has got to be a bioscience, high-tech corridor or anything like that. … The strategy is less prescriptive.”
Transportation changes are a big part of the report, but two plans that had been proposed have been effectively axed.
“We were testing if extending Energy Park Drive would make sense from a traffic standpoint,” Lovejoy said. “We also tested a connection that would go north over the railroad tracks from University Avenue north. Actually, they developed an alignment that went all the way up to Larpenteur. The conclusion of the study is that neither of those extensions would have demonstrable impact on University or Snelling. It wouldn’t decrease traffic.”
So scratch those ideas out. “The big conclusion of that study was we are not going to pursue either of what would have been very expensive projects,” he continued. “However, we did look at some other things that would help, particularly the accessibility of industrial traffic to the national highway system. We came up with three street projects.”
Here’s the three:
1.) Ellis Avenue: Ellis Avenue, an east-west street, would be improved for a block between Transfer Road and Vandalia. That would allow trucks coming west out of the BNSF yard to go south on Vandalia, as opposed to Transfer Road. “We don’t want trucks turning onto and off of University Avenue to get to I-94,” Lovejoy said.
2.) Vandalia: Vandalia would be resurfaced. “There are some places where we probably need to have a clear demarcation between what’s street and what’s loading dock,” Lovejoy said. “But that’s where most of the trucks want to go, so we want to make that as easy as possible.”
3) Territorial Road: “A couple things are going to happen there,” Lovejoy said. “Territorial is going to be designated a truck route, because it takes you right to 280.” Heading north, that would be the preferred truck route. On the west end of Territorial Road, west of Raymond Avenue, there’d be a bicycle route connecting to the District 12 Rec Center. Bicyclists could also jog down to University Avenue on a frontage road, and head west into Minneapolis. Cyclists could head east along Charles Avenue.
Additional changes might include trailblazing signs within the industrial area so that trucks know to directly access I-94 and Highway 280 along Vandalia and Territorial.
Now, those are just the street projects. There are two major interchange projects the city would like to see happen. (Whether MnDOT, which has a long list of its own priorities statewide, is onboard is another story).
1.) Interchange of Vandalia and 94: Pointing to heavy truck traffic, Lovejoy said turning lanes need to be improved onto I-94 on-ramps at Vandalia. Specifically, the southbound to westbound turn, the southbound to eastbound turn, and the westbound to northbound turn could use some help. What’s more, “we believe that the bridge should be reconstructed over I-94,” Lovejoy said.
2.) Interchange of 280 and 94: The last piece, “and by far and away the most complicated and most expensive,” would be improvements to the interchange of Highway 280 and I-94. Getting onto the interstate from city streets is, said Lovejoy, “a mess. … Currently, if you’re westbound on 94, you cross over 280 and turn left on Frontage Road, then left on Franklin, then a right right in the middle of the bridge to get on eastbound 94. Without getting into all of the details of what MnDOT wants to do, we have been engaging them in a discussion. I don’t believe it’s on any of their capital improvement lists, but it needs to be.”
Beyond streets and trucks, the city has some plans for pedestrians, too. Those plans didn’t go over well with business owners during a public meeting at Rock-Tenn in February, so they’ve been tweaked. They’re outlined on Page 30 of the report, which contains a map of sidewalk improvements.
They improvements add curbs and sidewalks in one- or two-block segments in a lot of different areas, both north and south of University Avenue. There’s a long segment on Transfer Road, as well as two blocks west of Raymond on Wabash Street. “We want to establish curb line,” Lovejoy said. “A lot of these industrial streets don’t have curbs, and clearly don’t have sidewalks.”
“What we wanted, and what we still want, is good pedestrian access into the industrial area,” Lovejoy said. “We picked the sidewalk links we picked because we thought there was the least resistance in terms of getting them done. But what we heard at that meeting, and subsequent discussions, is that a couple of the links were problematic. That project, which is funded, is moving forward yet this fall. The plan is to have them built this fall. … We had some pushback, we made some changes, we think we have a program that makes sense and does not result in (hardships for) businesses that are out there today.”
So what do you think, dear Scoop reader? Are these all good ideas, do they not go far enough, or do they reach? If you’ve read this far, you must really care about the Midway Industrial Zone. Feel free to sound off, below…