MINNEAPOLIS — The City of Minneapolis will restart a rain garden project after invasive weeds took root in the place of wildflowers across the past two years.
A city contractor created more than 100 small rain gardens along a stretch of Grand Avenue in the Kingfield Neighborhood when it was rebuilt a couple years ago. It was the city's largest "green infrastructure" pilot project.
The idea for the curbside garden patches to absorb stormwater runoff and remove pollutants. But the mix of native plants didn't take hold, and the gardens are now weed beds for the most part, creating confusion and frustration for neighborhood residents.
Liz Stout, a city engineer who specializes in surface water management, said the contractor will refresh the gardens and the city will be responsible for upkeep while the plants are being established.
"We’re going to be working with them to get this corrected. It will probably then fall on the city to do more of the intensive maintenance," Stout told KARE. "These are stormwater infrastructure. These are going to be maintained by the city."
Long-time resident Dick Rueter said previous messaging from the city was ambiguous, and people didn't know if the new plants that sprung up were weeds or the native plantings intended for the gardens.
"We were told to leave them alone, that native plants would emerge. But it’s been a strange couple of summers with drought," Rueter told KARE.
He has created wonderful gardens surrounding the home he's owned 40 years, so he's very familiar with what should be growing in the boulevard strip. But he said a lot of residents along Grand Avenue didn't know what they were seeing.
"People haven’t been able to identify what’s a weed and what’s not a weed and people have been reluctant to pull things up because the city said leave it alone."
The city has said it expected intensive landscaping to be part of the original contract, but that didn't seem to happen. A year ago the Kingfield Neighborhood Association gave the city staff a tour of the rain gardens to point out issues people had encountered.
Alice Johnson and Amy Crawford said it was unclear whether people should water or weed the rain gardens. They are also concerned about how steep some of the trenches are, falling away significantly from street level.
"It just makes some kind of dangerous trenches where some old person like me or some young person to fall into and break something," Johnson told KARE.
The couple, who've lived on Grand Avenue for decades, agree with the goals of the rain garden pilot.
"I think everybody here wants our street to be safe and clean, and we want to protect Lake Harriet and all our water ways," Crawford remarked.
"We’re all for that. We're just waiting to see what happens."
Stout said it takes time to establish the gardens, and the city can't expect everyone to have the knowledge or time to do that work.
"Once you put them in they take a couple of years to get established, so there’s a lot of heavy maintenance involved in the first couple of years."