![]() “I don’t think she’s raising issues that weren’t contemplated,” says Edina Mayor Jim Hovland, who has sat on the project’s Corridor Management Committee since the 2000s, back when the route was still being settled. No one at the project level is offering a mea culpa. We told them you are going to run into problems you are not going to be able to solve. ![]() We told them there was not room to build a tunnel safely. Hornstein, she says, “we told them the geology between the lakes was messy. “They called us NIMBYs, rich people who just wanted not to be bothered,” says Mary Pattock, former chair of the Cedar Isles Dean neighborhood board and longtime critic of the LRT routing. They were repeatedly assured by the Met Council that the project as designed would be safe and readily buildable. Nearby Minneapolis lakes neighborhood groups long believed the tunneling endangered the condo foundations and portended many other environmental and construction ills, going so far as to file a federal environmental lawsuit, which failed. Given the sheet decoupling elsewhere in the tunnel, a decision was announced in winter to build a drilled concrete (“secant”) retaining wall at the condos instead, which will add additional months and millions to the timeline. The excavation also comes inches from the condominiums, which sit just to the southwest of Park Siding. Specifically, the sheet piling that forms the walls of the tunnel excavation has decoupled once underground due to the presence of boulders and other debris, requiring it be hand-sealed in a time-consuming process that includes divers working under the water table. They include turning to a special method of construction to protect the foundation of the adjacent Calhoun Isles Condos, built in 1928 as grain elevators along the then-Minneapolis & St. The Kenilworth Tunnel, long the open wound among neighborhood and environmental activists, has been plagued by what they deem as foreseen challenges-which have forced construction crews to adopt complex and time-consuming fixes to maintain its structural integrity. Every dire prediction came true, the ones about cost overruns, the ones about the tunnel, the millions given away to railroads in negotiations,” he said in a spring interview.Īlthough contaminated soils and a separation wall demanded by adjacent BNSF Railway will add nearly $100 million in overages to the project budget-and take time to respectively remediate and build-it will happen concurrent with tunnel construction, which is the biggest headache. “We raised questions about all these problem areas. ![]() Hornstein is a supporter of the project who frames himself as disappointed in its current state. Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis), who chairs the state House Transportation Committee. At the time, the project was expected to be delayed by at least two years into late 2025, say individuals on that call, including state Rep. But the agency insists even today that it cannot estimate the magnitude of delay nor additional cost.īut in midwinter, in a private call with government stakeholders, the Met Council did offer some specificity, TCB has learned. Complexities with water, underground debris, and construction methods seem poised to push the line’s opening deep into 2025 or 2026.Įver since word started to leak out last fall that the Kenilworth tunnel construction was stuck in a sloppy mess of water and boulders, contractors and Met Council officials have known the line could not meet its opening estimates, and that tunnel costs could blow through the project’s contingency fund. It is hard by miniscule Depot Street, another reminder that the Kenilworth corridor has long been a transitway for trains.īut what’s happening between Park Siding and Depot Street today is construction of a half-mile tunnel that will carry the Metropolitan Council’s Southwest LRT project through a pinch point in its 15-mile path from downtown to Eden Prairie. Park Siding Park is named for a railroad siding that once occupied a tiny triangle of land in the shadow of former grain elevators turned into condos. Water gushing through pipes, water being sucked into other pipes, reminiscent of the sounds in a dentist’s office. There, the sounds of water are everywhere. If you want to understand why Southwest Light Rail is likely delayed several years beyond its last anticipated opening date, make a visit to Park Siding, an obscure park on the extreme western edge of south Minneapolis.
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