How Eden Prairie preserved miles of shoreline: A legacy of grants, plans, and development fees

Beth Kreusch often sees bald eagles, herons and other wildlife as she kayaks on Staring Lake in Eden Prairie. Last summer, she spotted deer near the shoreline playing hide-and-seek among the trees.

“I just don’t think you see that kind of activity in other places,” she said.

For Christine Brinkman, the lake is “my happy place.”

She became a Staring Lake kayaker after a neighbor recommended it over another lake “because it was quieter and had wildlife. He was 100 percent correct,” said Brinkman.

“I’m often the only person on the lake. And the reason I kayak is for that peace and solitude.” 

What Kreusch and Brinkman do not see are lakeside homes with manicured lawns down to the shoreline. The only structures on the lake are a couple of fishing piers and the city’s log-cabin nature center.

Kreusch and Brinkman have earlier generations of Eden Prairie residents to thank for the miles and miles of Eden Prairie shoreline in the public’s hands, most of it left natural. Timing, luck and persistence all played a part.

Six lakes – Round, Staring, the Purgatory Creek Recreation Area body of water, the two Anderson Lakes, and the Eden Prairie side of Rice Marsh Lake – have 100% of their EP shorelines in public ownership or protected by conservation easements if you count Hennepin Technical College, which has some property on Staring, as a public entity.

City park and recreation officials, eyeing computerized maps, recently estimated that four other lakes have between 75% and 100% of their shorelines protected by public ownership or easement (Birch Island, McCoy, Neill and Smetana). Another four are between 50% and 75% protected (Bryant, Eden, Idlewild and Mitchell). 

Two other lakes near Eden Prairie’s southern boundary – Rice and Grass lakes – are protected and are part of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Also, nearly all of the Riley Creek and Purgatory Creek corridors and a good chunk of the Nine Mile Creek corridor are city-owned.

It’s a lot of shoreline in public hands, and not every suburb has taken this approach. Lake Minnetonka, just 10 miles from Staring Lake, is mostly surrounded by large homes that separate most people from the water. Good luck finding a sidewalk or trail with lake views.

Eden Prairie’s conservation efforts also stand out because so many other cities in Minnesota allow lawns down to the water’s edge, with devastating consequences.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said in a 2023 report that natural shorelines are rapidly disappearing. Since Minnesotans started developing around lakes and rivers, the state has lost 40 to 50 percent of its natural shorelines and loses more every year, according to the DNR.

That’s significant because mowed shorelines allow seven to nine times more pollutants to enter a lake than a more naturally vegetated shoreline, the agency said in its report. This results in poorer water quality and reduced fish habitat.

But Eden Prairie didn’t stockpile natural shorelines because residents crowded city council chambers or laid down in front of bulldozers. They did it because early Eden Prairie park directors quietly and diligently – with permission from elected city officials – purchased the shoreline before it was lost to development.

And those park directors did so because farmers and other residents mapped out the future of Eden Prairie in a 1968 long-term plan, deciding that a critical goal would be preserving as much shoreline as possible.

It started with a plan

Good, timely planning nearly 60 years ago – when Eden Prairie had fewer than 7,000 residents, many of them farmers – might be the single largest reason that much of Eden Prairie’s shorelines are in the public’s hands.

More than 140 residents attended four “community development seminars” that planner Don Brauer, at the village council’s direction, organized in October and November 1967 to come up with the first long-term plan for Eden Prairie. The task was to help decide how Eden Prairie would develop. Attendees were asked to read 10 essays on city and suburban planning that were in a book titled “Man and the Modern City,” with one chapter titled “Suburbia Reconsidered: Diversity and the Creative Life.”

Brauer had a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Minnesota, and, though he died in 2014, he left a legacy of planning work in Eden Prairie, Edina, Richfield and other southwestern suburbs through his firm, Brauer & Associates, later called The Brauer Group.

He scheduled guest speakers for the Eden Prairie seminars and assigned a topic for each seminar. Participants were divided into small groups to discuss weighty topics like “Must Eden Prairie grow?” and “To what extent could Eden Prairie develop economic independence?”

Only about 10% of Eden Prairie was developed at that time, but residents and the village council had the foresight to set as a goal the preservation of all of the shorelines of Round and Staring lakes, as well as Purgatory Creek. And, as the plan states, there was a premium put on the “conservation of significant natural amenities such as lakes, streams, waterfalls, bog, forest, meadow, through preservation from destruction by all forms of urban encroachment.”

Not long after the village council approved the 1968 Guide Plan, Eden Prairie voters passed a $550,000 park bond referendum to help finance a lot of those shoreline purchases. 

The race to beat developers to the punch was on.

Then came park directors

The early work of shoreland acquisition fell to Eden Prairie’s first park director, Marty Jessen, who was hired in 1971 after working part-time for the city parks department in Maple Grove. Jessen was just 24 when hired by Eden Prairie City Manager George Hite and was still studying for a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota.

A large copy of the 1968 Guide Plan map showing future land uses hung on the wall at the village hall along Eden Prairie Road, now the Senior Center.

“It’s got all these green blobs on it,” recalled Jessen, referring to the plan’s goal of acquiring parkland and shoreline. “It’s got the land all the way around Round Lake, all the way around Staring Lake, the northeast part of Bryant, Mitchell Lake, Birch Island … . They didn’t have any of it, really, except for the Round Lake parcel. Birch Island (Park) had been purchased.”

He continued, “It was as much a social plan as it was a physical plan. Because they had these overarching objectives.

“That plan was sacrosanct. There was that much commitment to the idea. The way Don and Brauer & Associates worked on it, created ownership. It was (the residents’) plan. And that’s why there was such a tremendous commitment to it.

“So we bought up hundreds of acres of land. And got hundreds more donated.”

Among their best friends in the process were the federal government and its LAWCON grant program, which provided matching money for the shoreline purchases. LAWCON stands for Land and Water Conservation. The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 was an effort by the federal government to help preserve, develop and ensure access to outdoor recreation facilities to strengthen the health of Americans. Nearly all of the fund – $900 million annually – came from oil and gas leases on the Outer Continental Shelf off America’s coasts.

LAWCON grant applications became a regular item on Eden Prairie council agendas, and it was a process mastered by Jessen, who served as parks director until 1977, and then by his successor, Bob Lambert, who served until 2010. When money from that early park-bond referendum ran out, the city used other sources for the local funding match, including state and regional grants.

“We had lakeshore to preserve, ‘up the kazoo,’ so we were using LAWCON money for grants on Round Lake Park, Anderson Lakes Park, Staring Lake Park – all the lakeshore around there – obviously, eventually Miller Park, Riley Lake Park … . We used LAWCON grants for all of those things,” Lambert recalled. “I don’t remember a LAWCON grant that we applied for that we didn’t get.”

Said Jessen: “I think when all was said and done, I used to say – and I assume it has some basis in fact – that we bought about five and a half million dollars’ worth of parkland with that $550,000” from the park referendum.

The city was fortunate to buy land before Eden Prairie’s development boom increased prices. For example, in 1969, it bought a parcel on Round Lake for $1,971 per acre, according to city council minutes. In 1970, it purchased land on Anderson Lakes for $5,000 per acre. A year later, a 35-acre parcel on Staring Lake bought for park purposes cost $157,000, or $4,500 per acre.

By comparison, the Riley Purgatory Bluff Creek Watershed District’s recent purchase of 28 acres of mostly undeveloped land bordering Riley Creek in southern Eden Prairie cost $5.775 million, or $206,250 per acre.

Relationships helped secure land

Jessen would go on to be the chief park planner for the Metro Council, but Lambert continued the Eden Prairie pattern of aggressively snapping up shoreline and other parkland – straight-out purchases with occasional use of condemnation and the tax-forfeiture process.

“(Jessen) and I were of the same mind about pushing the envelope, recognizing what Eden Prairie had to offer and should be preserving in terms of natural resources,” Lambert said.

Like his predecessor, Lambert acknowledges the importance of the 1968 Guide Plan and its emphasis on preserving open space on lakes, creeks and elsewhere. “The one problem: There’s nothing in there that says how they’re going to fund it,” Lambert said about the document.

“But when I got there, everybody believed that was what we were going to do: We’re going to preserve all this.”

It required creativity and relationships. Lambert remembers a meeting with the surviving siblings of the Miller family that operated the Miller Brothers General Store along Eden Prairie Road for nearly 80 years, starting in the early 1880s. The meeting was arranged with help from City Attorney Roger Pauly, an Eden Prairie native, and the topic was purchasing the Millers’ extensive land holdings to create a city park on Mitchell Lake.

Lambert knew there would soon be developers bidding on the land – if there weren’t already. But he told the Miller siblings that if they sold to the city, he could convince the City Council to name the park “Miller Park.” It worked.

In another instance, he met almost weekly over coffee and cookies with Elaine Jacques, who owned property on Lake Riley that the city wanted for its community park there. Lambert’s relationship-building worked there, too, with the city purchasing a wide swath of Jacques property that included lakeshore and the Riley Jacques Barn.

But Eden Prairie’s rapid development in the 1980s also brought pressure to build playgrounds and ball fields. To do that and still deliver on open-space purchases, the city enacted what Lambert says were the stiffest park-dedication development fees in the metropolitan area. If developers weren’t donating land outright for park use, they were charged $700 for each single-family home in a development plan, when the next highest per-house fee among suburbs was $400. That money went toward the city’s parks and recreation system.

Eden Prairie was also wildly successful in getting developers to donate land along Riley and Purgatory creeks or to agree to place protective conservation easements on land deeds.

None of that could have happened without permission from elected city leaders, and both Jessen and Lambert are quick to hail those leaders’ willingness to stick to the Guide Plan.

“We were so fortunate to have all these great council members and parks commission members for so long,” Lambert said. “People that had so much talent and vision and were willing to donate all of that time.

“Everyone recognized that, when a city’s growing that fast, you really have one chance and a short window to do the right thing. And when you have a city like Eden Prairie, 36 square miles, with 16 lakes and three major creek valleys and all those natural areas … . If we didn’t have people that recognized the value of that, Eden Prairie would be a whole different city right now.”

Activists helped, including wildlife and nature photographer Les Blacklock and his wife, Fran, who served as an Eden Prairie parks commissioner during the couple’s 23 years on Anderson Lakes in Eden Prairie.

But most of all, it was the farmers and other residents who, led by Brauer in late 1967, envisioned an Eden Prairie where shoreline belonged to everyone, not just adjacent property owners.

“Brauer was an unbelievable salesman,” Lambert said. “And enough of these old-time Eden Prairie residents recognized how special Eden Prairie was, with those hills and those woods, and those creek valleys, and all those lakes, those streams. They loved living there, and they didn’t want it to ever change.”

So, when Brauer preached preservation, “that’s exactly what they wanted to hear,” said Lambert. “Without Brauer and his vision and Marty (Jessen) singing the same phrases, we would have never even thought about doing that stuff.”

Water quality remains an issue

The city’s approach has kept miles of shoreline in public ownership and has improved aesthetics and recreation for lake users. But today, with Eden Prairie nearly fully developed, other outcomes are more mixed.

The community’s approach took a lot of shoreline off the property tax rolls, but it doesn’t seem to have dramatically hurt Eden Prairie’s tax base. Under a metro-area fiscal disparities program, in which cities with a strong commercial-industrial tax base share revenue with communities that have less, Eden Prairie is the fourth-largest contributor to the pool in Hennepin County, behind only Minneapolis, Bloomington, and Plymouth. It’s a sign of a healthy tax base.

Furthermore, the quality of the overall natural environment in Eden Prairie continues to be regarded highly by residents, with 92% rating it as excellent or good in a February 2023 survey conducted by the city. This rating is higher than that of national, regional and Minnesota comparison communities, according to the polling company hired by the city. When asked to choose their favorite thing about living in Eden Prairie, 30% of residents mentioned parks, trails and recreation centers. Additionally, 12% made positive comments about open space, nature/wildlife and quiet/peaceful aspects of Eden Prairie.

When large amounts of shoreline are preserved, said current Parks Director Amy Markle, “it gives you that feel that you’re in a much more natural area than in a developed community, because we have these easements and parkland protected around most of the lake – you don’t see the big homes that you might see on lakes in other communities.”

However, Staring and other lakes with large amounts of publicly owned, protected shoreline have water quality issues similar to the other lakes in Eden Prairie. 

For example, over the last decade, Staring Lake has failed to consistently meet water quality standards set by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), according to the Riley Purgatory Bluff Creek Watershed District, which has been taking water quality measurements since 1971. Staring typically has higher levels of phosphorus and chlorophyll-a (a type of chlorophyll) than MPCA standards, and water clarity measurements over the last decade have been slightly above or slightly below standards, depending on the year.

While Staring has a mostly natural shoreline that provides a buffer to contaminants, it is also downstream from a lot of Eden Prairie development.

Round Lake, tested by the city, fares slightly better in meeting phosphorus and chlorophyll-a measurements, but both lakes are trending upward in measurements of chloride, which can result from wintertime de-icing products, water softeners and fertilizers.

For 2023, the watershed district – using a report card-like system – said Round Lake’s water quality warranted a “B” grade and Staring’s a “D.”

Ironically, Lake Riley – which has substantial home development bordering lakeshore, especially on the Chanhassen side – received an “A” grade, and its performance in recent years has the district asking the MPCA to take Riley off its list of impaired lakes.

But Lake Riley is deeper than Staring and has a smaller area of developed land draining into it.

Similarly, water quality varies in Eden Prairie lakes within the Nine Mile Creek Watershed District, which has data through 2018 available on its website. For example, Birch Island Lake’s water quality is labeled as poor, partly because it is a very shallow lake. Bryant Lake has improved and been removed from the state’s impaired waters list. As of 2018, conditions in Smetana Lake and Eden Prairie’s two Anderson Lakes have also improved and beat state standards.

As for creeks, persistent drought limited monitoring in 2023, but the watershed district says water quality in Riley Creek and Purgatory Creek fell slightly from 2021 to 2022.

While natural shorelines on a lake or creek are typically beneficial to water quality, many other factors are at play, including lake depth, the amount of developed area draining into the lake, the health of the fish population, and the presence of invasive plant species such as Eurasian watermilfoil and curly-leaf pondweed.

“Lake management is really complicated. There are a lot of things that go into lake quality. It’s never one thing; it’s always a bunch of things,” said Lori Haak, water resources coordinator for the city.

Still, Haak said, it’s logical to assume that water quality would be worse if more Eden Prairie shoreline were occupied by suburban homes with manicured lawns, as well it might be if attitudes had been different in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ’80s.

“In natural shoreline miles, we’re probably in a good spot,” she said.

“I guarantee it” would look different if more shorelines were developed, said Lambert. “You don’t have to go very far, to Edina or just west of us or north of us, and see what all those lakes look like.”

“Maybe that’s the influence of the farmers that put together the (1968) plan,” Jessen said. “They were used to owning their own land, and here they were making plans to own their own land in a group, as a city versus as individuals.

“They knew each other. And they were good people,” Jessen added. “A community.”