Our view: Change is hard
Change, as perhaps you have heard, is hard.
When it comes to municipal planning, the stakes of that hard change couldn't be much higher. Get it right and your residents, businesses, neighborhoods and quality of life flourish. Get it wrong and history eventually frowns on the shattered neighborhoods, marginal business zones, environmental blight and traffic and safety tangles left for future generations to tolerate or mitigate — if they can.
For residents of Sartell's River Oaks Lane neighborhood (those who decided not to sell their mid-20th century homes for development, that is), hard change has arrived. Trees and neighboring homes have been razed to make way for a commercial development that is rumored to include a car wash and a few chain businesses.
The small, dead-end street along the Mississippi River on the northwest side of the Bridge of Hope will never again be the enclave sheltered from a busy highway and county road by a buffer of trees and shared decades as a neighborhood.
It was not, however unfortunate, a surprise. The area had been zoned commercial for years and was designated in the city's comprehensive land-use plan as a non-core, second-priority area for commercial development.
Still, it must be particularly painful for the River Oaks stalwarts to stomach in this case. If they stand on the newly razed land their neighbors chose to sell, they can see the 6 acres or so that stands available directly across Minnesota Highway 15 at the southwestern foot of the Bridge of Hope.
And they can see the acres of eyesore in the Walmart/Sam's Club development where a huge pile of fill and scrub trees (trees well into adolescence after more than a decade of neglect) also stand undeveloped.
And then there is Sartell's stated civic desire to create a city center along Pine Cone Road, reinforced by its use of that desire in its recent defense of placing its community center there over heartfelt objections. Along Pine Cone Road, the curb cuts, street lights and other infrastructure have been in place for years, just waiting for the future buzz of commerce.
There is also the established commercial zone running from Pine Cone Road along Second Street to the Mississippi, a smattering of (let's call it misplaced) commercial properties along Riverside Avenue South interspersed with long-standing residential properties, parkland, land now slated for industrial or commercial use and ... you can see the vision for Sartell's future is a bit fractured.
Every government gets planning wrong sometimes (and we acknowledge that "wrong" is often in the eye of the beholder). Take St. Cloud's infamous ring road or Waite Park's traffic flows that send drivers in the know to big-box parking lots where cars move more efficiently than on the actual streets.
And it's not just a Central Minnesota foible. The destruction of Minneapolis's vibrant Rondo neighborhood to make way for an interstate is a famous failure. And L'Enfant's choice to design a circular city (Washington) inside a mostly-but-not-quite-square tract (the District of Columbia) puts almost all other planning errors to shame, as beautiful as the barely-functional result may be.
Making the task even more complicated is the fact that some planning mistakes are only realized as such many decades later as needs change, priorities shift and communities evolve. It's almost impossible to do it right every time.
Still, all cities owe it to their residents and businesses — past and future — to plan carefully, deliberately and discriminatingly so our communities may grow gracefully and successfully for the long term. Cities owe that obligation of care to landowners who have a financial stake in their property as well as those who have an emotional stake in their neighborhood. It's the city's responsibility to balance those needs for the good of the entire community, now and 100 years from now.
Thoughtful foresight is how we take our best shot at building livable cities that serve people, commerce and the future. Sartell is trying right now, but change is hard.
— This is the opinion of the St. Cloud Times Editorial Board, which consists of News Director Lisa Schwarz and Content Coach Anna Haecherl.
This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: Our view: Change is hard with municipal planning in Sartell
