Hole poked in Golden Parachute Park

By Chris Steller
Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 8:54 pm

Something hasn’t felt right, even from the beginning, about Bill McGuire‘s Golden Parachute Park — sorry, Gold Medal Park — the gentle, genteel, zigguratish mound that the ex-UnitedHealth CEO built as a gift to the city of Minneapolis. It’s not only that the 7.5-acre park next to the new Guthrie Theater is a bit strange (the eerily pastoral landscape, a dead ringer for Teletubbyland, nonetheless attracts the Zombie Pub Crawl undead). It’s not only the confusion over Gold Medal’s status as a privately built public park on city land that’s unaffiliated with the city’s park system (the first of two such public-private parks on the Minneapolis riverfront). And it’s not only that this “admirable but boring” park that’s “a little bit alien” seems, to Adrienne at Cafeapolis, for one, such an obvious sop to public goodwill after the outrage over McGuire’s giant severance package and stock option backdating scandal.

No, the uneasy feeling at Gold Medal Park could be emanating from real dirt lying under all that gratis grass. As Dave Orrick, Julie Forster and Nicole Garrison-Sprenger of the PiPress report, a postal inspector has given federal investigators sworn testimony that billionaire McGuire recommended Windsor Landscaping for work at Gold Medal Park in exchange for Windsor giving him a discount on landscaping at his own home. (Contractor Kraus-Anderson says it hired Windsor for the Gold Medal job in a competitive process.) Windsor owner Luther Hochradel will plead guilty next week in federal court to charges that he concealed landscaping work he’d done for free, allowing his clients to avoid paying taxes on the gifts. McGuire’s lawyer told the Strib the discount was in exchange for McGuire cosigning a loan for Hochradel. But McGuire’s name pops up often in 71 boxes of documents the feds seized from Windsor last July related to shady dealings at the unbuilt Town Center development in Ramsey, Minn. — a “Fargo”-worthy tale of a Midwestern business scheme gone wrong that the PiPress has tracked closely, from a dying developer’s secret Swiss bank accounts to a land appraiser’s nine-page suicide note.

Comments

6 Comments

Janine
Comment posted March 24, 2008 @ 10:22 am

I don’t get it Is there an accusation here, or is this just a pointless rant?

minnesotacharm
Comment posted March 24, 2008 @ 3:19 pm

I had the same question Particularly the first part — are we really so angered at rich people who donate parks that we have to respond with a pouty version of “thanks, but man, if I were rich and donated a park, it would have been a lot better than the crappy one you donated, and it would have been done with the purest of intentions”?

…followed by the second part, which appears to be full of rampant speculation but few, if any, facts indicating that a crime was committed by Mr. McGuire.

Charlie Quimby
Comment posted March 31, 2008 @ 11:46 pm

Not Quite the Way it Looks I’m no fan of McGuire and have criticized him myself. But the park deal came far in advance of any outrage over his stock shenanigans, so it can hardly be a sop. As for the rest of the accusations, I’ll wait for the actual court cases to find wrongdoing. The sad fact is rich guys can get discounts us regular slobs don’t.

Janine
Comment posted March 24, 2008 @ 5:22 am

I don't get it Is there an accusation here, or is this just a pointless rant?

minnesotacharm
Comment posted March 24, 2008 @ 10:19 am

…followed by the second part, which appears to be full of rampant speculation but few, if any, facts indicating that a crime was committed by Mr. McGuire.

Charlie Quimby
Comment posted March 31, 2008 @ 6:46 pm

Not Quite the Way it Looks I'm no fan of McGuire and have criticized him myself. But the park deal came far in advance of any outrage over his stock shenanigans, so it can hardly be a sop. As for the rest of the accusations, I'll wait for the actual court cases to find wrongdoing. The sad fact is rich guys can get discounts us regular slobs don't.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.