Minneapolis parks will, for a fee, let you book a picnic shelter to enjoy for an afternoon. Or, if you’re among a select group of concessionaires, the park board can help your company stay off the county’s property tax books for years and enjoy another kind of shelter. Six businesses with contracts to operate on parkland dating back as far as 2001 will now pay taxes for the first time, the Twin Cities Daily Planet reports. They owe more than $123,000 for this year alone, but the city has opted not to ask for the back taxes.

It seems no one notified city assessors about the private businesses being run on park property, not the park board and not the private companies, which notably include Mintahoe Hospitality Group (park contract since 2001, with $67,189 in property taxes owed this year) and Twin Cities Catering (contract since 2003, $39,819 owed this year), a company that would be hard for park administrators to overlook, since it operates out of the park board’s headquarters building.

Reporter Scott Russell writes that the under-the-radar arrangements may have given favored catering firms an unfair leg up on competitors who were assessed property taxes. That appears to be borne out by at least one company’s experience. According to the March 10, 2005, edition of the Northeaster newspaper, Joseph Catering in 2002 took out a lease on an event space only three blocks from Mintahoe’s base at the historic Nicollet Island Park Pavilion, in another historic building at 222 First Ave. NE. Within two years, Joseph Catering, which had been in business for 35 years, filed for bankruptcy. Among the company’s debts: $21,734 in taxes owed to Hennepin County.