City Hall Monitor: Mitigation City gets nicked

Neighborhoods around the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus form a kind of Mitigation City: the mammoth TCF Bank Stadium and Central Corridor light rail transit (LRT) projects both set aside sizable sums to mitigate negative impacts there. Then this month, just as the stadium mitigation money begins to flow and LRT mitigation pledges get put in ink, the state hits Mitigation City with an unprecedented refiguring of Minneapolis property value assessments. With the extra they’ll pay in taxes, homeowners could have started their own mitigation fund.

Yesterday, the U of M Board of Regents signed a memorandum of agreement to let LRT run at grade on Washington Ave. SE, eliminating vehicle traffic through the heart of the campus and shunting a daily flow of 25,000 cars and trucks onto neighborhood streets. Tomorrow, the Minneapolis City Council is expected to sign on to the same deal, which dedicates $27 million to beef up streets to take the overflow — though one "U" regent said she found the source of the mitigation funds too mysterious to support the agreement.

Last month, the university awarded the first grants from a $1.5 million endowment called the Good Neighbor Fund that the state Legislature mandated when it funded the new Gopher stadium. Seven neighborhood projects received a total of $69,000. But that amount is dwarfed by what the Mitigation City homeowners will pay the state in extra property taxes, after the Minnesota Revenue Department last week demanded a 5 percent increase over Minneapolis assessment values. As the Star Tribune’s Steve Brandt reported, owners of 20,000 residential properties in the University and Nokomis areas will pay a premium of $115 for a median lot in University and $100 in Nokomis.