Mankato Council returns to in-person meetings

The Mankato Council was greeted by a large crowd of Tourtellotte Park neighborhood residents in the first in-person regular meeting of the council since March 9, 2020.

MANKATO — The Mankato City Council rejected an effort by northside residents on Monday to block any possibility of widespread development of rental housing in the Tourtellotte Park area.

Dozens of residents of the neighborhood are worried that a former pasture owned by the School Sisters of Notre Dame might be transformed into apartments or townhouses targeted toward lower-income renters. An initial concept presented at a neighborhood meeting in April showed a three-story apartment building, a large parking lot and as many as 49 townhouses on roughly eight acres owned by the nuns.

In early April, the School Sisters announced plans to sell their entire Good Counsel campus as they look to generate revenue for the aging congregation of nuns and relieve them of the financial burdens of property management. But the School Sisters said they also want the next use of the property to be consistent with the organization’s mission and values and were working with the Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership on the possibility of providing affordable housing on the former pasture land just east of Tourtellotte Park.

While the initial proposal for a 34-unit apartment building and long rows of townhomes appears to have been dropped, Council member Mark Frost, working with members of the neighborhood, aimed to preclude any possibility of the land being redeveloped as rental housing. Frost and nearly 40 residents asked the council to expand Mankato’s rental-density ordinance to the pasture land — something that would have required approximately three of every four homes constructed there to be owner-occupied.

The 13-year-old ordinance — which governs most established residential areas of the city — was created to reduce the number of complaints associated with a growing percentage of rental houses in several neighborhoods in Mankato.

“This is the first time we’ve had an expansion of it, or attempted expansion,” Frost said. “... As you can tell, there’s a little bit of support for expanding it.”

近40 Tourtellotte公园附近居民were in attendance at the first in-person regular meeting of the council since March 9, 2020. But none of the council members backed Frost’s strategy, and several spoke against the idea of preemptively restricting the development options for the parcel when no specific proposal has been brought to the city by the landowners or the developer.

“We have not received an application from the property owners for any type of development ...,” Mayor Najwa Massad said.

Any construction project on the land would need to go through the city’s Planning Commission and the City Council before it could move forward, according to city staff. When that happens, the views of the neighborhood will be heard and closely considered, council members promised. Until then, they said, it would be premature to impose strict restrictions on any development through an expansion of the rental-density ordinance.

“That tells me we don’t trust our existing process,” Council President Mike Laven said of Frost’s approach.

Council member Karen Foreman said Mankato has a reputation for presenting developers with a well-defined and predictable set of rules for projects, something that’s conducive to economic growth.

“One of the things that’s really good about our community is we have guidelines for developers. ... We have a process that’s very clear to them, very well laid out,” Foreman said.

And Council member Jenn Melby-Kelley said a letter from the School Sisters pledged a thoughtful process for developing the property: “They say they’re not making any hasty decisions. Nothing’s going to happen overnight.”

A handful of the Tourtellotte Park residents spoke at the meeting, focusing on concerns that a large amount of rental housing would change the nature of the century-old neighborhood, increase traffic, bring pollution and negatively impact the wildlife that currently make the pasture land home.

Mike Spellacy, a North Second Street resident who once represented the area on the City Council, asked his successors to visit the parcel and consider the possibility of preserving it for public use.

“See what we have and what we may lose if we have just another development,” Spellacy said. “We can’t let this go to concrete and blacktop.”

Although there were no representatives of the School Sisters at the meeting, Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership architect James Arentson told The Free Press earlier this year that the nuns feel strongly about selling their property for purposes that meet community needs.

Affordable housing was a top choice. The congregation also has a long reputation for environmental initiatives, but their financial needs require that their land be paid for — not donated — if it’s going to be set aside as a natural area, according to Arentson.

“It needs to be purchased at a fair market value for a purpose that SSND believes in,” he said.

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