With a showdown looming over the future of a new downtown park, a key voice on the St. Paul City Council has proposed chucking a long-simmering plan for new office space and rejecting a park proposal supported by Mayor Melvin Carter.

The council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on whether to sell a vacant public safety building to the Ackerberg Group, a Minneapolis-based office developer. Combined with additional funding from Ackerberg, the sale proceeds would help the city build a new $4 million downtown park on underutilized city land next door, including shade trees, picnic benches, a playground, a water feature, a dog walk and other improvements.

Rebecca Noecker, the council member who represents the area, has an alternative, and it boils down to one word — sod. And lots of it.

Rather than sell the building to Ackerberg for office space, Noecker proposes the city tear it down and lay sod across the entire half-block. At roughly the same cost to city coffers, the result would expand the existing “Pedro Park” gardens into downtown St. Paul’s newest park attraction — minus most of the amenities selling the building would have funded.

“The neighborhood residents want grass. They want green space,” said Noecker, who has met with critics of the Ackerberg proposal for months. “It doesn’t have to be much more than green space.”

IS THERE ENOUGH SUPPORT?

It’s unclear if Noecker has the votes on the city council to make her vision a reality. A year ago, the city council met as the St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority and voted 4-3 to give Ackerberg “tentative developer status,” a first step toward the building sale and office redevelopment.

Downtown St. Paul has a fair amount of older and outdated office space available — “Class B” and “Class C” space — but both the Greater St. Paul Building Owners and Managers Association and the city’s “Full Stack” business initiative have documented a need for more high-end, or “Class A,” office space to draw jobs. BOMA plans to release updated numbers on downtown office vacancy rates Monday afternoon.

The city’s quarter-block park concept, which has been presented by St. Paul Parks and Recreation together with city Planning and Economic Development officials, on Oct. 11 received the support of the city’s Parks Commission, and before that the city’s Capital Improvement Budget Committee.

City officials have said that with the additional investments provided by Ackerberg and the building sale, nearly half the park funding would be paid for by the private sector, and shovels could be in the ground within months.

“The value proposition is a $2.23 million investment for a $4 million product, with construction next year,” said St. Paul Parks and Rec Director Mike Hahm during an early October interview.

NEIGHBORHOOD SEEKS GREEN SPACE

Residents note, however, that downtown’s residential population has nearly doubled in less than a decade, and green space beyond Rice Park and Mears Park is sorely lacking.

On Tuesday, a neighborhood coalition voted 18-0 to support Noecker’s sod alternative, with one abstention. The CapitolRiver Council, which represents downtown businesses and residents, has advocated for at least a dozen years for a new park space in the general area of 10th and Robert streets. In 2006, the CapitolRiver Council voted to support the “Fitzgerald Park Precinct Plan,” an early precursor to the Pedro Park project.

That vision has evolved over time. In 2009, two members of the family behind the shuttered Pedro’s Luggage factory and retail outlet contacted then-St. Paul City Council member Dave Thune and promised to donate the land at 10th and Robert to the city. The expectation was that the city would add surrounding land and begin to build a half-block, two-third-block or full-block park within five years.

The two buildings were demolished in 2011, but the only thing that became of the quarter-block property was a wall mural overlooking a garden planted in a creative pattern. The “Urban Flower Field” has stood as a proud placeholder in the eyes of Parks and Recreation officials, who have won awards for their ingenuity, and as an embarrassment in the eyes of many neighborhood advocates.

BATTLE LIKELY TO CONTINUE

Critics, who have formed the Friends of the Pedro Park Expansion, remain adamant that a quarter-block park will not fulfill the promises made to residents and to the few surviving members of the Pedro family. They recently filed a legal case in Ramsey County District Court.

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“We want to emphasize that this park land has been donated to the public,” the letter signed by board chair Tiffany Brace and council director Jon Fure. “It should NOT serve as the front yard for the Ackerberg Group’s renovated office building. Put bluntly, the Parks and Recreation department has not engaged the public; instead, it has ignored the public.”