Hackberry Park's Rebuild Has Two Phases, and Only One Has a Budget

Drive along Willow Drive this month and you will see the excavators before you see anything resembling a park. The basketball court is fenced off, the north ballfield is gone, and what used to be open grass now looks like a construction staging yard. Orono's own community newsletter has been fielding questions about it for weeks, and the Laker Pioneer summed up the scene about as plainly as it can be summed up: it is bulldozers and backhoes instead of bats and balls at Hackberry Park these days.

The park taking shape this fall is not the park the city eventually plans to have. The Laker Pioneer reported that the $1.4 million project now under construction fixes the drainage problem that has bothered the neighborhood for years and reworks the fields, but the two amenities that started this whole conversation back in 2023, real parking capacity and a permanent bathroom, are not part of this round. They are penciled in for later, and later is not fully funded yet.

What's Actually Going Into the Ground This Year

The city went out for bids on April 27, and the $1.4 million estimate covers the parts of Hackberry that have been failing for a decade: a clogged drain tile that turned the park into a mud pit after every rain, a northern ballfield that's being removed entirely, and a southern ballfield that's being rebuilt in its place. The basketball court is getting revamped rather than replaced. Pollinator gardens, a rain garden seed mix, and a stormwater feature are going in alongside the regrading, the kind of green infrastructure that does double duty as both drainage fix and landscaping upgrade.

City Administrator Adam Edwards framed the tree math on this piece specifically: five medium-quality maple trees are coming out to make room for the stormwater work, but the project nets out to seventeen new trees once the pollinator and rain garden plantings are counted. That is separate from the citywide ash removal effort also underway this year, which is pulling out roughly one hundred dead ash trees across Orono's parks and trails and replacing them with a hundred and fifty new, more disease-resistant species. A 2025 tree analysis found that more than three-quarters of the city's tree population is at risk from emerald ash borer, European spongy moth, or Asian longhorn beetle, and Parks Director Joe Ruthenberg put it bluntly: branches fall, and some of the trees themselves are falling, so the city is glad to get them out before they become a bigger hazard.

A Temporary Restroom Option for This Phase

Here is where the phasing becomes obvious. Last month, the council approved a change order for the project that removes 240 linear feet of the park's old galvanized fence and replaces it with a concrete pad and privacy screening, sized to hold up to two portable restrooms, one of them ADA-compliant. It gives the park a temporary restroom option while leaving a permanent building for a future phase.

Staff were candid about why: a permanent drinking fountain came in at $14,000 to $18,000 in vendor quotes, against an earlier staff estimate closer to $5,000 for something simpler like a spigot or bottle filler. The council debated the fountain, debated whether two stalls were worth the added maintenance cost over one, and asked that the pad face the parking lot for better screening and convenience. Staff noted the pad is built flexibly enough that it could serve as a leveled base for a future pavilion, if the council ever authorizes one, but that is a maybe, not a plan.

Here is what that leaves on the table right now versus what is still pending:

Parking Expansion Is Deferred to a Future Road Project

Go back to 2023, when Bolton & Menk was first contracted to draw up a Hackberry master plan, and the resident complaints were consistent: limited parking, a clogged drain, and vehicles speeding through the lot. Parking was the original irritant that got this whole process started, and the early Bolton & Menk executive summary sketched out a 60-space lot to fix it.

That full buildout is not what is getting built this year. The council chose to delay an additional $100,000 in perimeter parking so it can coincide with a future road project, one the city currently expects could arrive as early as 2027. Until that road work happens, the parking situation at Hackberry improves only as much as the current $1.4 million bid allows, which is a regraded existing lot, not the expanded capacity residents asked for two years ago.

How Orono Is Prioritizing Parks Spending

That deferral is not unique to Hackberry. It is how Orono is handling parks money across the board right now. Antoine Park, a neighborhood park off Fagerness Point Road, got a master-plan budget of $10,600, enough for community engagement and concept drawings, not construction. A stretch of the County Road 6 trail, from Old Crystal Bay Road to Willow Drive, got a resurfacing design budget of under $7,000 rather than a full rebuild. And when the Park Commission floated a mountain bike trail study at the Orono Orchards Golf Course last year, the council rejected it 3-2. Councilmember Alisa Benson said, as quoted by the Laker Pioneer:

"Park dollars are scarce in our city."

Park Commission Chair Brian Roath had pushed for the trail study anyway, noting the commission still had unanswered questions it wanted design money to resolve. The council said no. At Hackberry, the current phase addresses what is actively failing and leaves expensive additions for later.

The Three Years Before the Bulldozers Showed Up

None of this arrived without friction. When the city released concept plans for Hackberry, Friends of Orono, a citizens group that has tracked the project closely, argued the online survey drew a response from roughly fifty residents citywide, well under 1 percent of Orono's population, and said the city leaned on that thin sample while overlooking what the group called the number one request from all three listening sessions: keep the park's two T-ball fields where they are. The group also flagged that Hackberry sits on just 3.58 acres, which by National Recreation and Park Association and Little League guidelines is barely enough for two T-ball fields and spectators, let alone a playground, basketball court, restroom, and 35 parking spaces on top of new multi-use fields.

Malin Mulvaney, whose home faces the park, told the council directly at a May 2025 meeting that any redesign should stay "in the scale of the property size and keep what we have currently," pointing to unsafe parking and long-standing maintenance problems rather than a bigger footprint. The council's grant applications tell a similar story of a body working through disagreement in public: a 2024 vote to pursue Hennepin County Youth Athletics grant funding passed only 4-1, the second attempt after an earlier bid was denied outright.

The project included three years of design work, a survey Friends of Orono criticized, an open house residents said was poorly announced, and a special council session before construction began.

What to Watch For Next

The DNR grant covering the citywide ash removal and replanting carries a real deadline: all of that work has to wrap by mid-summer 2027 to satisfy the grant terms, so expect tree crews in Orono's parks well into next spring. The Hackberry-specific field work should settle out sooner, once this construction season closes, though the exact reopening timeline for the rebuilt ballfield has not been posted publicly yet. And if the 2027 road project the council is counting on for perimeter parking slips, so does the parking fix that started this whole conversation in the first place.

Antoine Park is already moving through its own version of this process, master plan first, construction dollars later, so residents who live near that park should expect a similar staged rollout rather than a single announcement and a finished product.

For now, Hackberry Park is getting repairs to its drainage and fields, while expanded parking and a permanent bathroom remain for a future phase.

Jim Schwarz has spent his career paying attention to the details that shape day-to-day life around Lake Minnetonka, from drainage fights to the timing of a road project two years out. If you are weighing a move within Orono or anywhere along the lake corridor and want a local read that goes past the listing sheet, Jim Schwarz welcomes the conversation. Schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready.