4 years overdue: When will St. Paul adopt its riverfront rules?

We're all set to celebrate the adoption of river protections by a full slate of cities and townships along the metro river. There's just one problem: St. Paul hasn't finished theirs.

The Mississippi River through the Twin Cities is a national park. It's also the state-designated Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area. For decades, 25 cities and townships within this 72-mile-long critical area managed riverfront land use and development through an inconsistent patchwork of ordinances. 

In 2007 Friends of the Mississippi River and other leaders pushed to create stronger environmental protections and more clarity for property owners throughout the critical area. This effort resulted in a set of rules from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) that every city in the critical area would be required to adopt into local ordinances.

Between 2020 and 2024, 24 cities and townships did just that. Only one city remains: St. Paul. 

What St. Paul has done so far

The DNR originally imposed a deadline of January 2021 for St. Paul to complete its ordinance adoption. Four years past that deadline, the ordinance still isn't complete, and city leaders are mum about when it will be done.

The city's Planning Commission hosted one public hearing about the draft ordinance in January 2023. The hearing yielded good discussions about how to improve the ordinance. But since then, city staff haven't presented any updated drafts for the public and commission to consider. The process is stalled, and it's not clear why.

FMR and community members have advocated for years for the process to resume. We've had meetings with leaders in the mayor's office and city council, helped residents send dozens of letters and shared our concerns with the media.

City's river regulations are out of date

These delays have put St. Paul years behind its peer cities in having the most up-to-date, science-based regulations to protect the Mississippi riverfront. For a city that owes its existence to the Mississippi River, this is concerning. St. Paul is responsible for caring for part of the river's only gorge, fragile bluffs, world-class parks and areas of great cultural significance to some communities. 

Some of the critical area requirements already exist in city code in some form. But other elements are new. We've written previously about the most essential aspects of this ordinance that we hope to see St. Paul adopt soon:

• Building height and shoreline and bluff setback limits. These vary by critical area "district" (areas defined by different existing development patterns) but are intended to be consistent throughout all 25 cities and townships. 
• Clearer standards about how to consider requests for exceptions, like variances, from the ordinance. Developers, community members and city leaders all benefit from this clarity and consistency; it makes development more predictable for all involved.
• An opportunity to add bird-safe building requirements to protect the millions of birds that migrate along the Mississippi River flyway. St. Paul included strong standards for this in the January 2023 public draft of the ordinance, and it was very popular with the public. 

We've heard that city staff would like to remove the bird-safe building requirements from the next draft of the ordinance, which is concerning.

Resuming the public hearing process would give residents an opportunity to weigh in on this and other aspects of the ordinance.

Get updates

We don't know when St. Paul will adopt its overdue ordinance, writing into law the strong protections that St. Paul's Mississippi River deserves. But when the public process does restart, we'll let our River Guardians know what's in the draft and how to share their feedback.