Half The Trees At Hackberry Park Are Gone. The City Says That Was Always The Plan.

Drive past Hackberry Park on Hackberry Hill this month and the missing canopy is hard to miss. Where a stand of shade trees used to break up the sightline from the road, there are now stumps, orange fencing, and open sky. It looks like the kind of damage that follows a storm or a budget cut. It is neither. Construction is officially underway on the park's redesign, and the trees came down on purpose, after a certified arborist and a landscape architect signed off on the plan.

Most of what was removed was dead or declining ash. The city has said the new layout will put nearly twice as many trees back in the ground as came out. That single number is worth sitting with, because it reframes what's happening here. This isn't a park getting smaller. It's a park getting rebuilt around a plan the city has been funding, in stages, since 2023.

The Budget Tells You This Isn't A Quick Fix

City capital improvement records show the Hackberry Park masterplan moving through three distinct phases with three distinct price tags:

A ten-thousand-dollar planning line in 2023 is the kind of thing most residents never notice. A million-dollar construction budget spanning two calendar years is not something a city commits to on a whim. The gap between those numbers tells you Orono has been building toward this for three years, and that the version of Hackberry Park that opens next is meant to last for decades, not just replace what emerald decline took out.

It also tells you not to expect a finished park this fall. A construction window that runs through 2026 means the fencing, the bare patches, and the reconfigured parking are going to be part of the neighborhood's daily view for a while yet.

The Meeting Where The Fight Actually Happened

The redesign wasn't uncontested. At the council session that authorized design work for Hackberry, a resident named Malin Mulvaney, whose home faces the park, pushed back on scale. She asked the council to keep the park's footprint in line with the existing property and flagged unsafe parking and long-standing maintenance problems as the issues that actually needed solving, not a bigger build.

The council's answer was structural rather than dismissive. Staff and councilmembers described the contract with the consulting firm Bolton & Mink as phased design work, not a lump-sum commitment, meaning the layout could still be revised before anything got built. That distinction mattered enough that the council repeated it on the record: approving design work was not the same as locking in a final plan.

There's also a funding detail that changes how the million-dollar figure should be read. City staff said the Hackberry design work positions Orono to apply for a Hennepin County Youth Sports Facility Grant, with awards reaching up to $300,000. If that grant comes through, a meaningful share of the construction cost gets absorbed by the county rather than the city's own parks fund. The $1.1 million on the page isn't necessarily the final number Orono taxpayers cover.

Three Projects, One Session, One Pattern

Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only follow Hackberry on its own. The same council meeting that approved Hackberry's design phase also approved a masterplan study for Antoine Park and a design for County Road 6 trail pavement preservation. Three separate park and trail projects, greenlit together, in the same sitting.

That's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's a pattern that continued into 2026. At a February Parks Commission meeting, the group agreed to carry trails, golf-course planning, and the Hackberry masterplan forward together as its top priorities for the year. Commissioner Jacob Janney used that meeting to flag something worth watching closely: a potential connection to the Loose Line Dakota Trail, urging fellow commissioners to keep an eye on county and neighboring-city trail efforts that could affect what Orono builds next. Staff added a small but telling detail in the same discussion, that the city already handles snow plowing for the Dakota Trail. Orono isn't treating that trail as a nice-to-have amenity. It's already maintaining it like core infrastructure.

Put together, the year's park spending isn't a series of unrelated repairs. It's Hackberry's redesign, Antoine's master plan, and a county road trail resurfacing, all moving at once, with a sitting commissioner pointing at the next trail link before the current projects are even finished. If you live near any of these three sites, the individual fencing and detour signs read differently once you see them as pieces of the same multi-year build rather than isolated construction headaches.

The council's broader 2026 goals, adopted by unanimous voice vote in January, back this up. Alongside the Hackberry work, the list includes improving park asset management citywide and establishing at least one larger annual fall event, on top of the tree-lighting the city already runs. None of that reads like a town managing parks one squeaky wheel at a time. It reads like a town treating its green space as a system.

Where To Walk While Hackberry Is A Work Zone

None of this helps much if you just want a place to take a fall walk this weekend. For that, Noerenberg Gardens on Crystal Bay is the better bet right now, and it's an easy one to overlook if you've never had a reason to turn onto North Shore Drive.

The 70-acre garden sits on what was once the lakeside estate of Frederick Noerenberg, the founder of Grain Belt Brewery, built in 1890. His family gave the land to the Three Rivers Park District, and it's been open to the public as a formal garden ever since. A few practical things worth knowing before you go:

• Open daily from May through October, so this fall is close to the last stretch before it closes for the season
• No dogs, no food or beverages, and no swimming or boat launching are allowed anywhere on the grounds
• The Dakota Rail Trail runs nearby, so it's a realistic bike destination if you don't want to deal with parking

It's a different kind of green space than Hackberry. Hackberry is built for ballfields and daily use by families in the immediate neighborhood. Noerenberg is a preserved formal garden, quieter and more particular about how it's used. Between the two, though, you get a sense of how much of Orono's outdoor life runs through spaces the city and the park district are actively shaping right now, not just maintaining.

What This Adds Up To

The stumps at Hackberry aren't a sign of neglect. They're the most visible evidence of a three-year, seven-figure commitment that's still unfolding, tied into trail planning that stretches past this one park's fence line. Residents who live near Hackberry, Antoine Park, or the County Road 6 corridor are watching the early, unglamorous phase of a build that the city has been setting up since 2023 and has no plans to rush.

If watching Hackberry Park take shape has you thinking about what a rebuilt trail network and a growing parks budget might mean for property values on that side of town, Michelle & Patrick Homes can walk you through what projects like this one tend to signal for the neighborhood around them.