Apple Valley: Cedar Avenue plan garners serious opposition

Leading figures in the business community along Cedar Avenue pleaded Wednesday with top city officials in Apple Valley to head off a disaster when it comes to plans for that congested corridor.

"This plan will shut down our center," said Shelli Krueth, property manager for a firm that owns a strip mall near the intersection with County Rd. 42. "Five of our seven leases are up next year, and our tenants will not renew if they lose access."

"This street was never designed to be a freeway," said Jim Paul, owner of Valley Pontiac Buick GMC. "But they're trying to turn it into one."

Convened by the city's chamber of commerce as a coalition of more than 20 businesses under the name Save Downtown Apple Valley, the business owners and managers gathered in a sixth-floor boardroom overlooking the street they were discussing.

Apple Valley Mayor Mary Hamann-Roland assured the group that city officials will meet with Dakota County officials to convey their concern. The city does have some leverage, she and others said, because it would be expected to contribute a share of the money for the project.

Concerns have arisen because of plans to:

• Add a pair of stops to the proposed bus rapid transit service along the street that are more like light rail platforms than old-fashioned bus stops.

• Cut off some access points to Cedar Avenue to ease traffic flow.

The first concern could involve the taking of precious land from businesses and end up with bus riders leaving their cars in their spaces, business people said.

"We could lose our patio, or have buses screaming along 10 feet away from it," said Michael Regnier, regional manager for the Old Chicago restaurant chain, which has a unit located near the intersection. "And if we lose access points, it'll kill us. We might as well open a heliport to fly people in. If it takes too long to get to us, they'll go to Famous Dave's instead."

The group has hired a transportation consultant to study the situation and offer alternatives to county transportation planners. The city also has hired a consultant to plan for station areas.

The urgency around the issue, city officials told the group, has partly to do with the need to have transit stops operating by next year under the terms of a federal grant. But major conflicts remain over where to put those stops.

Members of the group pointed to a fast food restaurant located at the corner of Cedar and 42, one of the state's busiest intersections, that closed down because motorists could see it but had a hard time reaching it. Their businesses could suffer the same fate, they said.

The city is eager to do what it can to help, the mayor said.

"Traffic needs to flow to your businesses, not by it or past it," she said. Any effort to bypass them, she said, could result in a "ghost town."

City Council Member Tom Goodwin said he perceives the scenarios prepared by county planners thus far as "staff driven," with an overemphasis on slowdowns that occur two to three hours per day, versus the needs of the remainder of the day.

Traffic engineers have "one purpose in life," he said, "and that's to move traffic as quick as possible."

Spikes in transportation funding, including the quarter-cent sales tax that will apply in much of the metro, have pushed forward projects that planners didn't think would happen for many years, heightening tensions, he said.

"Suddenly," Goodwin said, "you have many millions in play that no one had ever heard of till two or three months ago."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023