Minneapolis Park Board wants to hear your vision for Hiawatha golf course property

What is your vision for the future of the Hiawatha Golf Club, the nearby lake and surrounding area?

Perhaps a food forest, or a place filled with public art?

The Minneapolis Park Board wants park users to share their ideas using an online form to help guide the community group tasked with figuring out what the space will look like when water pumping is reduced at the golf course.

"Now the visioning exercise is open to everyone," a news release announced. "Please take a moment to fill out the form ... to contribute your vision and aspirations for the Lake Hiawatha area to this project."

In July, Park Board commissioners voted to drastically reduce the amount of water pumped off the grounds of the golf course, meaning much of the existing course will become waterlogged.

Reducing the pumping from the current 262 million gallons a year to 94 million will mean more wetlands and less managed turf grass. But the land could be turned into a nine-hole course.

Early numbers showed that reconfiguring the golf course as a park is expected to cost $28 million, according to Park Board estimates from last summer.

The decision caps a yearslong contentious dispute, with golfers and supporters fighting to keep the course as it is.

The water problems came to a head when the course closed after torrential rains flooded it in 2014. But that only added to an existing problem: The course sits about 2 feet below the level of Lake Hiawatha. Most of the water that is pumped off is shallow groundwater, followed by seepage from the lake and stormwater runoff.

Now, a community advisory group is studying what the space will look like with reduced pumping and will present its ideas to the board.

This month, the group picked descriptive words about their hopes for the space as part of a visioning exercise, the board said. Among them: accessibility, usable space, trees, wildlife connectivity and recreation.

The board is asking park users to do something similar — to share photos that have inspired them, short stories or poems that embody a vision, and to write three words that are important to the planning process.

Karen Zamora • 612-673-4647 Twitter: @KarenAnelZamora