Below is the Friends of Coldwater letter to Secretary of the Department of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne about a future Coldwater Park.
Dear Secretary Kempthorne:
Friends of Coldwater has been informed that the DOI plans to make the National Park Service (NPS) responsible for the 27-acre (former Bureau of Mines) Coldwater Spring property on the Mississippi blufftop just south of Minneapolis city limits.
Before President Bush leaves office we urge you to transfer the adjoining 23-acre Veterans' Administration land to the new NPS park to form a contiguous 50-acre Mississippi blufftop buffer.
Currently the VA land, 2-blocks between Minnehaha Regional Park and Coldwater, is undeveloped, fenced and used as a temporary dump site for construction dirt and downed trees. Paul Labovitz, Superintendent of NPS/Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, suggested the VA property might be transferred to the NPS within the DOI without an exchange of funds.
A 50-acre Coldwater Park is time-sensitive since the land is deteriorating and any change of administration after elections means the DOI will have to get-up-to-speed again. This Mississippi blufftop landscape has been overtaken by weed vegetation, erosion and hot-dog vandalism since 1995. Because the VA parcel would interrupt public access between two parks, it would be economically efficient to return this single landscape to oak savanna in one process.
Additionally Friends of Coldwater proposes that the 50-acre Coldwater Park become America's first Green Museum, a place where the land itself is the museum. Coldwater Spring is at least 10,000-years old and is the last natural spring in all of Hennepin County.
Coldwater is the Birthplace of Minnesota, where the soldiers who built Fort Snelling lived (1820-3) and a civilian community developed with citizens who pioneered statehood (1858). Before European- and African-American settlement in the area, the spring was a sacred gathering site for Dakota, Anishinabe, Ho Chunk, Iowa, Sauk and Fox peoples according to court-ordered testimony (1999) by native elders.
The Coldwater area is already an urban wilderness with the usual birds and critters plus eagles, fox, a pack of coyotes, and 11 abandoned buildings, disintegrating asphalt roads and human-made scars on the land. Last Friday afternoon I was treated to a swishy little doe announcing her readiness with flips of her white tail followed by an 8-point buck! It's rutting season but I've never seen it up close before. Wow!
Again Secretary Kempthorne, we encourage you to act promptly to save the whole 50-acres and to save time and money returning this portion of the Mississippi blufftop to oak savanna.
----S.J., for Friends of Coldwater.
Please send YOUR letter to (write or call):
Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of the Department of the Interior
via email or phone 202-208-7351 (email preferred).
And consider calling or copying your email to:
Congressman Keith Ellison: 612-522-1212 or online
Senator Amy Klobuchar: 612-727-5220 or online
Senator Norm Coleman: 651-645-0323 or online
~ What happens to the water happens to the people.~
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