Below is one long time community member's response/point of view - Tom Dimond, Pig's Eye Park Advocate

Tom says: "I support option 3 – Dig and Haul, No Backfill.  But I encourage everyone to go to the MN DNR website and enter your response."

Targeted Waste Relocation and Filter (Q1)
A Natural Area with passive uses such as birding, wildlife viewing, trails, fishing, canoe and kayak lake access are very appropriate uses.  Industrial, commercial, and active use are not appropriate.  Not at all comfortable without cleanup and remediation of the unlicensed polluted dump. 

Dig and Haul and Backfill (Q2)
A Natural Area with passive uses such as birding, wildlife viewing, trails fishing, canoe and kayak lake access are appropriate uses.  Industrial , commercial, and active use are not appropriate.  Not at all comfortable without cleanup and remediation of the unlicensed polluted dump.  Not at all comfortable with backfilling wetland/lake.  Historical wetland and lake should be retained. 

Dig and Haul and NO Backfill (Q3)
Very comfortable with this excellent option.   It provides for full cleanup and restoration of the wetland/lake.  This would allow for restoration of vital habitat and eliminate  waste and pollution.  It reduces fill cost.  This has the greatest overall value and best long-term outcome. 

Dig and Line (Q4)
This is probably the worst proposal.  Not at all comfortable with this proposal.  The waste and pollution were dumped into the lake.  The material would need to be removed from the lake.  The lake would be filled.  A liner system would be constructed.  The waste and pollutant would negatively impact flood levels and leave mounds of waste and pollutant covering our parkland.  Leaving waste and pollutant degrades the park.

Your additional thoughts (Q5)

Compatible uses (Q6)

• Yes to canoeing, kayaking, walking trails, pollinator habitat, wildlife sanctuary, conservation area, wildlife viewing, water access/boat launch, Lake/wetlands. 
• Include habitat restoration, lake restoration, fishing piers, information kiosk, park benches. 
• No to commercial or industrial uses within the park.

Incompatible uses in nature preserve (Q7)
No to commercial development, outdoor material storage, solar array, athletic fields, playgrounds, warehouse(manufacturing), disk golf course, warehouse space commercial development, mountain bike trails, community garden and other uses that limit the ability of nature to thrive and the public to enjoy nature

Demographics (Q8-9-10-11)

Reminder - Survey ends March 31, 2025.

Plans to protect Pig’s Eye began more than a century ago.  The State Critical Area Designation and National Park Designation identify this area as a Passive Use Natural Area.  All of the Park is designated ROS.  ROS is the highest level of Natural Resource protection.  Regional Park planning does not support industrial use or active uses such as athletic fields.  Look at the Great River Passage Plan.  Protect and restore natural areas in order to support high quality wildlife habitat and exceptional visitor experiences are priorities.  Canoes, kayaks, fishing, birding, beavers, heron rookeries, Bald Eagles, Pelicans, and hiking provide valuable experiences for both wildlife and park visitors.

The flood plain is a high value nature preserve.  The area serves as an important geologic lesson for the river corridor.  Pig’s Eye Lake was created by mile thick ice sheets thousands of years prior to the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers existed in Saint Paul.  Pig’s Eye was 200 feet deep.

Pig’s Eye was one of the early parks to receive Regional Park Designation.  1976 it was designated a unique Minnesota resource and State Critical Area to afford it extra protections.  In 1988 Pig’s Eye was designated as part of the MNRRA National Park.  1991 designated Area of Critical Concern.  The Federal, State and Local efforts have sought to protect and enhance the natural resources for the enjoyment of current and future generations. 

Check the MN Pollution Control Agency website: 
www.pca.state.mn.us/local-sites-and-projects/st-paul-pigs-eye-dump-task-force

Task Force is due to end January 2026.  Report out February 2026.

By Frederick Melo | [email protected] | Pioneer Press
UPDATED: November 30, 2022 at 12:32 PM CST
[Article Link]

St. Paul’s largest and arguably most overlooked lake is about to receive 400,000 cubic yards of dredge soil from the Mississippi River.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Tuesday that it will use river soil to create six new islands in Pig’s Eye Lake, a 600-acre wetland area that sits across the river from the St. Paul Downtown Airport and south of Lower Afton Road and Battle Creek Regional Park.

Working with Ramsey County, the Army Corps has awarded a $14.7 million contract to LS Marine Inc. of St. Paul to create island and wetland features on Pig’s Eye Lake, including the restoration of marsh habitat and new terrestrial plantings, with the stated benefit of protecting against shoreline erosion.
The four-year project begins in July and is expected to wrap up by the end of 2025.

PROJECT HAS CRITICS, SUPPORTERS
The fill to create the island will include fresh quarry rock, as well as dredge sand and topsoil temporarily stored at Pine Bend, Upper Boulanger and Lower Boulanger islands.

The project is not without its critics. East Side advocates Tom Dimond and Kiki Sonnen said the Army Corps has effectively run out of places to dump polluted soil dredged from the Mississippi upriver from Hastings, and they’ve chosen Pig’s Eye Lake because there is limited public access there and few stakeholders to sound alarm.

“Islands. That’s a nice-sounding name,” said Dimond, leading a recent tour of the lakeshore. “There’s no habitat it serves. It’s piles of pollutant.”

However, Zach Kimmel, project manager with the U.S. Army Corps, said the dredge soil will be capped with two feet of topsoil to create healthy bird habitat. Pollution in river soil removed from navigational channels is not a trivial concern, he said, but the dredge soil in question has been inspected with that in mind.

“We’re very confident the material we’re going to be using is going to be good clean sand,” Kimmel said. “We have established testing protocols with all the regulatory partners we work with along the river. We test material annually.”

Kimmel said that the islands will serve as terrestrial habitat, largely for shorebirds.
Officials with the Friends of the Mississippi River have been supportive of the Corps’ approach.
The Army Corps has chronicled 211 acres of lost shoreline from 1951 to 2015, and predicts another 38 acres will be destroyed by the year 2058. Proponents have said the islands would add new and varied habitat within the lake, including trees, marsh, prairie and sandy areas, while blocking wind and creating a calm, protected area for migrating birds.

“I strongly support this project on its merits,” said Dan McGuiness, a Highwood resident and a retired river ecologist, in written comments shared last year when Ramsey County sought public feedback on the project. McGuiness is the former director of the Audubon Society’s Upper Mississippi River Campaign.

CITY APPROVAL DETERMINED TO NOT BE REQUIRED
St. Paul City Council member Jane Prince said there are arguments for and against adding islands to Pig’s Eye Lake, but public discussion has been muted by a lack of coordinated outreach. She said the city council never approved the project with an official resolution. After noting her concerns, she said, the county and the Army Corps later determined that city approval was not required.

“My issue with the Corps and the county is the dearth of public process on this,” Prince said. “People are on both sides, in terms of ‘this could be a good thing for habitat’ or ‘this could be terrible for the lake.’ They determined there was no downside. This is like the dark ages of public process.”

Others disagree. “I think there’s been significant process,” said Ramsey County Commissioner Trista MatasCastillo. “Our Parks Department did a community process with the Army Corps and brought it to our Parks advisory board. We’re at a point with climate change, and the need to restore wetlands, that we need to move on this.”

In a written statement, Corps of Engineers officials said dredged material “can restore, protect or create aquatic and wetland habitats in connection with construction and maintenance dredging. Beneficial use of dredged material has also been used for upland habitat development, beach nourishment and levee repair and improvement.”

HOME TO HERON, EGRET
Pig’s Eye Regional Park is home to one of the largest urban heron and egret rookeries in the Midwest, as well as many eagles, but it’s dotted by industrial uses that make lake access all but impossible for most visitors, including robot-controlled Canadian Pacific Railway freight train cars and a tree-waste processing facility that sits in front of the trailhead to the river.

More than 110 freight trains pass through the 1950s-era railyard on the east edge of the park daily.
The Red Rock Terminal, located on the south end of Pig’s Eye Lake, encompasses a variety of industrial business for land and barge access.

Ramsey County’s Pig’s Eye Lake Master Plan describes the Pig’s Eye section as part of Battle Creek Regional Park and a backwater of the Mississippi River.

by Senator Foung Hawj
March 16, 2022

St. Paul-Senator Foung Hawj (DFL-St. Paul) said today that his legislation to establish a task force to explore ways to accelerate the clean up the Pig’s Eye Landfill, located on St. Paul’s East Side, has been advanced by the SenateEnvironmentPolicy Committee.

Senator Hawj said the landfill, which contains harmful contaminants that leak into nearby waterways, including the Mississippi River, is a threat to the people and wildlife in the area. The site contains high levels of pollutants, including metals, mercury, and PFAS/PFOS. The contaminants, especially the PFAS, have impacted wildlife in the area and threaten all downstream communities that rely on the Mississippi River for their water supply.

“For many decades, the city and community have been hoping to get the Pig’s Eye Landfill cleaned up and restored so that it can be turned into a park that can be enjoyed by citizens,” said Senator Hawj.“This legislation will establish a task force made up of representatives from city, county, state, and federal agencies and other stakeholders and give them the resources to make that vision a reality. I am pleased my bill is moving in the Senate.”

Under Sen. Hawj’s bill, the task force must begin work by October 2022 and report annually on the task force’s work.

Senator Foung Hawj
Senate District 67
Foung Hawj represents District 67, which includes the east side of Saint Paul in Ramsey County in the central Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Learn more about Sen. Hawj.
Read more news from Sen. Hawj.

Supporters say the time is now to restore Pig's Eye dump site, using money from the federal infrastructure bill and the state budget surplus.

Author: John Croman
Published: 3:57 AM CST January 19, 2022
Updated: 4:28 AM CST January 19, 2022
[Article/Video Link]

ST PAUL, Minn. — When Tom Dimond walks through Pig's Eye Regional Park, he sees nothing but opportunity, a chance to clean up a legacy landfill and deliver a functioning park to surrounding neighborhoods and the city at large.

It's known as Pig's Eye Regional Park, covering 1,300 acres southeast of downtown St. Paul, including Pig's Eye Lake and adjacent land. But it's never been fully developed because of the toxic chemicals that were dumped there for decades, between the 1920s and 1970s.

"It's been planned as a park for 100 years. Trails, a boat launch, pavilions, and all of that kind of stuff were promised back in early 1980’s and were supposed to be here by 1989 at the latest," Dimond, who lives nearby and gives tours of the area, told KARE.

"Needless to say, they missed that target. One of the reasons is because this is polluted, that until you clean up the pollution you can’t really put in the amenities."

In fact, it's an EPA Super Fund site. In some areas rusted 55-gallon drums that once contained chemicals can be seen jutting out of the ground. The MPCA has test wells there to monitor ground water contamination, and regularly tests the sediment at the bottom of the lake. The agency has also constructed some barriers designed to slow spread of toxins into waterways.

"There's a variety of toxic chemicals here, including PFAS, a forever chemical, PFOS. PCBs, dioxins, just a soup of very toxic materials."

It's also along the migratory bird flyway and is home to a large rookery, or nesting area, for great blue herons. But the numbers of nests and birds have been dwindling in recent years, quite possibly because of the pollution in the food chain.

"They’ve been testing bird eggs here and at different locations. And the counts of the PCBs and other chemicals in the bird eggs here are some of the highest that have been found in the world."
Dimond and others believe area could qualify for funding through the new Federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act because part of that money is designed to be used for environmental cleanup projects that benefit BIPOC communities. 

The St. Paul City Council passed a resolution recently asking the state to help with an application for federal stimulus money to help finance the cleanup of Pig's Eye, and to consider spending part of the state's projected $7 billion budget surplus on the project.

The area is sandwiched between the Mississippi River on the west and Canadian Pacific Railroad tracks on the east, which run parallel to US Highway 10/61.  The governmental entities that control all or parts of the park include the city of St. Paul, Ramsey County, the DNR, the MPCA, MnDOT, Metropolitan Council, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul Regional Water Services and the National Park Service.

Dimond was among several who testified in a House Natural Resources Committee meeting Tuesday. Rep. Rick Hansen, the committee chair, said his fellow lawmakers should consider that it's not just a St. Paul problem. "Millions of people live downstream from this site. This can have a long-reaching legacy," Rep. Hansen said. "It’s been ignored for a very long time and we need to deal with it."
Hansen noted that the MLCAT Fund, a pool of money set aside for landfill cleanups financed with fees on waste dumped in them, isn't large enough to take care of the types of toxic sites that have been discovered in recent years.

The panel also heard from Mary Elizabeth deLaittre, who heads the Great River Passage Conservancy.
"Our goal really is to reveal, heal, connect and protect these acres. We are concerned with 'How do we heal a compromised landscape? How do we connect people to this landscape?'" "It’s really important for us to have this partnership with the states and the feds, and this opportunity for potential cleanup funds because that could be really transformative for this area."

Ramsey County is in the midst of constructing new islands in the middle of Pig's Eye Lake to serve as new habitat for migrating birds and other wildlife that live in the area all or part of the year.

Going forward, the agency is studying whether to install additional barriers to collect contaminants.
By Zoë Jackson, StarTribune, January 18, 2022 at 5:20PM
[Article Link]

St. Paul leaders are turning to the state for help cleaning up Pig's Eye landfill, a source of harmful contaminants that leak into nearby waterways.

The landfill — a Superfund site located on St. Paul's East Side — contains contaminants including metals, mercury and a class of industrial chemicals known as PFAs, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) officials said during an Environment and Natural Resources Finance and Policy committee hearing Tuesday.

To mitigate that, the St. Paul City Council is asking the state for money from its projected $7.7 billion budget surplus and the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Estimated costs for cleanup and continued maintenance are $200,000 for fiscal year 2022 and about $11 million for fiscal years 2023-27.

Pig's Eye is the largest unpermitted dump in the state, said Jamie Wallerstedt, remediation division director at the MPCA. The waste is located near the water, and when rain infiltrates the waste, contaminants flow through Battle Creek, Pig's Eye Lake and eventually the Mississippi River. Those contaminants eventually make their way to humans, according to the MPCA.

Initial cleanup, including the installation of a barrier to absorb contaminants, was done from 2000 to 2005, but continued monitoring of soil, groundwater, surface water, sediment and landfill gas is ongoing.

Going forward, the MPCA is studying whether to install additional barriers to collect contaminants. From now through 2024, additional study is needed to determine the best remedy, which could be implemented as early as 2025, according to the MPCA.

City Council Member Jane Prince, who represents part of the East Side, said the council has heard from hundreds of residents and organizations since unanimously passing a resolution — which Mayor Melvin Carter signed — asking the state to allocate funds for cleanup.

"[Cleanup] gets ahead of climate disruptions that could further endanger downstream communities relying on the river for drinking water," Prince said, as well as honoring Indigenous history and restoring health to one of the world's greatest waterways.

Legislators are drafting a bill establishing a commission to explore cleanup with various stakeholders including the city, county, state and federal agencies, said committee chair Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul.

Tom Dimond, a St. Paul resident and frequent Pig's Eye Regional Park visitor, testified at Tuesday's hearing that restoration, not just cleanup, is needed for humans and wildlife alike.  "We know that a healthy habitat, not only for the bird populations but for other wildlife, is better for humans and is a better asset for our community," he said.

At the former site of Mel Chin's landmark project in St. Paul: ecological grief, cycles of remediation, and what happens when we try to put waste out of sight

Mike Curran, MN Artists
[Article Link] w/ great photos by Bade Turgut! and end notes.

I don’t seek out images of burning forests or lakes retreating into themselves, but still they find me. When a video of a collapsing glacier punctures my feed, I scroll past—if my thumb moves quickly enough, then the ice might stay intact. That same reflex kicked in last month when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their updated report on global warming. Though I could not bring myself to read the actual assessment, I pieced together its outline from overheard radio clips and highly-designed Instagram graphics: our current path of escalating instability is now fixed; many places will soon encounter their worst-case scenarios.1 Within hours, however, other horrors became top stories, burying the panel’s findings, churning them into another layer of sediment. For the moment, we were saved.

Climate researchers came up with the term “ecological grief” to explain our responses to experienced and anticipatory losses brought on by environmental destruction.2 I would like to be someone who devotes the appropriate time and attention to confronting their grief, but it’s a slippery thing, so I busy my hands instead.

I left the arts field last year and joined the Mississippi Park Connection, a group dedicated to restoring habitat along the Mississippi River. I tended to a number of climate adaptation projects, one of which involved a secluded test plot within Pig’s Eye Regional Park, a sprawling park wedged between St. Paul’s East Side neighborhood and the municipal airport. The plot contains bald cypress and tupelo trees, two species commonly found in the southeastern United States. Their planting in Minnesota is an attempt at modeling a future forest in an environment made warmer and wetter by climate change—a future where the bald cypress, the Louisiana bayou’s signature tree, might plant its knobby limbs at the opposite end of the Mississippi. The majority of trees died during their first winter, but a few dozen remain. Emerging anew each spring, the cypress’s feathery needles are a joy to brush against.

Known as Čhokáŋ Taŋka (the “big middle”) in Dakota, the land that now constitutes Pig’s Eye is part of a larger stretch of sacred sites for Indigenous peoples. Kaposia, a seasonal Dakota village, was situated next to Pig’s Eye Lake, which makes up the southern end of the present park. Atop the limestone bluffs that form the northern edge is Indian Mounds Regional Park, comprised of burial grounds that have been occupied for thousands of years. At the bottom of those bluffs sits Wakáŋ Tipi, a cave where honored spirits dwell.3

In 1851, the federal government forced the Dakota to sign the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota, which together ceded 24 million acres to white colonizers, displacing long-time settlements like Kaposia.4 Ever since, Čhokáŋ Taŋka has become a state-sponsored “sacrifice zone,” writes the Environmental Justice Team at the Lower Phalen Creek Project (LPCP), an Indigenous-led conservation organization currently building an interpretive center by Wakáŋ Tipi. In the late 19th century, the Milwaukee Road railroad dynamited the aforementioned bluffs to lay new tracks, destroying a chamber of Wakáŋ Tipi and several mounds; where 37 mounds once stood, only six remain today. Then, between 1956 and 1972, a 230-acre section of Pig’s Eye served as an unregulated landfill, and later as a disposal site for incinerated sewage sludge produced by the neighboring Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant. By the time cleanup efforts began in 1989—the year Pig’s Eye was designated a state Superfund site—8.3 million cubic yards of waste covered the area.5
Conventional remediation methods have proven impossible here. Pig’s Eye is situated in a floodplain, a constantly transforming ecosystem subject to the Mississippi River’s variable flooding. Most of the waste is submerged below the water table, so traditional landfill covers are effectively useless; the “forever chemicals” that 3M dumped decades ago when developing Scotchgard and Teflon will forever mix with the Mississippi’s backwaters. The absolute removal of this waste was estimated at $730 million—a sum that makes lawmakers scoff. Even if the waste were to be removed, an alternative dumping ground would need to be identified, another land occupied.

In what seemed like an expression of their own exasperation, officials decided to bury the entire landfill in two feet of fill dirt. This additional material slowed pollution discharge, ensuring only an acceptable level of toxins could reach the river. It was the perfect solution: what could once be buried could be reburied, until we built a barrier so thick that we wouldn’t have to think about this place again.

I ventured to Pig’s Eye on a hot June morning with Tom Bierlein, a sculptor and gardener. I had visited the park a handful of times, but made a wrong turn and drove the length of a massive gravel pit before I realized my mistake. Though it’s St. Paul’s largest park, Pig’s Eye is also its most difficult to access. After exiting I-94 just beyond downtown, you loop around a concrete production facility, then turn down a narrow outlet road that traces along the railyard; dust kicks up from passing semi-trucks with operators who look upon you from their cabs, wondering why your little sedan is puttering through a land reserved for heavy machinery. Mountains of chipped wood mark the next turnoff. A dirt road that curves around a pile of broken-down pallets before ending at a heap of excavated rock next to a turnaround: the park’s informal entrance.

Here we met Aaron Dysart, an artist who speaks of Pig’s Eye with the enthusiasm of a park ranger admiring the Grand Canyon at sunrise. Before we began to meander through the park’s tall grasses, we wrapped our pants with duct tape and doused any exposed skin in DEET, a necessary ritual during warmer months because, as Aaron reminded us, “Pig’s Eye has all the ticks—like, all of them.” While I wanted to show Aaron and Tom the test plot, we were also looking for a different experiment: Mel Chin’s Revival Field.

Throughout his decades-long practice, Chin, a Houston-born multidisciplinary artist, has shifted between critiques of authoritarian regimes abroad and atrocities committed closer to home. Another line running through his oeuvre is an interest in using art to rehabilitate and remediate: an abandoned home in Detroit transformed into a community-owned worm farm, a mobile art project addressing childhood lead poisoning in post-Katrina New Orleans. His longstanding interest in the afterlife of broken and unseen things led him directly to Pig’s Eye.

Revival Field was built atop layers of waste and profoundly degraded soil in 1991 with the intention of removing heavy metals from the ground.6 Chin partnered with Dr. Rufus Chaney, a soil remediation expert with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to design the garden, which they stocked with “hyperaccumulators”—plants like maize and red fescue grass with roots able to absorb cadmium, zinc, and lead, storing particulates in their tissue; when burned in reclaiming furnaces, mature plants generate metal purer than mined ore. The plants were harvested for three successive years and shipped to Dr. Chaney’s lab, where researchers determined that alpine pennycress, a low-lying member of the cabbage family, had the capacity to restore soils in as little as four years. Chin and Dr. Chaney’s findings supported then still-emerging theories around phytoremediation, a now readily accepted means of utilizing plants to stabilize and extract contaminants within soil and groundwater.
As Aaron, Tom, and I wandered along the overgrown trail that twists through the park, I held the naive hope that we would stumble upon a leftover stretch of chain link fence or a remnant pennycress patch thriving in its adopted habitat. But no vestiges remain. At the time of Revival Field’s installation, the city banned public entry to the site due to potential toxin exposure. To deter visitors, the structure was dismantled in 1993, its surviving plants burned. A few years later, the entire landscape was again buried in more fill soil, making its contours unrecognizable; Aaron mentioned that even Chin had trouble locating the original site when he returned in 2017.

When we arrived back at the dirt turnaround and started plucking the ticks that had burrowed into our socks, crushing them with loose gravel, I found myself at a loss for words. In a later conversation, Aaron shared the same sentiment: “The issues at Pig’s Eye feel a bit overwhelming in many ways. The scale feels rationally huge, but somehow experientially larger than thought can dictate.” Aaron has spent more time at Pig’s Eye than most. When I followed the makeshift trail he weaved through the prairie—tripping on exposed roots; keeping my eyes to the ground to avoid stepping on garter snakes—I began to sense the extraordinary weight of the space. The park is not a metaphor, but a pulsating, physical manifestation of historical and contemporary failures stacked atop one another—a confluence of violence that courses through the Mississippi River Basin’s entirety without finding a drainage channel.

That a bald cypress should take root amongst this mess feels like a small miracle. But in fact, Pig’s Eye is teeming with life. Though the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has restored certain hotspots over the past two decades—planting trees to stabilize Battle Creek, which runs through the park; adding dredged sand to the lakeshore to limit erosion—much of the landscape has regenerated naturally. In addition to slowing contaminant leaching, the layers of added soil also introduced organic material to an ecosystem stripped of nutrients. Today, monarch butterflies flutter around a blooming prairie that dips into a dense stand of cottonwood trees. Just south of the lake sits one of the largest rookeries in the region, where hundreds of herons, egrets, and cormorants nest.

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Tsing contemplates matsutake mushrooms, which flourish in human-disturbed environments such as the scarred scrublands left behind after clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest. “Global landscapes today are strewn with this kind of ruin,” Tsing writes. “Still, these places can be lively despite the announcements of their death.”7 Though we often think about habitat restoration as something that humans might do to an ecosystem—the cypress plot being one example—Tsing draws our attention to the abilities of non-human species to create livable conditions: underground fungal networks transporting nutrients across stressed forest floors; beavers within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone returning deserted industrial land to bogs. Back in our own ruin, cottonwoods provide rare shade at Pig’s Eye, and local bees use the tree’s resin to strengthen their hives.

It is difficult to linger here, atop a landfill roughly three times the area of the Mall of America, and not find yourself in awe of nature’s capacity to persist. But, like dolphins gliding through Venice’s Grand Canal, this too is a mirage. Observation wells dot the landscape, which the MPCA use to monitor groundwater contamination. Now weathered and rusted, the wells conjure up the site’s past, and all that festers just below the surface.

Since the forced relocation of Kaposia, this land has never been allowed reprieve. On a subsequent trip with photographer Bade Turgut, haze from wildfires raging just across the Canadian border blanketed the park. The smell of further-away forests burning reminded me of accounts from local residents who remembered the landfill smoldering from 1956 to 1964, and again for two straight months in 1988.8 During the brief time of this writing, two accidents occurred at the railyard (now operated by Canadian Pacific Railway.) In August, three trains collided and 1,200 gallons of diesel fuel spilled near Wakáŋ Tipi; in July, more than 700 gallons of diesel poured into Battle Creek. The public would not have known about the latter spill if not for community activists who spotted the cleanup gear drifting in the freshly oil-slicked creek; Canadian Pacific never notified the city.9

This land’s desecration is also immaterial: The park’s very name originates from the first white settler within the present-day boundaries of St. Paul—a one-eyed, French-Canadian fur trapper named Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, who set up a bootlegging operation close by. Besides the name, the constant, screeching sounds of train tracks switching and engines braking fill the air. All the pennycress in the world might absorb the remaining cadmium, but could never pull that underscoring, spectral sound from the wind.

The particular ways history repeats at Pig’s Eye make me wonder whether humans should have a footprint here at all—but our presence is exactly what LPCP envisions. “People rarely visit due to inaccessibility,” the Environmental Justice Team wrote to me. “It will always be difficult to restore the land without people visiting, appreciating, and wanting to give back.” For LPCP, a yet-to-be-realized remediation step involves improving transit access through the industrial maze and incorporating signage that centers Dakota narratives, reminding visitors that, despite becoming a sacrifice zone, the area was never truly anonymous. That vision is shared by St. Paul’s Great River Passage Initiative, which aims to create public connectivity throughout the East Side River District. Angie Tillges, the Great River Passage Fellow, confirmed a forthcoming project that would promote access to Pig’s Eye Lake.

While these plans await funding, it’s worth considering the people already moving about this landscape every day—not park visitors, but those semi-truck operators. If you flush a toilet anywhere in the Twin Cities, the flow ends at the Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the largest such facilities in the nation, servicing 1.8 million residents. Through a multi-tiered system of screens, scrapers, and tanks of nutrient-eating microorganisms, the plant discharges water back into the Mississippi cleaner than the river it mixes with. 300 employees work in round-the-clock shifts to ensure the cycle continues without disruption, making the cities inhabitable for the rest of us.10 On the opposite side of Pig’s Eye Lake Road, the mountains of chipped wood at Environmental Wood Recycling will soon be hauled and converted to biomass at District Energy in St. Paul, where it will heat the underground water pipes that snake through downtown.11 The number of trees the facility processes each year—260,000 tons in 2019—has rapidly increased due to the emerald ash borer, a beetle introduced to the Midwest in 2002 that has aggressively chewed through forests ever since. In the coming years, Minnesota is projected to lose one billion ash trees alone; its near-extinction poses an existential threat to the surrounding floodplain. And yet, from Pig’s Eye, irreparable loss heats the capital.

The Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant emerges from a row of cottonwood trees. Photo: Bade Turgut.Both facilities reverse the landfill logic that has long permeated Pig’s Eye, contending with our waste in plain view instead of burying it elsewhere. In this respect, they are reminiscent of Revival Field. Chin recognized that, in order to address an obscured problem, he would first need to isolate and unearth it. He arranged the installation’s fencing in the shape of a crosshair target, bringing intention and specificity towards a place that officials had given up on. He attempted to move Pig’s Eye from the city’s periphery to its center and, in so doing, call attention to the institutions responsible for its ruin. But it too was buried.

After his initial installation at Pig’s Eye, Chin went on to install more iterations of Revival Field upon toxic sites in Florida, the Netherlands, and Germany. But back in Minnesota, the land seems suspended in time. Meanwhile, at the Mississippi’s headwaters, a Canadian oil company continues to drive a pipeline through Indigenous territory to the silence of both the Biden and Walz administrations.12 Thirty years after Revival Field’s inception, we have been compelled to fight on more fronts while the collective challenges we confront only feel more insurmountable.

But there is something undeniable about walking the grounds at Pig’s Eye. Observing both the workers and the non-human worldmakers navigating this ruin lends a physical language through which we might be able to speak of ecological catastrophe in all of its liveliness, and work through our present and future grief. We never stumbled upon the specific site where Revival Field once stood, but its burial reminds us that remediation is both an impossible project, and one we must take on anyway.

By Tad Vezner | [email protected] | Pioneer Press
UPDATED: October 24, 2017 at 6:54 PM CDT
[Article Link]

The drive takes you past a line of massive industrial lots. Two sets of train tracks. A couple of Mississippi River barge terminals. Nobody comes out here.

The manager at St. Paul’s wood recycling center — whose yard, dominated by looming hills of wood chips and pallets, you have to pass through — isn’t quite sure how to get you where you want to go. There’s not a signpost to be seen.

“I think it’s that way,” he says, pointing at a dirt road on the far side of his lot. “Some people use that road sometimes.”

You go down that road and find a dirt “parking lot” — more of a turnaround, with plenty of mud and ruts — and you’re there: at the trail head of St. Paul’s most hard-to-find park.

And ironically Pig’s Eye Regional Park is the city’s largest, with 404 acres of land, around a roughly 500-acre lake. (The contiguous Hidden Falls and Crosby Farm, taken together, are bigger).

The trail is, objectively, beautiful: Once you take a bridge over Battle Creek and pass through acres of tall prairie grass, you can see Pig’s Eye Lake, after which the park was named. A heron rookery sits on a far shore, and now the hard metal sounds of the industrial lots seem even farther.

“It’s been mowed twice in its lifetime,” Mary DeLaittre says of the path. She manages the city’s Great River Passage Initiative, which has included the park as something they want to make people more aware of. Correction: aware of at all.  “Generally speaking, nobody is out there. Them mowing the path is only because we asked them to.” Last week, a bunch of her initiative’s “stakeholders” took a stroll through the fields.

FORMER DUMP SITE ‘GOOD TO GO’
’“It’s very difficult to experience it,” admits city parks director Mike Hahm.

Part of the reason is the land is actually landfill. Shanty dwellers abandoned it decades ago, because of all the flooding. You really shouldn’t go there in the spring, unless you like puddles and mud. And all that wild, unfettered flora and fauna — from turkeys to coyotes to deer — means ticks in the summer.
Oh, and 45 years ago it was a dump. Pig’s Eye Dump: the largest Superfund site in the state. And though it was remediated just after the turn of the millennium, no solid structures can be built there.

“It was constantly on fire,” said state Rep. Sheldon Johnson, a St. Paul Democrat whose home overlooks the park. Decades ago, when tire fires were a thing, his neighbors weren’t fans.

“But now it’s good to go,” he adds. He’s one of the few who frequently walk the park.

“It’s safe to use as a park,” said Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Walker Smith, who noted that several feet of organic soil have been dumped on top of the dump, after its worst contamination was excavated. And the banks of Battle Creek were stabilized with trees, now fully grown.

ISOLATED PARK LIMITS ACCESS
Another reason for the inherent sense of solitude is the park’s isolation: there are no immediate residential neighbors. Just barge and train yards.

It’s true that a slice of Pig’s Eye Regional Park can be reached from the north: a comparatively tiny triangle of space that includes an archery range. But to reach the prairie and lake, you have to cross a litter of 21 train tracks, or find the unmarked dirt lot, miles to the south. Beyond state natural resource officials, crossing from one side of the park to the other doesn’t happen much.

Just past Environmental Wood Supply at 2165 Pig’s Eye Lake Road is the ummarked Pig’s Eye Regional Park. These are the last signs you will see on Pig’s Eye Lake Road before you turn off to the most hidden St. Paul park. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)“People don’t think they’re supposed to be here,” said Angie Tillges, another Initiative staffer. “There’s no signs, lots of edges and barriers.” She’s not just being metaphorical: there are chain fences all the way to the park, enough to make any park-goer feel like a trespasser.

If the push to initiate the Great River Passage gets some steam, Hahm is asked, what would he like to see for Pig’s Eye?

“Access,” he says simply, then says it again: “Access.” And maybe “something with the water.” DeLaittre puts out the possibility of a paddling launch or a bird-watching site.

CONNECTING THE PUBLIC TO THE RIVER
The goal of the Initiative — under the auspices of the parks department — is to bridge the sporadic public spaces in the area below St. Paul’s East Side bluffs and the river they overlook.
The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary already sits there, and there’s a push to put a welcome center on the land, with a Dakota focus. There’s a strained history there.

“Our Garden of Eden … became a toxic waste dump,” said astronomer James Rock, a Dakota educator who is also the University of Minnesota Duluth’s planetarium director. “This place was too sacred to live on, near, at.”

Above the sanctuary sits Indian Mounds Park, and next door is the Department of Natural Resource’s headquarters, with its fish ponds. Would it be possible to link everything? A staircase down the bluffs from the upper park, and paths and roads and bike trails — and perhaps even a sign or two, so people at least know there’s something there?

The city hopes to have a plan for that by next year, and DeLaittre says she’s looking to create a nonprofit that would gather private funding for three projects — one of them Pig’s Eye park.
“It’s absolutely imperative that industry stays,” DeLaittre says of the project’s hard-hat-wearing neighbors.

But maybe they’ll smooth out some of those edges.


St. Paul Pioneer Press: Originally Published: October 24, 2017 at 7:40 AM CDT