The Minnesota DNR is ready to push the paved riverside trail another 2.2 miles west of Lyndale Avenue, crossing Nine Mile Creek on a new bridge and eventually linking the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge to the Bloomington Ferry Trailhead. But before shovels hit dirt, the city council has to sign off on how the state plans to make up for the wetland the bridge will destroy.
The bridge crossing will permanently fill 0.2 acres of wetland, which under Minnesota's Wetland Conservation Act means the DNR has to buy wetland banking credits to offset the loss. The agency's plan calls for restoring 0.4 acres of wetland in Eden Prairie to cover it. Because that replacement plan is on the table, it needs the city's blessing, said Jack Distel, the city's water resources specialist. "Plans that require wetland replacement necessitate the City Council's approval," he said.
The council could take up the vote as soon as its August 3, 2026 meeting.
This is the second of three phases the DNR has mapped out for the Bloomington stretch of the trail. Phase 1A, a 1.7-mile paved segment running east from Lyndale Avenue to the Xcel power line corridor, opened in 2020, and Phase 1B — continuing on to the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge — is already funded. Phase Two runs the other direction, west from Lyndale toward Nine Mile Creek, and is the piece that still needs both money and this wetland sign-off from the council.
The city cleared the bigger environmental hurdle years ago: the state's environmental review process wrapped up in December 2018 with a record of decision finding the trail wouldn't have significant environmental effects, and the council approved a cooperative agreement that November letting the DNR build on city-owned land in the river valley corridor. The full 13-mile Bloomington segment is planned as a 10-foot-wide, ADA-accessible paved trail that will eventually form roughly an 8-mile loop along the river.
Once the council approves the wetland plan and the DNR lines up remaining funding, the agency's timeline calls for building the Nine Mile Creek bridge over the winter of 2026-2027, paving the trail itself in spring 2027, and letting the disturbed vegetation stabilize through spring 2028. The whole project traces back to a 1969 state law authorizing the trail, with the bonding money that's actually paying for construction approved by the legislature in 2014.