To create a Regional Parks and Trails System that welcomes all residents of the region to its range of amazing opportunities, it is imperative to identify and understand the barriers to participation, as well as recognize the harm that has been placed on underrepresented communities. Engagement with these specific communities can reveal the harms and barriers that exist and offer opportunities to co-create durable solutions for a better future.

Below are examples of how to carry out Action 1. These are not requirements, but rather examples of approaches that emerged during recent community engagement, research, and work group discussion. They illustrate what our partnerships strive for in a changing region. A static list of eligible activities no longer sufficiently encompasses the needs of our future Regional Parks and Trails System. To remain relevant and equitable, our system must continue to evolve.

Desired outcome examples:

• Honor cultural considerations across diverse communities in our regional system
  • Continue engaging across all communities of color and other prioritized communities around their specific and personal cultural connections to parks and trails.
  • Remove barriers to American Indian cultural activities within parks and trails.
    • Provide access to sacred sites
    • Strive to support American Indian ceremonies in welcoming, private, and obtainable ways
    • Provide foraging opportunities for traditional cultural practice.
  • Recognize the historic exclusion of American Indian and Tribal groups from parks and trail systems, educate parks and trails staff and decision makers to center American Indian communities in parks and trails management.
  • Amplify American Indian perspectives through programming and interpretation.
  • Prioritize the development and use of accurate and inclusive historical and cultural information.
• Equitable Infrastructure:
  • Use universal design in regional park and trail facility designs.
  • Create gender neutral bathrooms.
    • During the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Plus (LGBTQ+) Perspectives on Parks Focus Group (2023), participants stated that having access to restrooms, specifically gender-neutral restrooms in the parks is important for making people feel more secure. Particularly, making sure that park patrons have access to detailed information to comfortably plan their outing into parks and trails. This is particularly important for individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and other neurodivergent conditions.
  • Ensure bathrooms with running water are available throughout regional parks and trails system.
  • Along regional trails, provide more benches and improved lighting.
• Enhance wayfinding across the Regional Parks and Trails System, making it easier for visitors to navigate within and across systems. This includes information that is accessible to blind and low-vision visitors.
• Create design practices that increase equity and inclusion, reflect the diversity of our region’s cultures and ethnicities, and promote social cohesion:
  • Create signs that use Indigenized and non-Western design elements developed in consultation with American Indian people, youth, and historically excluded communities.
  • Invite artists into park design processes, to emphasize the importance of cultural and racial representation in the Regional Parks and Trails System. For an example, see the Ramsey County and Met Council partnership project that invited five artists representing different racial and ethnic backgrounds to develop art that creates a sense of belonging for all and advances racial equity and inclusion: https://www.ramseycounty.us/content/parks-recreati....
• Develop park programming in partnership with affinity groups centering safety and belonging.
  • Affinity groups are invitational spaces that provide safety for individuals that have been historically excluded such as LGBTQ+ or Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities
  • Affinity groups are an integral strategy in the Regional Parks System, such as programs developed exclusively for children or women. Develop programs that are specifically geared to LGBTQ+ and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities as an effective strategy to prioritize equity and belonging in our system.
    • The findings from the LGBTQ+ Perspectives on Parks Focus Group (2023) recommend creating more affinity groups across the region. This approach increases a sense of connection, belonging, and safety for LGBTQ+ park users.
• Use Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-led media outlets to create awareness and spread the word about regional parks and trails in communities of color.
  • Encourage new approaches that deliver information and marketing to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities, especially those that do not speak English.
• Hire more diverse staff and intentionally listen to them for insights and guidance on how to increase welcoming and belonging.
  • Encourage opportunities for support, innovation, and growth among staff that are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
  • Involve youth as leaders and decision-makers.

Implementing agencies who wish to propose new Regional Parks and Trails System activities should consult the “Recreational Activities Evaluation Process” and “Process for including New Activities” sections of the Regional Parks and Trails Planning Handbook.

The Regional Parks and Trails System is made up of many unique natural spaces that serve a wide variety of needs and desires for visitors and the environment.

When the Regional Parks and Trails System was established in 1974, it included existing parks that had facilities not considered eligible for regional funding. These include:

• Formal ball fields, diamonds, and organized athletic complexes
• Tennis courts
• Golf facilities
• Amateur athletic facilities
• Off-road vehicle areas are not eligible for regional funding (ATV, Off-Road Motorcycle, and 4X4 Truck opportunities, and snowmobiles), as the Minnesota DNR provides and supports these opportunities.

These activities remain ineligible for regional funding, as they more closely align with the responsibilities of local jurisdictions. Additional information and criteria can be found in the Regional Parks and Trails Planning Handbook and Grant Administration Guide.

Desired outcome examples:

The examples listed below are not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather as inspiration for implementing agencies as they plan for future programming and activity needs.

• Our Regional Parks and Trails System is made up of a wide array of unique and complementary opportunities.
• Not all parks and trails need to encompass the same activities, facilities, or natural areas.
• Encourage place-based appropriateness.
  • Example: Turning underutilized parking lot into a pop-up skatepark
• Provide a geographic distribution of activities and protection systemwide.
• Stacked functions are the future:
• Nature and people can share space
• Promote flexible spaces that support a variety of activities. Examples include:
  • Open, grass fields in a floodplain provide space for games, fun, and water storage
  • Pop-up programming
  • Plant forests of fruits and nuts for foraging
  • Community gardens
  • Reuse of hard surfaces for skate parks or pop-up programming,
  • Culturally specific programs or facilities to meet shifting demographic needs.

Our Regional Parks and Trails System is made up of a wide array of unique and complementary opportunities.

• Programing is key to connecting:
  • Support and provide leisure, educational, and programming opportunities that recognize the way people interact with our system
  • Prioritize and program activities that are more contemplative, restful, socially or spiritually focused, or non-equipment based.
  • Support recreation activities that resonate with communities of color and age groups that have not been well served in the past, such as teenagers
  • Hire more diverse programming staff that reflect the community.
• Moving from protecting to restoring:
  • Invite park and trail visitors to learn more about the natural world through storytelling, educational opportunities, and other programming
  • Increase understanding of the role parks and trails play in creating a resilient natural environment
    • Examples: Heat island mitigation, water storage, carbon capture.
  • Incorporate American Indian practices
    • Examples: Reintroducing bison, using prescribed fire on the landscape, and promoting foraging.
  • Improve storytelling around the benefits parks and trails provide to increase region’s climate resilience.

Based on this legislative direction and definition of “regional recreation open space,” the activities and facilities in the Regional Parks and Trails System should align with the system’s vision, mission, and values listed in Section One and meet criteria below:

• All proposed activities and facilities for regional parks and trails should be consistent with the community engagement findings of the Agency-led long-range planning processes
• Serve a regional audience
• Should not duplicate neighborhood parks and trails systems
• Should connect and support the system’s nature-based foundation
• Be compatible with the other uses and activities, minimize user conflicts, and preserve user experiences
• Are consistent with the expectations of the Council’s review and approval process
• Enterprise facilities, including regional park concessioners, may operate within the Regional Parks and Trails System if consistent with the rules of the regional park implementing agencies. There are several types of enterprise-fund facilities. Some are expected to generate sufficient revenues to pay their own costs, while others require some level of public subsidy to exist.

Parks and trails have a large capacity to support community through a broad array of partnerships around the region. They play an important role in our physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and mental health. Their value goes beyond their “existence value” because they bring deep importance to people’s quality of life. They are a critical tool for combatting America’s loneliness epidemic as they provide spaces for community connections and well-being. Expanding and strengthening our cross-sector partnerships will increase parks and trails impacts and open new revenue streams and imagination for what is possible in parks and trails. Below are ideas that emerged during engagement, research, and agency collaboration discussions.

Desired outcomes examples:

• Promote parks and trails to play an important role in sustaining mental and physical health.
  • Shape nature-based programs to increase human connections and combat loneliness
  • Design quiet spaces for spiritual connections, creating a sense of awe in nature
  • Create places and programming for multigenerational play
  • Partner with public health departments to co-create and fund mental health programming
  • Use social media as a promotional tool. For example:
    • St. Paul Parks hosts “Mental Health Mondays.” Their social media posts highlight how nature can increase health and happiness.
• Promote our transportation system as a viable way to connect people to parks and trails.
  • Prioritize public transportation to nature in partnership with Metro Transit
  • Strengthen active transportation connections to parks and trails with improved biking and walking access
  • Create better maps and signage to highlight the transit and trail connections.
• Use arts and culture to bring people to parks and trails and enhance belonging
  • Find ways for parks and trails to honor, hire, and pay more artists to bring people to parks for music, dance, festivals, and more.
• Inventory current memorials in parks and trails and clarify whose history is being told. Hire artists to imagine new ways of telling broader and more inclusive histories
  • For example, support projects like Cloud Man Village at Bde Maka Ska, including Dakota language sidewalk stamps.
• Encourage agencies to make art and culture plans, to examine how to use existing and new art to better connect people to the outdoors.
  • Explore new funding sources for art.
• Support programming to increase visitation, visibility, and connection to parks and trails. Fund programs and programmers to dream big in cross-sector ways.
  • Create environmental education programming as a way to connect the next generation to parks and trails, creating the future stewards of the system
  • Continue to grow stewardship programs to connect community to parks through actively caring for them and allowing deeper relationships and love for these spaces.

The Regional Parks and Trails System is a vast and unique system that stretches across the Twin Cities region, and yet many residents do not know it exists. Creating outreach initiatives that invite communities, especially those that have been excluded from the benefits of the system in the past, is a pivotal step to creating a more equitable region. For example, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board found that Black communities living near Theodore Wirth Regional Park do not experience the benefits as compared to other communities, even though the Black communities live in the neighborhoods that surround much of the park. As our region’s racial diversity grows, the Regional Parks and Trails System should experiment and collaborate on ways to genuinely and effectively raise awareness, particularly among underrepresented communities.

Desired outcome examples:

• Support, create, and provide space for affinity groups and affinity-focused programming to continue growing connections between agencies and communities.
  • Regional park implementing agencies continue to grow genuine relationships and financially support the knowledge, expertise, and lived experience that affinity groups are bringing to our system.
  • Find more ways to support affinity groups whose mission is to build trust and bring disenfranchised groups to parks and trails. Find creative ways to financially support these groups and expand this work.
  • Create more programs focused on specific communities.
    • For example, find ways to support programming for Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color and LQBTQ+ communities, as part of regular programming efforts.
• Build trust and relationships with communities of color, especially community leaders of color.
• Develop intentional communication strategies and marketing materials that center racial justice and demonstrate sensitivity to overburdened communities.
• Promote programming that increases awareness of opportunities and creates welcoming spaces.
  • Hire staff that reflect the racial make-up of desired audiences
  • Provide staff cultural competency training
  • The details of programming matters. Consult community members on matters of program times, costs, and other factors to ensure that programs are accessible
  • Ensure that programs and engagement are done in ways that demonstrate respect and appreciation. Avoid transactional, one-time interactions.
• Art amplifies awareness. Hire artists that look like the community members Agencies are trying to better serve.
  • Incorporate non-western design practices into art and culture in regional parks.

Safe, high-quality, continuous, barrier-free bicycle and pedestrian facilities shall be developed, maintained, and improved to function as integral parts of the Regional Parks and Trails System and transportation system. The Council is responsible for planning regional transportation, including bicycle transportation facilities. Since many regional trails also serve as commuter bikeways, it is important that Regional Parks and Trails System and transportation planners work together when developing trail and transportation plans.

A comprehensive network of trails and bikeways that serve both recreation and transportation needs is an important priority for the Met Council. This network should link state, regional, and local trails and should be integrated with other transportation modes and networks, including the regional transit system.It should connect population centers with important regional destinations, including economic hubs, schools, shopping, parks, and trails.

In practice, the Regional Bicycle Transportation Network (RBTN), regional trails, and all local trail and bikeway networks complement each other to serve the overall bicycle transportation and recreation needs of the region. All of these elements serve to provide an integrated and cohesive system that supports all forms of bicycling and the full range of bicycle trip needs.

Developing a more integrated and collaborative planning approach between regional trails and the RBTN is needed by the Council and its implementing agency partners. Met Council staff will work to define these opportunities for increased collaboration involving transportation and regional park implementing agencies’ bicycle professionals and stakeholders and will incorporate those opportunities into future planning and implementation efforts. For more information about this future work, see Section 9, 2025-2028 Workplan and Section 7 in the Regional Parks and Trails Planning Handbook.

With over 450 miles of multiple-use trail facilities open to the public, regional trails support a wide range of activities. From recreational pursuits to commuting to work and school, regional trails play a vital role in the lives of our region’s residents. E-bikes are a growing trend on the regional trail system as well as across the region and country. They take the form of electric, pedal-assist bicycles and are generally allowed on regional trails. While e-bikes are gaining acceptance on trails across the country, concerns about speed and safety are topics that need further study (see Section 9, 2025-2028 Workplan).

In general, regional trails should be developed away from roadways. However, in some instances it may be necessary for a short stretch of trail to be located on, or adjacent to, a road to bypass natural or artificial barriers or private property.

The RBTN, established in the 2040 Transportation Policy Plan, is intended to serve as a “backbone” arterial network for accommodating daily bicycle transportation needs by establishing an integrated and seamless network of on-street bikeways and off-road trails. The network prioritizes corridors and alignments for regional transportation investment. Cities, counties, park agencies and the state play an important role in planning and implementing future bikeways and trails in support of the network vision.

The RBTN is based on a Regional Bicycle System Study analysis and prioritization of potential bicycle corridors[1]. The study incorporated factors such as bicycle trip demand, network connectivity, social equity, population density, regional job centers, major destinations (including highly visited regional parks), and connections to transit. Alignments are defined where there are existing or planned bikeways, or a consensus of which roadways and planned trails would most effectively meet the regional corridor’s intent. Corridors are retained where alignments have not yet been identified. The presence of corridors allows for local bike plans to determine an effective alignment that follows the corridor’s orientation and uses on-street bikeways and off-road trails to achieve an efficient facility route. Tier 1 corridors and alignments (highest priority for transportation investment) are planned in locations where they can attract the most riders and most effectively enhance mode choice in favor of biking, walking, and transit over driving alone. Tier 2 corridors and alignments (second highest priority for transportation investment) also provide transportation connectivity and they serve to support the Tier 1 corridors and alignments.

Regional Trails were an important input during the development of the original RBTN and many regional trails have been identified as important alignments within it. These include Cedar Lake, Samuel Morgan, Lake Minnetonka, and Bruce Vento regional trails, to name a few.

Increasing the coordination and communication between the regional trail system and the RBTN will result in a stronger and more connected overall system. Both regional trails and the RBTN seek to support active lifestyles, connecting people with where they want to go.

The regional trail system was originally envisioned as an off-road system that sought to connect regional parks, park reserves, special features, and regional trails by providing safe and separated opportunities to serve recreation and transportation purposes. While these goals remain vital, it is important to recognize that regional trails serve as transportation corridors, connecting important local and regional destinations. Also, they serve as a “backbone” for connecting and supporting local bicycle networks. This is evidenced by the significant overlap between the regional trail system and the RBTN corridors and alignments.

The RBTN is planned to facilitate daily bicycling for transportation that includes commute trips to work and school, shopping trips, trips to entertainment venues, medical-related trips, and social trips. The RBTN focuses on connecting its designated regional destinations to and between local bicycle networks by integrating on-street bikeways and off-road trails that offer the most direct and efficient routes.

An integrated system of regional trails and the RBTN requires a collaborative approach to regional trail and bicycle transportation planning by the Met Council and its implementing agency partners. For example, one of the strengths of the regional trail system is the wealth of trails serving exurban and rural areas. These trails, like Carver County’s Minnesota River Bluffs Regional Trail, connect visitors to needed amenities and destinations important for daily work and living. Met Council staff will continue to seek opportunities to enhance collaboration and coordination among transportation and parks agency planners to maintain and build upon a cohesive and integrated regional system overall.

Developers of trails and bikeways that are included in both networks may need to resolve competing considerations such as design speed, needs of expected users, or protection of natural features.

For more information on the Regional Bicycle Transportation Network, please refer to the draft 2050 Transportation Policy Plan, Bicycle Investment Chapter (draft for public comment to be released in August 2024).

Relationship to other technical guidance

The 2050 Regional Parks and Trails Policy Plan should be used in conjunction with the current versions of the MnDOT Bikeway Facility Design Manual and DNR’s Trail Planning, Design, and Development Guidelines. There are also other important design and development resources available.

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[1] Regional Bicycle Transportation Study, www.metrocouncil.org, Transportation Policy Plan, 2014.