A kinetic sculpture has kept watch over Cedar Lake since 1983. Now the sliver of land it stands on is on the market.

The Park Board’s fiscal shortfall amounts to roughly one-tenth of 1% of the city’s proposed budget, a math teacher argues, and no line item delivers more for the money.

Three miles east of Uptown, Ingebretsen’s Anna Bloomstrand watched her stretch of Lake Street move from crisis to cooperation. What worked was not construction. It was a room where people knew each other.

The Park Board rebuilt the lakeside pavilion for $6.5 million, then renewed a 2017 concession decision without reopening it to bidders. The concept that opened was never competitively evaluated, and two years have cost the park system $291,777.

A grand home on the parkway has sat empty for more than a decade. The county seized it, then handed it back on a promise of renovation that still has not arrived.

Those mysterious road cutouts around the lakes are speed humps and traffic circles, the payoff of an eight-step city process that can take years.

Long called the Twin Cities’ oldest fountain and a work of the Italian Renaissance, the Lyndale Park landmark is neither. Its real story begins in a Florentine foundry a century ago.