Drive Highway 62 through Edina this month and you will pass three active construction zones inside of four miles. At Rosland Park, the pedestrian bridge that used to arc over the highway is simply gone, removed over a weekend closure in late June, with pedestrians rerouted onto Valley View Road. A few minutes west, dirt movers are reshaping the old Fred Richards Golf Course into something that doesn't have a golf course shape anymore. And up at Braemar Park, a golf dome parking lot has been torn up since late July for what will eventually be pickleball courts.
It is easy to read all of this as one story: Edina is rebuilding its parks, cue the orange cones, wait it out. But that reading misses the thing that actually matters if you use these parks. Two of these three projects are running on money the city controls outright, on a schedule the city itself set. The third is not. And the difference between those two clocks is why the bridge has been the subject of council debate over budget gaps while the golf dome lot construction has proceeded without a hitch.
The Money Behind Braemar and Fred Richards Is the Same Money
In November 2022, Edina voters approved a half-cent local sales tax dedicated to park improvements, generating an estimated $39.3 million for the system. That single vote is funding two of the three projects underway right now. Braemar Park's master plan, including the golf dome parking expansion and trailhead work, is drawing on $8.1 million of it. Fred Richards Park, the larger and more visible transformation, is built on $17.7 million from that same pool.
Because this money is local, self-approved, and already sitting in the city's account, the pace of these two projects has been set almost entirely by staff logistics rather than outside review. At Fred Richards, crews spent late 2025 hauling in more than 4,000 cubic yards of dirt and letting it compact over winter, specifically so the ground would be ready for courts and hard surfaces once full construction began this year. Park Planner Rachel DeVries has described the sequencing as deliberate rather than rushed, telling the city's own newsletter that the team is building features together rather than opening them one at a time, in part to let new plantings establish properly.
The 43-acre park, which will end up almost twice the size of Centennial Lakes Park, is being organized into distinct zones under a "Pathways to Play" concept: a Nature Bank of wetlands and pollinator habitat, a neighborhood playground and picnic shelter near Parklawn Avenue, a Great Lawn for open field use, and a Central Green with a traditional playground, pickleball courts, and a multi-purpose court for basketball and futsal. Full construction is expected to run about 18 months, and the existing playground and picnic shelter near the Nine Mile Creek Regional Trail are staying open throughout, though the shelter won't be available for private rentals while heavy equipment is on site.
At Braemar, the golf dome parking lot expansion is smaller in scope but solving a problem regulars already know about: the lot fills during peak season and cars end up lining the road. The fix adds 50 spaces and, starting in 2027, four seasonal pickleball courts made of tournament-style mats that roll out over the asphalt once the dome closes for the warmer months. City Council Member James Pierce called it during a March council meeting, describing the reuse of dead-season parking space as a creative solution to get full use of that space. It is the kind of pragmatic, low-drama project that self-funded local money tends to produce.
The Bridge Is Running on a Different Clock
The Rosland Park pedestrian bridge is not part of that sales tax pool. The current bridge, built in the early 1960s, is owned by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, not the city, and it has been on a collision course with replacement for years. It does not meet ADA standards, it is accessible only by stairs, and it was struck by vehicles twice in 2022, closing it for most of that year before temporary repairs got it back in service in January 2023.
Replacing it required a different kind of money entirely: a combination of $6.2 million in secured state funding, $800,000 from the Pedestrian and Cyclist Safety Fund, $600,000 in Municipal State Aid, and $400,000 from the Centennial Lakes Tax Increment Financing district, for a project expected to cost around $8 million. Because most of that funding runs through state channels, the project has had to move through MnDOT bid review and coordinate its schedule with a separate MnDOT noise-wall project planned for 2028.
That outside dependency is exactly what produced the friction the other two projects didn't have. In April, the Edina City Council reviewed bid results that showed a budget gap of $1.4 to $2.2 million depending on how much architectural cladding the bridge would carry, and council members spent real time weighing full cladding against partial cladding against none at all. Architect Brad Smith of Snow Kreilich Architects argued the bridge was more than infrastructure, calling it an opportunity to create a lasting landmark for the community. Councilmember Julie Risser pushed back on cost grounds and safety concerns about visibility. That is the sound of a project answerable to a state funding partner and a public bid process, not a city team executing its own referendum.
"I am excited to provide a bridge that is more accessible to all types of users. The bridge will accommodate all types of wheels and provide easy access while also being architecturally pleasing." — Chad Millner, Edina Public Works Director and City Engineer
Construction on the new bridge began in late June 2026, with the old structure removed during a full weekend closure of Highway 62 between Highway 100 and Interstate 35W. The westbound Highway 62 on-ramp from Valley View Road has been closed since then and is expected to stay that way through fall 2026, with more closures possible into 2027. The new bridge, with ADA-compliant ramps on both sides of the highway, is targeted to open in early summer 2027, according to the city's official project updates.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you use Rosland Park, the practical situation is more forgiving than the highway closures suggest. All park amenities, including the Mooty Pickleball Courts on West 64th Street, remain open during construction. What has changed is how you get to them:
- The pedestrian bridge over Highway 62 is closed for the duration of the project. Walk or bike via Valley View Road instead.
- West 64th Street is closed between the Mooty Pickleball Courts and the north Aquatic Center parking lot, so plan your driving route around that stretch rather than through it.
- All trails within Rosland Park remain open, according to the city's construction notices.
The Mooty Pickleball Courts themselves are worth knowing the history of if you play there. The five dedicated courts, plus two adjacent tennis courts now used almost exclusively for overflow pickleball, exist because the Mooty family approached the city in 2015 to fund Edina's first dedicated courts, in honor of family members John and Melvin Mooty. A second phase of fencing and gate upgrades wrapped up this spring, and the courts have stayed open through that work.
At Braemar, the Golf Dome parking lot and adjoining hiking trail saw a road closure from late July into mid-August for utility work, with the trail set to reconnect and reroute once the project wraps this fall. The broader Braemar Park natural areas restoration, a 44-acre effort to clear buckthorn and restore native oak savanna near Nine Mile Creek, is running on its own multi-year timeline through 2027, funded in part by a $500,000 Conservation Partners Legacy Grant from the Minnesota DNR.
At Fred Richards, the existing playground and picnic shelter off Parklawn Avenue remain accessible, and the segment of the Nine Mile Creek Regional Trail that runs through the site is expected to stay open for most of construction, with only limited, posted closures as work progresses.
The Practical Takeaway
None of these three projects is actually behind the others in ambition. But if you are trying to guess when a specific piece of Edina's park system reopens, the answer depends less on the scope of the work and more on who is paying for it. Locally funded projects, backed by a referendum voters already passed, move on a schedule the city sets and mostly keeps. State-linked projects, tied to another agency's bidding process and infrastructure calendar, move on someone else's clock, and that clock does not always match the season you were hoping for.
Edina residents have gotten used to construction notices this year. Knowing which fence is temporary and which one is a placeholder for 2027 makes the difference between planning around a minor detour and simply avoiding a corner of town for a year you didn't need to.
We follow projects like these closely at The Debbie McNally Group because Edina's daily texture, from a rerouted trail to a rebuilt bridge, is part of what makes living here worth paying attention to. If you're thinking through a move within Edina or into it and want a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, we'd welcome the chance to talk. Schedule a private consultation whenever it's useful to you.
