"An important trail is a Loose Line Dakota Trail connection," Orono parks commissioner Jacob Janney told the rest of the Parks Commission back in February. Nobody slowing down to look at the plywood fencing around Hackberry Park this month would necessarily connect the two. But they're the same project, just at different stages of becoming visible.

Drive along the park's edge right now and the story looks like tree removal and mud. Stumps where there used to be shade. A construction entrance where there used to be open grass. If you've lived in Orono for a while, you already know Hackberry has been a slow-moving conversation for years, not a sudden decision. What's less obvious from the road is that this fall's work sits inside a bigger, quieter push to link the trails and parks around it into one system, and that push has already been running for longer than the fencing suggests.

The Trees That Didn't Make the Cut

The city's own construction update is specific about what's coming down and why. A certified arborist evaluated the trees on site, and the removals were coordinated with the landscape architect handling the park's redesign. Most of what came out were ash trees already dead or declining, not healthy canopy cleared to make room for parking. The new park plan calls for replanting at roughly double the number of trees removed.

That ratio matters more than it sounds like it should, because Hackberry's problems were never really about aesthetics. According to reporting in the Laker Pioneer, the park has been on the city's radar for improvements for years specifically because of drainage issues, and the city brought in the engineering firm Bolton & Menk in 2023 to build a master plan around fixing them. Three years of study preceded three months of visible fencing. The trees are the part everyone can see. The regrading underneath them is the part the master plan was actually written for.

Four Projects, One Season

Hackberry isn't the only line item on Orono's current projects page, and it isn't being treated as a standalone fix. The city's Parks Commission spent its February 2 meeting explicitly deciding to carry three things forward together as 2026 priorities: trail work, golf-course planning, and the Hackberry Park revitalization. Golf-course planning made that short list for a reason. The city's projects page currently groups Hackberry alongside the Golf Course Pavilion, Antoine Park, and the Lurton Park Parking Lot Expansion as active work for the year.

None of these read as urgent on their own. Together, they read like a city clearing several small backlogs in the same stretch of budget cycle, which is a more honest description of most municipal park seasons than any single ribbon-cutting ever is.

The Trail Piece Nobody Puts in the Same Sentence as Hackberry Park

Here's where Janney's comment from February stops being a throwaway line. The Luce Line Trail and the Dakota Rail Regional Trail already run through this part of the west metro, but they don't currently connect the way residents who use both tend to assume they do. Janney flagged that gap as a near-term priority for the Parks Commission to watch, specifically urging colleagues to track what Hennepin County and neighboring cities are doing that could affect Orono's own trail plans.

What makes this more than commission-room talk is a detail buried further into that same meeting: city park staff already handle snow plowing for the Dakota Trail. Orono isn't waiting for a connector to justify investing in that trail. It's already maintaining it through the winter, treating it as infrastructure the city is responsible for regardless of whether the Luce Line side officially links up. Hackberry's redesign, the golf course planning, the Lurton parking expansion, and the trail connector conversation aren't four separate stories the city happens to be running at once. They're one season of work on the same set of underused connections, described in four different meeting agendas because that's how city budgets get itemized, not because the projects are actually unrelated.

What to Do While the Fence Is Up

None of this changes what a fenced-off park means for this particular fall. If Hackberry was part of your evening walk, that route is gone for now. The good news is that the piece of infrastructure the Parks Commission is trying to connect to already has an anchor worth walking or biking to.

Birch's on the Lake Brewhouse & Supperclub sits on Long Lake, close enough to the Luce Line Trail that regulars mention the proximity in reviews without being asked. It's been in its current lakeside location since 2015, splitting the building between a Wisconsin-style supperclub upstairs and a brewhouse downstairs that brews its own beer and doesn't distribute it anywhere else. If you're looking for a reason to get out on the Luce Line this fall while Hackberry sits behind construction fencing, that's a real destination at the other end of it, not a hypothetical one the trail connector might someday justify.

The fencing at Hackberry will likely outlast this season. But the stumps being cleared this month are also clearing space for two trail systems that already share a snowplow route to eventually share a map.

If you're watching how Orono's public investments, from Hackberry Park to the trail connections around it, are reshaping daily life in specific pockets of the city, Holly Connaker and the Connaker Group track these details as closely as they track the market itself. Schedule a Private Consultation to talk through what's actually changing in your corner of Orono.