Drive past Hackberry Park this month and you'll notice the chain-link fence along the ball fields is gone. In its place: a concrete pad and privacy screening built to hold up to two portable restrooms, one of them ADA accessible. If you followed the fight over this park last year, you might have expected something much bigger to be going up by now. That gap between the argument and the outcome is worth understanding, because it says more about how Orono actually makes park decisions than either side of last year's debate did.
What Actually Changed This Summer
The Orono City Council approved a change order for the Hackberry Park Revitalization Project that removed 240 linear feet of the old 3.5-foot galvanized fence and replaced it with a concrete pad sized for two portable restrooms. Staff also floated adding a permanent drinking fountain, with vendor quotes running $14,000 to $18,000 installed against a rougher estimate of about $5,000 for a simpler spigot or bottle-filler option. At last report, the council hadn't settled on which way to go.
That's the whole visible project. No new ball field. No expanded parking lot. Just a fence coming down, a small pad going in, and a decision still pending on whether the water fountain gets built now or later. You can read the city's own Hackberry Park project page if you want the layout history in full.
The Plan That Didn't Survive Contact With the Neighborhood
To understand why this summer's work looks so modest, it helps to know what almost got built instead. In 2025, city staff put forward three concept layouts for Hackberry that would have packed a second softball field, a playground, a basketball court, a bathroom building, and 35 parking spaces onto the same 3.58-acre lot. One of the proposed softball field placements would have hit balls toward a stormwater pond and Willow Drive, a busy road bordering the park.
The feedback that shaped those concepts came from a short online survey. A neighborhood group called Friends of Orono, which has pushed back publicly on the process, cited the response count at different points as both 53 and 51. Either number is a sliver of a city with roughly 8,300 residents, and the group also noted the survey ran for about two weeks with no email or social media notification pushed to residents beforehand. Friends of Orono raised a second point worth sitting with: national Little League space guidelines call for roughly 1.75 to 2 acres per T-ball field, which means the two T-ball fields Hackberry already had were using most of the site's buildable land before anyone added a basketball court or a second sports field on top.
None of the three concept plans moved forward as drawn. What did move forward, a year later, was the fence-and-restroom pad project described above. The debate didn't produce the expansion that worried neighbors. It produced a much smaller step, with the bigger questions about fields, parking, and drainage still open for a future council to decide.
Antoine Park Is Taking the Opposite Route
At the same time Hackberry was working through its public back-and-forth, Antoine Park was moving through its own process on the other side of town, and it looked almost nothing alike. The council approved a master-plan study for Antoine to gather neighborhood input on potential amenities, including a pavilion. That survey has since closed, according to the city's Antoine Park project page, without the kind of public dispute that surrounded Hackberry's rollout. No construction has started there yet.
Here's how the two tracks compare so far:
| Hackberry Park | Antoine Park | |
|---|---|---|
| Process so far | Contested 2025 survey, three concept plans, public pushback over methodology | Neighborhood survey on possible amenities, including a pavilion, closed with no comparable dispute |
| What's visible now | Fence removed, concrete pad and privacy screening in for portable restrooms | No ground broken |
| Next decision | Whether to fund a permanent drinking fountain now or later | Whether council funds pavilion design and moves to construction |
Two parks, same city, same general timeframe, and two very different paths to get to "nothing dramatic has been built yet." That's not a knock on either process. It's a useful reminder that a loud debate and a quiet one can both end up in roughly the same place: incremental, phased work rather than a finished amenity.
The Trail Work Underneath Both Stories
The same council session that authorized Hackberry's design work also approved a County Road 6 trail resurfacing project, framed by staff as pavement preservation rather than new construction. It's a smaller line item than either park, but it's part of the same wave of infrastructure decisions moving through Orono this year.
The more interesting long-term piece is trail connectivity. Orono's Parks Commission formed an ad hoc North Arm Drive Trail subcommittee to plan a walking and biking trail timed to a possible 2026 road reconstruction along North Arm Drive, with an eye toward a connection to Lakeview Legacy Park and coordination with Hennepin County on County Road 19. One commissioner flagged a link to the regional Dakota Trail, sometimes referenced locally as the Loose Line Dakota Trail connection, as a near-term priority worth watching alongside the park work.
That distinction matters if you're trying to figure out which projects will actually change how you move through the city. A resurfaced ball field or a new pavilion improves one park. A trail connection to Lakeview Legacy Park or the Dakota Trail changes how you get between several of them, on foot or by bike, without touching a road that's carrying cars.
If You Want a Say in What Happens Next
Orono is currently recruiting residents for a 2050 Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee, the body that sets long-range land use and growth priorities for the next couple of decades. It's a different venue than the Parks Commission that handled Hackberry and Antoine, and it's where decisions about how much park land the city plans to have, and where, actually get made over the long run. If the back-and-forth over Hackberry made you want more say in how these calls unfold, that committee is the more useful place to watch than the next round of survey results on a single park.
The lesson from this year isn't that public pushback wins or loses. It's that a contested process and a quiet one can both land on modest, phased outcomes, and the projects worth tracking closely are usually the ones that connect places, not just the ones that get the loudest meeting.
The Steadman Team has spent three decades paying attention to exactly this kind of local decision making, the kind that shapes what it actually feels like to live in a place long before it shows up in a listing description. If you're curious how park investment, trail connections, or the city's long-range planning work could touch a property you own or love in Orono, The Steadman Team is always glad to talk it through.
