Ramsey County Board held a workshop on May 26, 2026, in Courthouse Room 220 to receive Community & Economic Development mini-workshop updates on two major projects: RiversEdge in downtown St. Paul and Rice Creek Commons in Arden Hills. The workshop was recorded and live-streamed on Zoom webinar. No formal votes were taken; the session was informational and part of an ongoing series tied to the county's Building Stronger Together initiative.
All right. Well, welcome everyone. Welcome to Ramsey County Board Workshop. Today's workshop is titled Community and Economic Development Meeting Workshops. We could focus on River's edge and right street comments. A quick courtesy reminder that this board workshop is recorded and it is live streamed on Zoom webinar. There will be no votes taken during this workshop. So let's start with introductions of commissioners and presenters around the table, and then the rest of the room. Mary Joe McGuire, Commissioner District 2. My Tang Chan, Commissioner District 6. Kelly Miller, Commissioner District 7. Josh Olson, Community Economic Development. Claudia Clay Camera Community and Economic Development. Carrie Collins, Tippity County Manager, Economic Growth and Community Investment. Lynn Becker County Manager. Clemens Baron. John Mass Powell will deputy director of public works. Mike Rogers, Public Works. Christy Cost any of this topic? How it's a chief operating offset? Building government relations. Ellen Larson, Pop Land Laties from Lance County. It's also at the country manager helping the work, so to speak. Your top box, yeah. All right, so thank you. So there's workshop follows the launch of Building Stronger Together to provide updates on two of Ramsey County's major development projects. These two projects are key components to the county goal of building a dynamic downtown and selling county owned land. Through these focus meeting workshops, the county board will hear how the Building Strong Together strategy is being activated and implemented through the ongoing planning, ongoing planning, development, and execution of these two transformative county layout projects. With that, I would like to turn it over to our presenters. Madam Fair Commissioners, I'll just uh give a quick intro to this, I guess, new style of workshops. We've got two kind of mini workshops, if you will, 45 minutes for each. Um, and the intent is not to necessarily get all the details uh about each project, but it's to get you up to speed on kind of where things are at, um, with the idea that this becomes kind of a multi-part series, uh, that we come back, you know, on some kind of regular cadence here and provide yet another mini workshop in a few months to keep momentum going on the projects and so that you can all see what staff are working on, what's advancing, and where there may be obstacles. And so uh we've got our redevelopment staff here, we've got other uh staff here with various expertise that are prepared to answer your questions. And um, so I'm going to fall back and let the kind of the revolving door of folks come through, and I'll turn it over to uh Director Josh Wilson. Thank you, Commissioners. Good afternoon. Um, I I hope uh today's uh briefing across these two mini workshops will give you a bit of a deeper dive into a number of the elements that um our teams uh both in community economic development and public works. So as much as that we put up their, you know, it's a CED, community and economic development meeting workshops. We really do believe that these are um shared projects between our two departments. Um today we'll as uh Chair Moran already mentioned, we're focusing on two of the high profile projects um led by your Ramsey County team. Um, each of the projects um are important and certainly centerpieces of these two elements outlined on your on your slides uh for building stronger together, building a dynamic downtown where you'll hear more about the River's Edge project and um selling county-owned land, which is where we talk about other projects across the county, including the big one uh out in Arden Hills uh Race Creek Commons. Um, but I I do want to take a moment just to preface this by saying these two all these two projects are large projects for us, and we're working on them. We're working on a number of other things too. Um, these two sites represent key key places, but we also have other projects smaller in scale in many instances across uh the rest of the project. And so we're excited to kind of bring forth those updates at future mini workshops where we can talk a little bit about how we're positioning those projects as we move forward, how they connect with other elements, whether they'd be programmatic or other department work. So really, as I said, you know, these other efforts kind of still fall under the large umbrella that is uh building stronger together. And you even saw earlier uh this morning at your board meeting an element that is not led by Ramsey County, but where we will be very involved in because it is an element that helps uh further um many of these projects in the case of the Kellogg uh bridge in downtown. So again, trying to kind of pond intended bridge across all these pieces. Um thanks for the sound effects, right? Um, but also uh as we kind of uh begin to illustrate uh how uh at the staff level, but also through our partnerships um across community are kind of working in these projects um forward.