The Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District has a deal in place to buy a big chunk of University of Minnesota-owned UMore Park land in Rosemount for construction of a new $135 million middle school, a project that will replace the the oldest building in the district.
The University of Minnesota Board of Regents agreed late last week to sell the 76-acre property to Independent School District 196 for $7.24 million. The price breaks down to about $95,800 per acre for the property, which is at the southeast corner of County Road 42 and Biscayne Avenue within the UMore Park area.
The district hopes to begin construction this fall on the middle school project, which was funded as part of the $493 million bond referendum approved by district voters in May 2023 the largest successful ballot initiative of its kind in Minnesota’s history.
Mark Stotts, director on special assignment for the school district, said he intends to have the land deal up for school board approval at its July 22 meeting.
Stotts said the district has been working with the U of M on land acquisition for at least a year and a half. The district, he said, looked at other sites in the Rosemount area and discovered quickly that there’s little land available.
The UMore Park site makes sense for the district, in part, because it’s conveniently located off County Road 42 and is in a high-growth area. Just to the east is the Amber Fields residential development, which will eventually bring roughly 2,000 new homes to the city.
“We were looking at some other properties too, but this was far and away the best location. So we approached the University of Minnesota and Dakota Aggregates, which is the company that is mining the property around it, and that's kind of how we got the ball rolling,” Stotts said.
Leslie Krueger, the U of M’s assistant vice president for Planning, Space and Real Estate, said Monday that the U of M has been having conversations with the school district for a number of years about the district’s facility needs in the Rosemount area.
“It’s a very fast-growing community, and so as another public entity, we've been supportive of making sure that we can support the broader community with their needs,” Krueger said.
The U of M’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences is currently using the land for crop production, but the land has been slated for future development.
“We’re developing it a little bit earlier than we anticipated to meet the school district’s needs,” Krueger said.
District officials say the need for a new middle school is great. The oldest part of the existing school was built in 1918. Though the district has expanded the building over time, it no longer works well for a middle school, Stotts said.
“The hallways are really narrow. Traffic flow in the building is just awful,” Stotts said. “Talk to parents or students. They talk about how it's really difficult to get around in that building. I've been there [during times] where I've actually just planted myself against a wall because there's literally no room to move.”
Stotts said the district plans to find a new use for the existing building, possibly for community education or early childhood learning.
“It’s still a functional building, and we're going to repurpose it for other uses. But in terms of today's education, it's just not an adequate facility anymore. Obviously, the public understands that because they voted positively for the referendum that's funding this.”
The property is in the “North Phase” of the Dakota Aggregates Mining Lease area, according to the U of M. Specifically, it’s among the areas that have been “mined, reclaimed and returned” to the U of M as a “mining buffer” along County Road 42 and Biscayne Avenue.
Stotts said the district’s environmental engineers have been doing soil borings on the property, which he describes as a “clean site.”
“That site has been tested and tested again, and everything is fine,” he said.
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