With maintenance costs mounting, the University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents has agreed to sell the historic Eastcliff mansion in St. Paul to the University of Minnesota Foundation, an independent nonprofit that manages major gifts on behalf of the school.
The $2.2 million sale will allow the foundation to lease the 20-room structure back to the university on a 40-year lease, rent-free, so it can continue to serve as the university president’s residence. Revenue from the sale will be put into a new maintenance account that will help cover the building’s day-to-day operating expenses, which total roughly $300,000 annually.
“To have one less old building that we have to maintain, to me there’s no other choice but to support this resolution,” said Gregg Goldman, the university’s executive vice president for finance and operations, prior to the 9-2 vote.
The goal of the sale, according to board members, is to leave future capital improvements in the hands of the nonprofit foundation, an independent entity that works closely with the university but that has its own board of directors, while allowing the school itself to retain ownership of the land it sits on and control of the building’s everyday management.
Built by lumber magnate Edward Brooks in 1921 overlooking the Mississippi River, Eastcliff has housed university presidents since the early 1960s and doubles as an event and welcome center for visiting dignitaries. Board members said transferring Eastcliff to the foundation would be in keeping with the spirit of the Brooks family’s 1958 donation, allowing the house to remain in service to the university and maintained by the school on a day-to-day basis.
Goldman encouraged the board to make what he described as a fiscally responsible decision to support the sale at a time of rising tuition and growing fiscal pressures, when too much of the university feels “held together with bubble gum and bailing wire.”
Two voices of dissent
The home, which sits on the National Register of Historic Places, is undergoing some $6 million in renovations in advance of the arrival of Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, who was appointed university president in July 2024. Those renovations are being paid for by the foundation, according to a spokesperson for the university on Thursday.
Board vice chair Penny Wheeler noted the sale follows the recommendation of the Eastcliff task force, which had encouraged using philanthropy to support the building’s growing capital expenses after previously mulling the possibility of a sale. The Board of Regents voted unanimously in July 2024 to support that recommendation.
The foundation, Wheeler said, “is in a perfect position” and “given the renovations currently under way, this is a really timely move for us as the Board of Regents. … If for some reason the foundation is unable to maintain (it), it comes back to university hands.”
Regents James Farnsworth, who represents the district Eastcliff sits in, and Robyn Gulley voted against the sale after expressing concern about transferring a historic university asset to an independent nonprofit. Regent Mary Turner was absent.
“I see the task force report — that I did vote in favor of in July 2024 — a little bit differently,” Farnsworth said. “(I) don’t see this proposed real estate transaction necessary in any way to help honor … those goals.”
“I won’t be able to support this today,” Farnsworth added. “This proposed transaction doesn’t feel right to me.”
Foundation’s long ties
Board vice chair Ruth Johnson noted that the foundation also owns the McNamara Alumni Center in Minneapolis, where the board’s finance and operations committee met Thursday — “the one we’re in right now,” she said.
“Our work is not affected here whatsoever by the fact that they own it,” added Johnson, who serves on the board of the U foundation and on an Eastcliff advisory board. The house is “an important part of our history. … But we can have them do the heavy lifting of supporting that.”
The 10,000-square-foot mansion has been home to eight university presidents and one governor since 1961. A frequent stop for visiting dignitaries, Eastcliff hosted the Dalai Lama in 2011.
Gov. Tim Walz and his family recently spent 19 months in Eastcliff while the governor’s Summit Avenue residence was undergoing its own improvements. The state’s first family left Eastcliff in February.
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