MOSCOW (AP) — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will remain jailed on espionage charges until at least late June, after a Moscow court on Tuesday rejected his appeal that sought to end his pretrial detention.

The 32-year-old U.S. citizen was detained in late March 2023 while on a reporting trip and has spent over a year in jail, with authorities routinely extending his time behind bars and rejecting his appeals. Last month, his pretrial detention was continued yet again — until June 30 — in a ruling that he and his lawyers later challenged. A Moscow appellate court rejected it Tuesday.

In the courtroom on Tuesday, Gerhskovich, wearing a white T-shirt and an open checked shirt, looked relaxed, at times laughing and chatting with members of his legal team.

His arrest in the city of Yekaterinburg rattled journalists in Russia, where authorities have not detailed what, if any, evidence they have to support the espionage charges.

Gershkovich and his employer have denied the allegations, and the U.S. government has declared him to be wrongfully detained.

Analysts have pointed out that Moscow may be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips in soaring U.S.-Russian tensions over the Kremlin’s military operation in Ukraine. At least two U.S. citizens arrested in Russia in recent years — including WNBA star Brittney Griner — have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the U.S.

In December, the U.S. State Department said it had made a significant offer to secure the release of Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, another American imprisoned in Russia on espionage charges, which it said Moscow had rejected.

Officials did not describe the offer, although Russia has been said to be seeking the release of Vadim Krasikov, who was given a life sentence in Germany in 2021 for the killing in Berlin of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a 40-year-old Georgian citizen of Chechen descent who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya and later claimed asylum in Germany.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, asked this year about releasing Gershkovich, appeared to refer to Krasikov by pointing to a man imprisoned by a U.S. ally for “liquidating a bandit” who had allegedly killed Russian soldiers during separatist fighting in Chechnya.

Beyond that hint, Russian officials have kept mum about the talks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeatedly said that while “certain contacts” on swaps continue, “they must be carried out in absolute silence.”

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since September 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB.

Daniloff was released without charge 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet Union’s U.N. mission who was arrested by the FBI, also on spying charges.

Whenever SpaceX rockets blast off from the sandy property that Elon Musk controls near Brownsville, the road to Boca Chica Beach—including Boca Chica State Park—closes by order of the county judge (as well as other days when the company deems it necessary). At times, rockets have exploded and showered down debris on public and private lands for miles around. Bits have been discovered in grassy coastal areas identified by officials from the nearby U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge as the territory of the endangered piping plover, a small shorebird with a distinctive black-striped face.

But for Rio Grande Valley residents, this land is more than habitat for birds, nesting sea turtles, and other wildlife. It’s a longtime gathering spot for Brownville families and fishermen eager to avoid the tourists and towering resort hotels of South Padre Island to the north. It’s also a place that members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe prize as their ancient camping and fishing grounds.  

That’s why more than 2,300 public comments flooded in—the majority negative—when the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission recently debated a proposal to trade away 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park, west of the beach and adjacent to the existing launch site, to SpaceX.  A contentious March 4 hearing attracted dozens of spectators, including three vanloads and more cars full of activists from the Valley who made the five-hour trip to Austin in order to speak for just three minutes apiece. 

But Commission Jeffery D. Hildebrand, a billionaire businessman appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott as chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, told opponents this hearing wasn’t about their SpaceX concerns but about what he considered a good deal.

He and other commissioners unanimously voted to swap the parkland for the possibility of acquiring another 477 acres that’s fully 10 miles away, across the Brownsville Ship Channel and west of Port Isabel, even though SpaceX doesn’t yet own that other property. (The company proposes to acquire the land and donate it later.)  “​​Through this transaction, we are guaranteeing the conservation of 477 acres, which would otherwise potentially be developed into condominiums or strip centers,” Hildebrand said.

In April, only weeks after that meeting, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, in partnership with the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and Save RGV, sued the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and the commission for its land swap decision. The groups denounced TPWD for allowing what they called “a land grab of Boca Chica State Park land for a private space corporation that is clearly not in the public interest.”

Two beachgoers ride past the SpaceX launch facility at Boca Chica Beach in 2021. Ivan Armando Flores/Texas Observer

But giving up or giving away Texas state property is nothing new for the state’s park commissioners. Over the last 25 years, commission members have agreed to swap, lease, give up, or give away thousands of acres of public lands, according to records and news accounts.

In some ways, though, this latest proposed land deal is different: It comes only months after Texas voters approved a billion-dollar endowment fund specifically for state park expansion. In other words, Texas state park commissioners are no longer so cash-strapped that they are forced by budgetary constraints to trade away land in order to grow. “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Olive Hershey, a longtime environmental activist from Houston said in an interview. “They don’t have to do this at all.”

Voters overwhelmingly approved the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund in November 2023 as a way to celebrate the state parks’ 100th anniversary. On top of that new billion-dollar endowment, Texas voters had previously approved a constitutional amendment that entitled the TPWD to receive 94 percent of the sporting goods sales tax—another fund that has grown to about $160 million a year.

Neither during their March meeting, nor in response to questions for this article did park leaders explain why they chose not to tap the endowment to acquire property instead of sacrificing parkland to SpaceX.  

Hildebrand is an energy executive used to cutting deals with major corporations. (He is Executive Chairman and Founder of Hilcorp Energy Company and previously worked for Exxon Company, U.S.A, among others.) Supposedly, the new land acquired via the SpaceX deal will be used to build another state park someday.

In response to questions about the deal from the Observer, a TPWD spokesperson said via email: “The acres proposed for swap are noncontiguous tracts largely surrounded by private owners and encroached on by construction,” apparently referring to construction by SpaceX itself. “Given the breadth of opportunities to expand and enhance Texas state parkland using the Texas Centennial Parks Conservation Fund, this swap providing a ten-time return on acreage offers the most prudent use of public funds for expanding state park availability in Texas.”

Alex Ortiz, an Austin-based lawyer and water resources expert who currently serves as the volunteer water resources chairman of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, is one of many people who consider the swap a bad deal for local residents and wildlife —and bad policy for Texas parks in general. In his formal comment, he wrote: “Approving this action today could potentially risk irreparable harm to Texas’s coastline, endangered species, indigenous communities, and the whole Texas Parks system. Moreover, this decision risks setting a dangerous precedent that large for-profit entities with an appalling history of being a bad land steward and bad for public beach access, like SpaceX, have the ability to slowly chip away at beloved state parks in communities that do not want them to expand.”

TPWD staff have already been authorized to begin negotiations with SpaceX, which will likely involve months-long environmental assessments, though the lawsuit seeks to stop that process. The tracts the state proposes to relinquish are likely visited both by coastal waterbirds and sea turtles, Ortiz said. The larger property SpaceX will supposedly acquire, further inland along a lagoon, likely supports migratory birds and other wildlife. Comparing the ecological value of those two may prove difficult, but, to Ortiz, it all seems unnecessary. “You didn’t have to sacrifice 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park to do this,” Ortiz said in an interview. “This is just bad all around—a bad conservation practice.”

Over the years, TPWD officials, overseen by gubernatorial appointees, have repeatedly cut deals to enable development on current or former state park land. They’ve also traded away state park and recreation land to businesses and to other government entities.

In 2019, Port Arthur LNG purchased and donated 1,280 acres near the state’s existing JD Murphree Wildlife Management Area in Port Arthur in exchange for126 acres owned by the state. Though the math seems to favor Texas public lands, the state land was in an area known as Round Lake, which included sensitive coastal wetlands. A TPWD spokesman said that acreage was already “surrounded by land owned by Port Arthur LNG, which prevented TPWD from effectively managing the lake as it did not own or control the land around it. The company is now developing that parcel for a liquid natural gas port.” 

Other records show that the park officials were cozying up to Port Arthur LNG, even as others were fighting that same project in court as potentially hugely damaging to the already fast-subsiding and often-flooded stretch of Texas Gulf Coast. Around the same time, the project developers, Sempra LNG, a San Diego-based energy company with more than $66 billion in assets, received a 2019 environmental stewardship award from TPWD for its employees’ participation in cleanups at nearby Sea Rim State Park. In March 2023, the company announced a multibillion-dollar deal related to its expansion, which was praised by Gov. Greg Abbott. (A Sempra spokesperson did not provide comment by publication time.)

It already seems like “SpaceX is in charge.”

But the financial motivation for trading away other state park or recreational land seemed to evaporate in November 2023, when voters approved the billion-dollar endowment. State parks leaders—who oversee  89 parks, natural areas and historic sites—immediately pledged to begin a new era of expansion.

The 2023 vote came only a few months after TPWD leaders had been publicly embarrassed after being forced to abandon a popular state park on wooded lakefront acreage that they’d leased for decades from a power company. The property, the former home of 1,460-acre Fairfield State Park, was sold to a private developer after state leaders failed to act on an opportunity to buy. They were given 120 days to vacate after the sale went through. Though state officials belatedly tried to recover the land through eminent domain, they quietly abandoned those efforts in December 2023, losing any chance to recoup trails, picnic grounds, and other amenities built with taxpayer money. Much of that public investment will now benefit new owners: the private subdivision’s developer and its future residents.

The avoidable loss of an attractive park and lake so near the fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex attracted plenty of adverse publicity. But Texas park leaders have a long tradition of quietly wheeling and dealing away parkland and wilderness tract.

In 1999, the Legislature amended the Parks and Wildlife code to authorize transfer of state real estate to local governments because TPWD leaders were complaining that they lacked funds even to address a huge backlog of needed repairs and upgrades in the popular state park system. (Those shortfalls had been created mainly by the Legislature’s failure to allocate enough of the sales tax created in 1994 on sporting goods to adequately support parks.) A series of state land giveaways ensued. 

In 2004, state leaders transferred the hugely popular 517-acre Kerrville Schreiner State Park , originally developed by the federal Civilian Conservation Corps between 1935 and 1937, to the city of Kerrville. Lubbock Lake Landmark State Historical Park, a 336-acre site with archeological ruins, went to Texas Tech University and three other state properties were traded away too in the early 2000s.  

The Boca Chica State Park property was acquired in 1994, but for decades, much of that land was leased back to the federal government to add to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. That lease ended in December, only a few months before the land swap vote.

Texas already ranks low in park acreage per capita—it’s 28th in the nation based on the percentage of land covered by state parks. And even that dismal ranking is artificially higher than it should be: It’s skewed by the size of Texas’ largest (and most remote) state park, Big Bend Ranch, which sprawls across 311,000 acres along the meandering Rio Grande in a Far West Texas stretch of desert that spans Brewster and Presidio counties.

Texas owns very little parkland along its 350-mile Gulf of Mexico coastline. But this is not the first time part (or all) of a beachfront state park has been threatened with closure or given away. Most of Bryan Beach State Park, 862 acres of beachfront near the mouth of the Brazos River, in Brazoria County, was transferred to the city of Freeport in 2019 (and the rest went to the Texas Department of Transportation for a dredging operation).  

If the 2024 vote holds, SpaceX will soon claim acreage that belonged to one of Texas’ four remaining state coastal parks. Boca Chica State Park, Galveston Island State Park, Mustang Island State Park and Sea Rim State Park. All four have been adversely affected by flooding and hurricanes, but Boca Chica is the only one where public beach access is regularly blocked by private commercial activity. SpaceX did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Boca Chica swap won’t happen right away, partly because the land SpaceX proposes to trade is still owned by an Austin-based company called Bahia Grande Holdings, the Houston Chronicle reported. (The owners could not immediately be reached by the Observer).

A TPWD spokesman said, “This disposition process could take up to 18 months and would include an environmental assessment and opportunities for public comment and federal environmental compliance consultations through the National Historic Preservation Act and Endangered Species Act, and with local tribes.”

Justin Bravo sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck at Boca Chica Beach in 2021. Bravo is not a fan of SpaceX’s impact on beach access. Ivan Armando Flores/Texas Observer

The recently filed lawsuit may further delay action. But even some opponents worry there’s limited chances left to stop SpaceX’s Boca Chica expansion.

Already, SpaceX has adversely affected Boca Chica State Park and the surrounding area, activists say. Cameron County commissioners have issued a standing order, with permission of the state General Land Office, that allows the county judge to temporarily close off access to public State Highway 4 and the public Boca Chica Beach to allow SpaceX activity. 

According to real-time text alerts sent by SpaceX, the road to Boca Chica was closed on March 3 (the day before the land swap hearing), March 7, March 11, March 14, March 25, March 27, and April 5. 

For Alex Ortiz, that practice poses yet another troubling question: “There’s a constitutional right to beach access in Texas. So it feels different if there’s repeated closures to a beach in a state park.” (The late René Oliveira, then a Brownsville state representative, passed a bill a decade ago allowing SpaceX to effectively undermine the state’s six-decades-old Open Beaches Act.)

To Valley activist Emma Guevara, a Sierra Club local community organizer, it already seems like “SpaceX is in charge.” She says many local residents are deterred from visiting the public beach at all, because SpaceX has so many “crazy beach and road closures.” 

“You have to sign up for alerts and the system is not always accurate,” she said. “Our whole argument is … the more land they get, the more control they’ll have over that area until they have complete control. They pretty much do now because the county supports them.”

Editor’s Note: Olive Hershey is on the board of directors of the Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation, which is a financial supporter of the Texas Observer.

By MARK SHERMAN (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has scheduled a special session to hear arguments over whether former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted over his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

The case, to be argued Thursday, stems from Trump’s attempts to have charges against him dismissed. Lower courts have found he cannot claim for actions that, prosecutors say, illegally sought to interfere with the election results.

The Republican ex-president has been charged in federal court in Washington with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, one of four criminal cases he is facing. A trial has begun in New York over hush money payments to a porn star to cover up an alleged sexual encounter.

The Supreme Court is moving faster than usual in taking up the case, though not as quickly as special counsel Jack Smith wanted, raising questions about whether there will be time to hold a trial before the November election, if the justices agree with lower courts that Trump can be prosecuted.

The justices ruled earlier this term in another case that arose from Trump’s actions following the election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The court unanimously held that states could not invoke a provision of the 14th Amendment known as the insurrection clause to prevent Trump from appearing on presidential ballots.

Here are some things to know:

WHAT’S THE ISSUE?

When the justices agreed on Feb. 28 to hear the case, they put the issue this way: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

That’s a question the Supreme Court has never had to answer. Never before has a former president faced criminal charges so the court hasn’t had occasion to take up the question of whether the president’s unique role means he should be shielded from prosecution, even after he has left office.

Both sides point to the absence of previous prosecutions to undergird their arguments. Trump’s lawyers told the court that presidents would lose their independence and be unable to function in office if they knew their actions in office could lead to criminal charges once their terms were over. Smith’s team wrote that the lack of previous criminal charges “underscores the unprecedented nature” of what Trump is accused of.

NIXON’S GHOST

Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace nearly 50 years ago rather than face impeachment by the House of Representatives and removal from office by the Senate in the Watergate scandal.

Both Trump’s lawyers and Smith’s team are invoking Nixon at the Supreme Court.

Trump’s team cites Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case in which the Supreme Court held by a 5-4 vote that former presidents cannot be sued in civil cases for their actions while in office. The case grew out of the firing of a civilian Air Force analyst who testified before Congress about cost overruns in the production of the C-5A transport plane.

“In view of the special nature of the President’s constitutional office and functions, we think it appropriate to recognize absolute Presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote for the court.

But that decision recognized a difference between civil lawsuits and “the far weightier” enforcement of federal criminal laws, Smith’s team told the court. They also invoked the high court decision that forced Nixon to turn over incriminating White House tapes for use in the prosecutions of his top aides.

And prosecutors also pointed to President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, and Nixon’s acceptance of it, as resting “on the understanding that the former President faced potential criminal liability.”

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

The subtext of the immunity fight is about timing. Trump has sought to push back the trial until after the election, when, if he were to regain the presidency, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case. Prosecutors have been pressing for a quick decision from the Supreme Court so that the clock can restart on trial preparations. It could take three months once the court acts before a trial actually starts.

If the court hands down its decision in late June, which would be the typical timeframe for a case argued so late in the court’s term, there might not be enough time to start the trial before the election.

WHO ARE THE LAWYERS?

Trump is represented by D. John Sauer, a former Rhodes Scholar and Supreme Court clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia. While serving as Missouri’s solicitor general, Sauer won the only Supreme Court case he has argued until now, a 5-4 decision in an execution case. Sauer also filed legal briefs asking the Supreme Court to repudiate Biden’s victory in 2020.

In addition to working for Scalia early in his legal career, Sauer also served as a law clerk to Michael Luttig when he was a Republican-appointed judge on the Richmond, Virginia-based federal appeals court. Luttig joined with other former government officials on a brief urging the Supreme Court to allow the prosecution to proceed. Luttig also advised Vice President Mike Pence not to succumb to pressure from Trump to reject some electoral votes, part of Trump’s last-ditch plan to remain in office.

The justices are quite familiar with Sauer’s opponent, Michael Dreeben. As a longtime Justice Department official, Dreeben argued more than 100 cases at the court, many of them related to criminal law. Dreeben was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and joined Smith’s team last year after a stint in private practice.

In Dreeben’s very first Supreme Court case 35 years ago, he faced off against Chief Justice John Roberts, then a lawyer in private practice.

FULL BENCH

Of the nine justices hearing the case, three were nominated by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. But it’s the presence of a justice confirmed decades before Trump’s presidency, Justice Clarence Thomas, that’s generated the most controversy.

Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, urged the reversal of the 2020 election results and then attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot. That has prompted calls for the justice to step aside from several court cases involving Trump and Jan. 6.

But Thomas has ignored the calls, taking part in the unanimous court decision that found states cannot kick Trump off the ballot as well as last week’s arguments over whether prosecutors can use a particular obstruction charge against Capitol riot defendants. Trump faces the same charge in special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution in Washington.

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When St. Paul City Council Member Cheniqua Johnson read through written comments submitted on the proposed St. Paul Bicycle Plan, she was taken aback to find just a handful of emails from her East Side ward, despite public outreach from city staff for more than a year. And by a handful of comments, she means exactly that.

“I pulled out the written comments from Ward 7, and I had a mighty three,” said Johnson during the city council meeting last week, urging East Siders to pick up the phone, submit an email or pen a letter. “Just know that we are reading them. It goes to a real human.”

Nevertheless, said Johnson, many low-income residents do not have cars, one of the reasons she said she likely would vote in favor of the plan this week.

“A lot of our community members bike, sometimes out of necessity,” she said.

City council vote

With carbon emissions goals in mind, the city council is poised to approve on Wednesday the first sweeping write-through of the city’s then-groundbreaking 2015 bicycle plan, a key document that sets the tone and general vision for up to 163 miles of new bike lanes and related amenities in the 16 years ahead.

That’s a 75% increase in St. Paul bikeways by 2040, most of it rolled into what’s being dubbed as a “low-stress network” of off-street bike corridors drawn on paper with young families, hesitant fence-sitters and non-bikers in mind.

“Specifically what this plan hopes to accomplish is to attract new people riding bikes … who haven’t felt comfortable riding,” said Jimmy Shoemaker, senior city planner, addressing the city council last week. In national surveys, 54% of respondents said they were interested in cycling but hesitant, mainly due to safety concerns.

With the goal of making cycling more accessible across all ages and abilities, the 51-page document prioritizes “protected” lanes that are level with the sidewalk over in-street lanes, while still advocating for a range of approaches on different streets. During a public hearing last Wednesday, the plan was praised by cyclers as a model for inviting newcomers into their community.

“Surveys show the biggest barrier to cycling is proximity to cars. Separated bikeways … address this for all ages and abilities, not just people like me,” said Zack Mensinger, chair of the St. Paul Bicycle Coalition, addressing the council. “This forms a network. Too much of our existing bike infrastructure is fragmented and incomplete, meaning from block to block your route might just end.”

Funding, engagement

Two things the bike plan does not lay out are how new bike lanes will be funded, or how to boost greater engagement on the city’s East Side, which has many immigrant and working class corners that appear disconnected from the prospect of long-term planning for bike corridors.

Shoemaker said the bike plan’s priorities were informed by a survey of 1,700 city residents in the fall of 2021, which drew about 10% of its responses from the East Side, an area comprising roughly a fourth or more of the city population.

Recognizing the disparity, city staff later held outreach events at both the Conway and Battle Creek rec centers, as well as Lake Phalen.

Still, Shoemaker acknowledged more input will be key as specific projects move forward.

“This is kind of beginning,” he said. “The bicycle plan is a decades-long vision for St. Paul. Every single one of those lines on the planned bicycle network represents a different project, and with each project will come more public engagement.”

Separated bikeways a common request

In the local surveys, he said, the most common request was for more separated bikeways, which is considered best practice within federal and state road planning circles when daily traffic volumes exceed 6,000 vehicles.

On the East Side, the most immediate question raised by the bike plan is along Maryland Avenue between Johnson Parkway and Ruth Street. City planners are recommending against a bikeway on the Ramsey County-owned road because of competition for space with the future St. Paul-to-White Bear Lake Purple Line, as well as the Como/Maryland H Line bus rapid transit project, which would connect downtown Minneapolis to Maplewood.

“After we spoke with the county, it was ultimately our recommendation to not include a bikeway on that,” Shoemaker said. The Planning Commission and Transportation Committee disagreed, and have asked the city council to keep a line on the bike plan map indicating Maryland Avenue would be considered a potential “bikeway for further study.”

On any particular street, the bike plan does not specify a particular layout, including whether the city would build a two-way bikeway or add a path on either side of the street. Design details get worked out as street reconstruction is plotted. “Because we don’t offer specific designs, it does not offer an estimate for the cost of any single one project,” Shoemaker said.

Nor does the bike plan specify construction or maintenance funding. Most off-street lanes are added as part of street rebuilds and future public transit projects, making them pricier and at times more politically contentious additions than just painting lines on an existing street.

Other questions

Few areas of the city have been as polarized around the concept of off-street lanes as Summit Avenue, where opponents fear a heavy impact on tree canopy.

“What will it cost?” said Tom Darling, president of the Summit Avenue Residential Preservation Association, urging the council last week to hold off on the plan and seek further public engagement and firm cost estimates. “This is going to affect hundreds or thousands of people on specific streets, specific blocks. Why not send each of them a postcard … saying, ‘We’re considering this. The upshot of this is going to be increased property taxes, safety for bicyclists…’”

The city has added 65 miles of bikeways since 2015, including major network additions to the St. Paul Grand Round, Capital City Bikeway and the Highland Bridge development, for a total of 218 miles of bike corridors as of 2023.

Funding for snow and ice removal, signage placements and other maintenance has not grown in step, Shoemaker said, and “this (bike plan) does not identify new sources for maintenance funding.”

Council Member Rebecca Noecker said while she was thrilled with the plan overall, that’s no small concern.

“We cannot keep building without budgeting to maintain,” Noecker said.

Key goals

Among the bike plan’s key goals:

• Separated bikeways, currently 42% of the city’s bike network of bike corridors, would grow to as much as 73% of the network.

• Complete the Capital City Bikeway and Grand Round networks.

• Bikeways should be no more than a half-mile apart, and separated bikeways and paths and
bicycle boulevards should be no more than one mile apart.

• Build bikeways with the city’s new 1% sales tax, which is dedicated to parks and roads improvements.

• Work with railroad companies to build bikeways in or alongside rail corridors.

• Pursue external funding to construct bikeways separate from ongoing street reconstructions.

Public hearing

A public hearing on Wednesday drew a strong showing of support from the cycling community, as well as a few critical comments from plan opponents.

“I would probably be classified as a confident biker, but I’m also an aging biker,” said Deborah Schlick, a West Sider. “I’m getting more fussy about where I bike … and the way people drive in the years since the pandemic has gotten more reckless, more fast, so I almost always seek out a separated bike path.”

Macalester-Groveland resident Alexandra Cunliffe told the council last week that she and her husband share a car, a set-up that’s only made possible by the city’s bike corridors. But there’s still plenty of places she’s hesitant to roll into the street with her four-year-old cycling behind her.

“We’ve just been so thrilled at the increase in bike infrastructure in the city,” said Cunliffe, who urged the council to support more off-street lanes “so as my kids get older, they get to bike like we enjoy so much.”

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