If you have driven down Willow Drive this summer and noticed grading equipment, fresh silt fence, and a chunk of the old ballfield turned to dirt, you are not imagining a sudden change. You are looking at the tail end of a three-year process that took far longer to reach a shovel than the fencing suggests.
Hackberry Park sits on 3.58 acres at 170 Hackberry Hill, and until this year it held two tee ball and softball fields, a playground, and open grass space for two additional fields. The city has been trying to redesign it since 2023. What took so long was not really the design itself. It was the order the city built it in.
The Sequence That Kept Resetting the Clock
In 2023, Orono hired the engineering firm Bolton & Menk to draft a masterplan for Hackberry, along with study work at Antoine Park and a resurfacing plan for a stretch of the County Road 6 trail. Bolton & Menk's fee for the Hackberry portion alone was capped at $87,200. Their early design notes named the problems residents had been living with for years: a clogged drain tile causing standing water, tight parking, and cars moving too fast along Willow Drive. Their proposed fixes went further, calling for ash tree replacements, a drinking fountain, coniferous plantings along the road, and a reworked ballfield layout that would remove the northern field and improve the southern one.
That was the easy part. Getting the plan approved took two more years.
The city applied for a Hennepin County Youth Athletics grant to help fund construction in the fall of 2023 and was turned down. A year later, the council tried again, approving a second grant resolution in a split 4-1 vote. By June 2025, the council had greenlit further design work and construction plans were expected to be ready "later that summer." Then, in August 2025, a concept plan went public, and the timeline stalled again. Neighbors and the local Baseball Association pushed back on where fields were being moved and how much tree cover would come down. A special Park Commission meeting was called for September 9, 2025, to sort through the objections.
Here's the detail that explains why so much of this kept looping: at a Park Commission meeting that November, commissioners noted the plan had gone to the City Council before it came back to their own commission for sign-off. They said the sequence felt backwards. The Park Commission is the body Orono created specifically to vet park designs before they reach council chambers, and on its own signature project, that review happened out of order. Commissioners flagged unresolved questions about grading, tree removal, and speed along Willow Drive, and asked for the chance to weigh in before final action, not after.
What the Numbers Actually Said
The city's community engagement for the redesign leaned heavily on a resident survey that ran online for roughly two weeks. According to the resident group Friends of Orono, which has tracked the process closely, the survey drew just 51 responses, a sliver of the city's population by any measure. That same group flagged something more specific than a low response count: across the listening sessions it tracked, the most consistent resident ask was to keep the two existing tee ball fields exactly where they are. That request does not appear as a standalone feature in the city's own published summary of what residents wanted.
None of this means the plan is wrong. It means the paper trail does not fully match the plan, and that mismatch is what kept generating do-overs rather than any single lightning-rod design choice.
Here's how the money has been staged across the project's Capital Improvement Plan, in draft form as of the most recent city budget documents:
| Phase | Year | Budget |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | 2023 | $10,000 |
| Design | 2024 | $50,000 |
| Construct | 2025 to 2026 | $1,100,000 |
That construction line is still marked draft in the city's own capital plan, which tells you something about how fluid this project has stayed even after ground broke.
What's Actually Different This Season
By late summer 2026, the change was visible enough that the city's own homepage was flagging it directly, telling visitors that anyone driving past Hackberry recently might notice things look different, with more detail on the construction project posted separately. That is city-speak for: yes, it's finally happening, and yes, the details are still being worked out in public.
For residents who use the park, a few practical notes worth knowing this fall:
- Field reservations at Hackberry run through the city's facilities booking system, and current construction may affect availability on the fields under active work. Check the city's Hackberry Park facility page before planning a game or practice.
- Antoine Park, off Fagerness Point Road, is going through its own lower-cost masterplan process and remains a fallback for neighborhood field time while Hackberry work continues.
- The County Road 6 trail segment between Old Crystal Bay Road and Willow Drive was part of the same 2023 Bolton & Menk contract and may see its own resurfacing work on a separate timeline from the ballfields.
The Part Worth Remembering
The lesson in Hackberry Park's timeline isn't really about tee ball fields or drainage tile. It's that Orono's park planning process, at least on this project, let a design reach the City Council before its own Park Commission had finished vetting it. That is the detail that turned a two-year design contract into a three-year fight, and it's worth knowing if you care about the next park project the city takes on. Commission meetings are open, agendas are posted in advance on the city's Granicus portal, and public comment happens before a plan goes to council, not after. If a future project matters to you, that's the window to show up.
Hackberry's fields will eventually reopen, the fencing will come down, and most residents driving past next spring will just see a park that looks a little different than it used to. The three years it took to get there is the kind of local detail that never makes it into a listing description, but it's exactly the sort of thing that makes a place feel like home rather than an address. This is the day-to-day texture the Fowke Weber Team pays attention to across Orono and every community on Lake Minnetonka, because knowing how a place actually works matters as much as knowing what it costs.
If you have questions about Orono, Hackberry Park, or anywhere else around the lake, The Fowke Weber Team is always glad to talk it through.
