Lake Nokomis has been fighting algae blooms, beach closures, and creeping erosion for years, and Minneapolis is now moving into the next phase of its effort to fix it. The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board is seeking a contractor to restore and naturalize sections of the Nokomis shoreline, replacing the kind of mowed-turf-to-water edge that has long fed the lake's water quality problems.
The project, listed on the city's COMET supplier portal, was posted July 14. Specific dollar figures and the exact shoreline segments involved haven't been publicly disclosed in the solicitation materials.
The approach is well-established in urban park management: swap out turf lawns that run straight to the water for native plantings, bioengineered slopes, and terraced buffers that slow runoff and filter out phosphorus before it reaches the lake. Phosphorus feeds algae, and algae feeds the blooms that have forced repeated beach closures at Nokomis in recent summers, including shutdowns tied to blue-green algae and E. coli in 2023 and 2024. The lake sits on Minnesota's impaired waters list for nutrients and eutrophication.
Source: NationGraph.
The Park Board has been working the problem from multiple angles. The Minnehaha Creek Watershed District treated the lake with alum in 2019, a chemical process that binds phosphorus in the sediment. But shoreline erosion keeps delivering new nutrients from the surrounding land, and a manicured turf edge also creates ideal habitat for Canada geese, whose droppings add more bacteria and phosphorus to the water. Native plantings break that cycle by making the shoreline less attractive to geese and less permeable to runoff.
Climate isn't helping. Minnesota has seen a documented rise in heavy rain events, which flush more nutrients into lakes faster than aging or degraded shorelines can handle. Fluctuating water levels and shifting ice-out timing have accelerated erosion at Nokomis and other metro-area lakes.
The project fits into the Park Board's 2015 Nokomis-Hiawatha Regional Park Master Plan, which specifically identified shoreline degradation as a priority, and into the broader 20-Year Neighborhood Park Plan, a $311 million capital investment program launched in 2016 to address deferred maintenance across Minneapolis's park system.
For the south Minneapolis neighborhoods surrounding Nokomis, including Standish, Hiawatha and Field-Regina-Northrop, the lake's beaches are a major summer resource, heavily used by working-class and immigrant families. Water quality here is a practical access issue as much as an environmental one.
The Park Board has not announced a construction timeline, and the contract value remains to be determined once bids come in.
