Program for smaller cities makes a big impact in Harris

Map of the City of Harris

By John Wagner, originally published in the County News Review, Nov 21, 2025

For the past few years, the University of Minnesota has partnered with Harris and several other Chisago County communities to improve the parks and trails system around the county through a program called “Empowering Small Minnesota Communities.”

ESMC was established by the state legislature in 2023 to help Minnesota communities under 15,000 population plan for future infrastructure projects as well as gain better access federal, state, and local funding for those projects.

Mike Greco, the Metro Area Coordinator for ESMC as well as the Program Director for the Resilient Communities Project (RCP), said the program takes a pretty broad view of what “infrastructure” means.

“I think most of the infrastructure projects [the legislature] probably had in mind were things like more traditional hard infrastructure — gray infrastructure, if you will — like roads, bridges, sewers,” he said. “But our program has taken a little bit broader perspective on that, and so we have been working with some communities on things like parks, trails, community centers, public buildings, those kinds of things...

“We also think about things like ‘greenways’ and trails and open space.”
Greco looks at all of these pieces as elements of “social infrastructure.”

“By that I mean the kind of glue and relationships that hold the community together,” he said. “We’re thinking about helping a community design a more functional community center or a gathering place in the community.

“So it’s thinking more about the sort of relationships between people, and the opportunity for communities to come together.”

RCP and colleagues from the University of Minnesota’s Design Center worked with Lindstrom and Center City as well as Harris, which approached ESMC with the idea of taking a closer look at its parks system.

“Harris felt their parks had not really been updated or renovated for quite a while,” Greco said. “And each park sort of had its own issues to address. They were looking for help with primarily revitalizing their park system and rethinking the system.”

There are different “pathways” that communities can take within the program. Greco said Lindstrom and Center City had very geographically specific locations they wanted to focus on, while Harris applied for a different track that is called “community futures.”

“The idea behind community futures is to take a broader community perspective and to identify a strategy for the community to embrace, that they can use to then move forward in some positive, constructive way,” he explained. “In the case of Harris, they wanted help with their park system.”

The original plan was to look into turning the old water treatment area in Harris into another city park.

“Our work with them was to think not just about the individual parks, but how these parks connected to the rest of the community,” Greco said. “We helped them think about a trail system that could literally connect all of these parks to their core downtown and residential areas.

“And then we also helped them think a little bit about where it made sense for future development to be located. They’re right on Highway 35, old Highway 61 runs right through the community. So there’s lots of opportunity there for maybe some commercial and some industrial development.

“We helped them think about where it made the most sense to put that kind of development, to take advantage of some of the existing infrastructure.”
One element that Greco was especially pleased with was the city’s thinking about Goose Creek.

“Goose Creek runs through the community, but there are very few places where someone can access Goose Creek from public property. It’s almost all private property,” he said. “So one of the things we did for part of the trail segment was to try to get it close enough to the creek that people could get public access to that creek...

“It’s a real amenity for the community: it’s a beautiful creek. It’s fairly pristine, although it does have some water quality issues. Doing that, I think, helped us go from a project just looking at parks to one that really started to think about the community as a whole and how we could physically connect to the community. That way people could get access to these resources and to these natural amenities.”

Greco said the first step in the approach for community futures is discovery. The second phase of work is to develop a community strategy. And then the third phase is project identification.

“Everyone agrees this is the approach the city wants to take,” he said. “Then what are the individual pieces that will get that will allow you to fulfill that strategy? What projects can we get funding for? And what infrastructure projects make sense, given what we’re trying to accomplish?

He added that the process with working with smaller towns is especially gratifying because RCP does not purport to have all the answers.

“It’s not bringing the experts in to give you the answer,” Greco said. “It’s bringing people who have particular expertise that can help the community better understand what its options are and sort of where it’s at and where it wants to go.

“And then also find ways to help it take that path, especially the funding and grant writing and things like that.”

Greco hopes that his program could help a smaller city such as Harris grow in ways similar to its neighbor to the south, North Branch.

“I think Harris is located in a place where the kind of growth we’re currently seeing in North Branch — and have been seeing for the last 10 or 20 years — could easily start happening in Harris,” he said.

“The issues that North Branch is facing are going to be very different than the ones Harris is facing, and Harris can learn from what happened in North Branch as well and decide, ‘Is that the kind of growth we want? Or do we want to do something different?’”

It’s also worth noting that this program addresses the needs of cities whose population is under 15,000 — so North Branch would be a candidate as well.
“We talk a lot about taking an asset-based approach to community development,” Greco said. “What we mean by that is working with the community to figure out what are its strengths? What are its assets? What does it have going for it?

“And then using those as the foundation for coming up with a strategy to move forward so that the community is really drawing on what it has going for it. And that’s going to be very different for different communities. …

“We want to be a resource for cities like Harris. So we’re hopeful that we can help them identify specific funding opportunities, find ways that they can get help with grant writing. We want smaller communities to be able to be competitive when they’re applying for these grants.”

Greco said the Empowering Small Minnesota Communities program plans to open a third round of proposals sometime in the spring of 2026.

“We’re in the midst of talking as a team about what that next call for proposals would look like,” he said. “If the previous rounds are any indication, it’s a pretty straightforward application process. There’s an online application form that communities fill out with some basic information about their city or county, and a brief description of what they’re hoping to partner with the university on.

“If it’s a tactical action project, it would be that discrete project somewhere in the city or county. If it’s a community futures partnership, then it would be what are the bigger picture issues that the community is grappling with or opportunities that they’re trying to take advantage of.”